AUTUMN road trips are the bomb. Nature’s colors are changing from green to rich amber in the higher elevations. The air is cold and crisp and the summer crowds are gone. All of this makes October the ideal month for lighting out. And this time I was bound for New Mexico to visit old friends in Albuquerque and Santa Fe (I warned them I was coming), followed by a deep dive into the Navajo Nation, camping under the stars. It would be a photo safari of sorts: capturing desert sunrises and sunsets; cottonwood groves ablaze in fall splendor; red sandstone buttes; Anasazi cliff dwellings… I was stoked.
I pulled the cover off Old Blue, and though it hasn’t seen much use since the Zombie Apocalypse, it was clean, gassed up, and ready to rock. I loaded the fridge and cupboards with food; stowed away four gallons of drinking water; two bottles of wine; a flagon of Irish whiskey for emergencies; hiking gear; camera paraphernalia, including a new tripod; road maps (I’m old school); a sleeping bag; personal gear; the dogs’ camping box, which includes kibbles, treats, leashes, bedding, and their favorite book, Squirrels of North America… Am I forgetting anything? No? Then it was time to head for the Land of Enchantment!
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Surrealistic Boondock
A LIPSTICK sunset was draining from the sky of Day One as I exited I-40 outside of Kingman, Arizona. Originally I had hoped to reach Williams by nightfall, but… you know how it goes. I could've kept driving, but I was tired and hungry and the Campendium website—the boondocker’s Bible—had asserted to free camping nearby. It was worth a look. At the end of the off-ramp, I turned south onto a lonely desert road and soon came to a large, dirt pullout. Unfortunately, several big RVs were already there, settled in for the night. Very unappealing. But Campendium had also stated there were more sites further up the road in a more secluded area, so onwards I drove.
Indeed, a half mile further, I turned onto a bumpy dirt track and followed it into the mesquite brush. A few parked vehicles were visible in the gathering dusk, and steering clear of them, I drove to an open clearing about two hundred feet from a tiny old travel trailer. I killed the engine and climbed out to inspect my site closer. Not too shabby.
As I was walking around to the other side of the van to let the dogs out, a black Labrador Retriever suddenly appeared at my feet, tail wagging. I reached down and scratched him behind the ear, which he seemed to relish. That’s when I noticed the pickup truck lurking nearby under a half-dead ironwood tree. It looked old and battered, a black tarp covering the bed and much of the cab. Though there was no sign of life, it didn’t look abandoned. I glanced over to the travel trailer—who I had thought was my only neighbor, but I was wrong—and now noted that it was dilapidated as well. And there was no sign of a vehicle to tow the trailer. AND there was a white picket fence around it to assimilate a "front yard". How did I miss all that when I drove in?
“What’s going on here?” a voice called out.
A man was approaching me, bent forward like he was trudging into a headwind, hands tucked in his coat pockets. I couldn’t make out any other details in the twilight, so I raised my hand in greetings.
“I’m thinking of camping here tonight,” I said. I even offered to move further away from the truck under the ironwood tree.
His response was: “You ran over my dog.”
What?? I looked around for the black Lab that I had just been petting moments ago. It had vanished.
“I assure you, I didn’t run over your dog,” I replied. “Is he black?”
“The nerve,” the man grumbled. “Coming out here… They said you ran over my dog.”
“Who are ‘They’?”
“Did you?”
“No!”
This was going nowhere. But just then, the black Lab materialized out of the darkness behind the man, tail wagging. I pointed to it.
“Is that your dog?”
The man turned to look. He muttered something, and then ambled away.
I had an audience by now. A bearded man was scrutinizing me from the driver’s seat of the old pickup under the ironwood tree, and a woman was now standing beside the white picket fence of the trailer homestead. She hollered something at me, but I didn’t catch what she said. Her tone was curt. That’s when I became cognizant that there were more camps pitched in the shadows of scrawny trees and shrubs around me. More people looked my way, and as if on cue, a coyote yelped in the distance. Suddenly it no longer felt like a good place to camp. I got back in the van, started the engine, wheeled around—extra careful not to hit any dogs—and got the heck out of there.
Granted, strange things can happen, even becoming more extraordinary than your imagination. But this… was a little too bizarre. Or was it? Who said you can’t put a picket fence around your tiny trailer in the middle of the Mojave Desert? Who am I to judge, an old guy sleeping in a van with two dogs? Nonetheless it was getting dark, and I needed to find a place to eat dinner and ponder my next move.
I drove back to where I’d seen the RVs parked in the dirt pullout near the interstate. This was good enough for now, I reckoned. The first stars were coming out, the lights of Kingman shimmering in the distance. After parking at the far end of the pullout—giving the other rigs as much “open space” as possible—I let Toby and Wolfgang out to water the mesquite and sniff around. While they were doing this, I poured kibbles into their food dishes. Suppertime!
Back in the van, we all dug in. I sat in the driver’s seat, chowing down on a Subway chicken sandwich, while the dogs were in back with their food dishes. Toby was munching away. Wolfgang was staring at my sandwich—you gotta watch this guy. Always. While eating, I opened Google Maps on my phone and zeroed in on Williams. If I was willing to drive another ninety minutes, I could camp there for the night, in a boondock area north of town—if I could find it in the dark. Should I stay, or should I go? It sounded like a Clash song. I had promised myself I wouldn’t do any late-night driving on this trip, yet… the constant drone of eighteen-wheelers on I-40 was a buzzkill.
This is what I was deliberating when there came an urgent knocking on my door window. It startled me for sure, but Toby flipped out like he does at home when the UPS delivery man drops off a package, barking fanatically right behind my head until my ears were ringing. I twisted around to get him to hush—not an easy task—and in doing so, knocked my sandwich onto the floor, where Wolfgang lunged forward and scarfed it up in two bites like it had all been planned.
After I got Toby to chill out, I rolled down my window to find a person standing there in the dark.
“Did you run over my dog?” he asked.
I was speechless. It was the same guy!
This is when I expected Rod Sterling to step out of the night in his dapper suit and tie and somber narrative: Ronald Barry. A man who was only looking for a quiet place to rest and eat his sandwich. Instead, he found himself in…
Yep.
“They said you ran him over,” the man ranted.
“Who are ‘They’?”
“Well, that’s what they said.”
Who’s on first, What’s on second, I-Dunno’s on third… I knew where this was going. The dude just stood there looking at me, waiting for an answer, a signal, anything. That’s when the black Lab walked by, brushing against the man’s leg, and I took the apparition as a divine sign. But the guy didn’t seem to notice.
“Look,” I replied, slow and calm. “I did not. Run over. Your dog.”
He stood there, deep in thought, processing what I had just told him. Finally, he swiped his hand in front of his face, like he was fending off mosquitos or dismissing me, and then turned away and disappeared into the night.
I sat there for quite a while, trying to grasp what had just happened. Had that black dog been an illusion? No. Impossible. Or was it? At any rate I made the executive decision, right then and there, to drive on to Williams.
As I accelerated onto the I-40 eastbound, I glanced into the back of the van and said: “Hey, Wolfy, how was my sandwich?”
That part, for sure, had not been a hallucination.
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| Our tranquil boondock in the woods outside Williams, AZ. |
Standing on a Corner
FLASHBACK to Los Angeles, 1971. Two cats, Jackson and Glenn, move into the same apartment complex in Echo Park and become good friends. They certainly have much in common: Both are twenty-three-year-old musicians, writing songs, just scraping by, and hungry to land a record deal. Glenn would frequently hear Jackson down in the basement—directly below Glenn’s apartment—plucking a tune on guitar or piano, working out the notes to a new song. One of the songs he found especially tuneful and made note of it. He even asked Jackson about it at some point. It got shelved, Jackson tells him—he has the melody dialed in, but lyrically, he couldn’t get past the first verse. A classic case of writer’s block.
“Let me take a crack at it,” Glenn offers, so down to the basement they go.
The song unfolds through the eyes of a young man with girl troubles, loosely based on an experience that Jackson had while driving through the Navajo reservation and breaking down in a small Arizona town. The first verse recounts the seven women on his mind: four are control freaks, two want to bludgeon him, and one just wants to remain “friends.” In the second verse, the young man is down on his luck and stranded in Winslow, Arizona. But anywhere Jackson tries to take the song from there leads to a morose, Debbie Downer. He is literally and metaphorically stuck.
I’m standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona.
That’s it. That’s all he has down on paper, even after wrestling with it for many weeks. So, Glenn takes a shot at it. And it didn’t take long before he came up with…
And such a fine sight to see.
It's a girl, my Lord, in a flat-bed Ford,
Slowin' down to take a look at me.
BAM! With those three lines, the dam bursts and Jackson finishes the song in a new light: one of optimism in lieu of despair. He titles it “Take It Easy” after the now-famous chorus, and even bestows Glenn with co-writing credit for his contributions. But the song doesn’t make it onto Jackson’s debut album, which had already gone to press. Glenn, however, would record it the following year with his new band—the Eagles—where it became the opening song on their first album. It was a huge hit.
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| Jackson Browne & Glenn Frey, 1974 |
Naturally, Winslow was my first stop after leaving Williams that morning. I exited off I-40 and followed Second Street (Old Route 66) into town, and at the intersection with Kinsley Avenue, there it was, you couldn’t miss it: A red flat-bed Ford truck parked at the curb. I couldn’t resist. I had to go stand on the corner! In fact, many people come here to do just that. It’s the biggest attraction in little Winslow. The Eagles and Jackson Browne were part of the soundtrack of my youth—and apparently, to a lot of other folks who stopped by to have their photo taken on the corner with the bronze statues of Jackson and Glenn. And they weren’t all old Boomers like me, reminiscing about the “good ol’ days” of rock n’ roll in the Seventies. No. I saw people of all ages, just as thrilled to stand on the corner as anyone. Evidently “Take It Easy” is a breezy traveling tune that spans generations.
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We may lose, or we may win, But we will never be here again, So how about me climbing in? |
Albuquerque
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| "New Beginnings" by Bret Philpot |
THE MAIN purpose for going to Albuquerque was to see an old friend, Bret Philpot. We had worked together in the 1980s, back when engineering plans were drawn by hand using pen and ink on mylar. You had to have artistic panache to be a good draftsman in those pre-CAD days. At that juncture, Bret made the bold choice to quit his job and pursue a career as an artist, moving out to Joshua Tree to make it all happen. Many years passed. Then one day, quite by accident, I stumbled upon a collection of his paintings in a swank, Palm Springs art gallery. Wow! He had accomplished what he set out to do.
Bret relocated to Albuquerque recently, where he and his partner, Brian, bought a charming adobe bungalow near Old Town. I felt the allure straight away upon my arrival: a crimson sunset on the Sandia Mountains. Stunning. The next day, Bret took me and the dogs for a hike along the Rio Grande, which flows through Albuquerque as a riparian woodland preserve called the Bosque. We hiked under a canopy of giant oaks while Toby and Wolfgang splashed in the river; the hum of insects; the soft rustle of wind through the canebrake… It was hard to believe we were surrounded by a city of a half million people!
But it wasn't just nature's beauty that captivated me. It was also the rich tapestry of Native American art woven into the very fabric of the city’s culture, where Southwest mythology permeated from everything with intricate designs and vibrant colors. Bret and Brian—hardcore coffee aficionados—turned me on to the Blackbird Coffeehouse in Old Town, tucked away in a quiet patio garden. Excellent! I stopped by every day, hob-knobbing with the locals, such as the veteran photographer who owned the art gallery next door. I was told that old-timers call their city “Burque.” And though the trendy slang of late is to call it “ABQ”, long-time locals will know you’re new in town if you call it this, or the “Q”, or the “505”. So, it’s best to stick with Burque. And wear sunglasses.
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| Hanging out with Bret. |
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| Romping in the Rio Grande. |
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| A tandem fetch and retrieve. |
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| Bret & Brian's house, all decked out for Dia de Los Muertos festivities. It's a big deal here. |
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| Old Town, Albuquerque. |
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| Old Town Plaza, the city center when it was first established in 1706. |
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| San Felipe de Neri Church. The church's parish has been active for more than three centuries. |
BURQUE FUN FACTS
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| Navajo dancer |
• Home of the International Balloon Festival, the world’s largest. Interested? Book your lodging a year in advance.
• Host of the Gathering of Nations, the largest Native American powwow on the continent.
• The largest employer is Sandia National Laboratory, the engineering component of the U.S. nuclear weapons program.
• Hometown of the Unser auto-racing dynasty, where brothers Al and Bobby,
along with Al Jr., have won the Indy 500
an unprecedented nine times.
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| Walter White of Breaking Bad. |
• Dia de Los Muertos is way more popular than Halloween.
• The American Rattlesnake Museum has
the largest collection of live rattlesnakes in the world.
• Breaking Bad and its prequel, Better Call Saul, were both filmed here. Albuquerque was the backdrop for these award-winning dramas. Maybe the shows have ended, but you can still take a tour and visit many of the scene locations in Walter White’s Winnebago.
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| Classic car show in Old Town. To attest to their popularity, there are 14 vintage car clubs in Albuquerque. |
Trailer Park Time Machine
I NORMALLY don’t write about the campgrounds where I’ve stayed, but I’ll make an exception for my three nights in Albuquerque. Enchanted Trails RV Park was a trip—as in a trip back in time, back to the historical Route 66 of the 1950s. This is where June and Ward Cleaver would’ve stayed on their summer vacation, Wally and Beaver doing cannonballs into the pool behind the office. Granted, the constant drone of traffic on I-40 is an annoyance. But the place is clean. The staff is amiable. And where else can will you find an antique Wurlitzer organ in a campground lobby? I was dying to sit down and play Bach’s Toccata in D minor—but the sign on the wall read DO NOT TOUCH. Surely, they jest.
Enchanted Trails was sparsely occupied during my stay, though my neighbors across the way—my only neighbors—told me it had been booked solid the prior week for the Balloon Festival. They were a family of five, living on the road in a fifth-wheel trailer. Dad was a travel nurse, working at a hospital in town, while Mom—a teacher by profession—homeschooled their three kids. Come January, they would move on to California. It was their kids who had told me about the pink flamingos and old travel trailers that were located up near the office.
“The birds are plastic, and the trailers are locked,” said the younger boy, who was eight.
And sure enough, like the kid said, the trailers were locked. So, I stopped by the front office and struck up a conversation with the desk clerk. He said the owner of the RV park collected and restored vintage trailers as a hobby. When I asked him what they were worth, he shrugged.
“Depends,” he replied. “I know that a fifty-nine Airstream Flying Cloud sold for fifty-two thousand a while back.”
Whoa! There’s a market for these things?
“There’s a market for everything,” he said, giving me a look that conveyed “What planet are you from?”
Sure enough, I found a website for selling vintage travel trailers. There was a 1949 Spartan, excellent condition, for $125,000. And a ’55 Spartan for $115,000... Which is why the owner of Enchanted Trails no longer rents his out for lodging: They're just too valuable.
“Would you like to take a look inside?” the desk clerk asked.
Is the Pope Catholic?
He handed me the lanyard with the trailers’ master key on it and I was off and away, back to a time when there were no iPhones, no WiFi, no GPS mapping, no online reservations, no nothin’. Just hitch a trailer to your Detroit Iron and hit the road, Jack.
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| A ‘63 Winnebago Dot. Winnebago got its start in 1958, making small travel trailers like this one. Today, it is one of the largest RV manufacturers in the country. |
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| 1956 Yellowstone Geneva. Though super popular in the 50s and 60s, the company was bankrupt by the early 90s. |
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| Sleeping quarters of the Yellowstone Geneva. Gorgeous woodwork throughout. |
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| 1959 Spartan Flosse. This was the final year of production for Spartan, which built high-quality trailers using the latest innovations in materials and design. A restored Spartan today fetches over $100k. |
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| The kitchen in the Spartan: classic Mid-Century design with pastel colors. |
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| The Trailer Park Boys can give you a deal. |
Santa Fe
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| "Ganado" by Brett Philpot |
SANTA FE was my next destination, scarcely an hour's drive north from Albuquerque. It has a rich history that harks back to its Spanish founding in 1610, making it the second-oldest city in the USA—and at 7,000 feet, the highest state capital. Santa Fe today is a cultural hub for the arts, home to many museums, galleries, and an opera house. But what really sets it apart physically is the unique Pueblo-Territorial Revival architecture (maximum building height is 45 feet), which gives the town a distinct aesthetic. I was looking forward to meeting up with a couple of people I knew and browsing around town. I was also hoping to spend one of my days hiking in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains where the aspen groves turn to dazzling hues of amber this time of year... But then, Mother Nature stepped in.
A storm trundled in overnight, bringing rain to the valleys and snow to the high country. Come morning, there was an inch of frozen sleet on the ground of my campsite—and when it melted, it turned to mud. As for the surrounding mountains, they were socked in, the clouds occasionally parting to reveal snowy slopes. Not good. Neither was the "parking garage incident"—but more on that later.
Despite the blustery weather, I made the best of it. I met up with Jessica Ary, a talented young lady and fellow climber who had recently relocated to Santa Fe from Bishop. Since our hiking plans in the mountains had been torpedoed by the storm, we settled for beer and food at a downtown brewery. I also had the opportunity to reconnect with Steve Zappe, a dear pal from my days with the Riverside Mountain Rescue Unit. It was a nostalgic reunion, two senior dudes reminiscing about mountaineering and rescue missions in the 1970s. (My, where did the years go?) On my last night in town, Steve and his wife, Kristan, treated me to dinner and margaritas at their favorite Mexican restaurant. Delicious!
It's unfortunate that my seeing the sights were hit and miss, more rain than sun. And I didn’t get to visit the Georgia O'Keefe Museum (it was CLOSED!). Clearly, I have good reasons for returning some day.
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| New Mexico Museum of Art |
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| Santa Fe Plaza. |
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| Skulls and chilies in the marketplace. |
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| Plenty of shops with serious Navajo bling. |
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| 1956 portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe, the godmother of American Modernism. |
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| Ram's Head/White Hollyhock Hills, by Georgia O'Keeffe |
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| Jimson Weed/White Flower No.1, by Georgia O’Keeffe. This painting recently sold for $44 million. |
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| Dinner at Maria’s with Kristen & Steve. |
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| Sleet and wind outside the van, but cozy and warm inside. |
SOME FOLKS say that comedy doesn't travel well. Clearly, they haven't traveled with me and my dogs. Picture this: I’m driving in downtown Santa Fe, looking for a place to park. All the spots on the street are taken, so I pull into a public parking garage, pluck my ticket out of the dispenser, and drive in when the gate lifts. However, I’m still on the first level when a loud, terrifying SCREEEECH emanates from overhead, like Godzilla was tearing the roof off Old Blue. The entire van shudders, and when I hit the brakes, my brave and loyal dogs spring into action—to abandon ship. Toby leaps into my lap and I grab him by the collar so he can’t jump out my window. At the same time, Wolfgang vaults onto the front passenger seat, and the only thing keeping him from jumping out the open window of the door is me grasping his tail and holding tight.
Before I go on, I would like to emphasize that, yes, I had visually checked the roof clearance before entering the parking garage, and that there had been an inch to spare between my roofline and the maximum-height bar hanging at the entrance. Okay, maybe a little less than an inch. But it cleared!
By now, the driver of the car waiting behind me has lost patience and slowly comes around on the left and squeezes by. What a sight it must’ve been, me smiling and nodding hello with a sixty-pound poodle in my lap and a shaggy doodle halfway out the passenger window, held in place because I had him by the tail. Unfazed, the guy returns my nod and continues, as if this happens all the time in Santa Fe. With more than a trivial effort, I extract Wolfy from the window and order him to the back of the van, as well as Toby. Then I step outside and stand on the running board to inspect the roof. Amazingly, it’s still there. The steel bolts that fasten the roof to the pop-up assembly had taken the full brunt of the impact, their hexagonal heads showing signs of a rigorous grinding. That was the only damage.
Miracles aside, the van was still stuck. I needed an escape plan—and the only way out of the garage was to keep driving forward. Deflate the tires? A last resort. Call AAA? Don’t be ridiculous. I can do this. And with determination in my heart and poodle hair in my lap, I cautiously drive forward in search of better clearance. Again, the screeching racket echoes through the garage. I cringe. My courageous dogs whimper. And then finally… we’re free! The concrete beast releases its grip on Old Blue and we quietly motor towards the exit and make it out alive. Lesson learned: Never trust the maximum-height bar at a public parking garage. And final thoughts: Comedy may not always travel well, but when you throw my dogs into the mix, you're bound to have a good story to tell.
Into the Night
COINCIDENCE is defined as an occurrence of random events that happen at the same time by accident but seem to have some connection, like a fluke, or pure luck. Or perhaps it’s the word we use when we can't see who is behind the curtain pulling the levers.
I departed Santa Fe on a rainy afternoon, windshield wipers at full tilt. My next destination was the transcendent high-desert realm of Dine Bikéyah (Navajoland), and four hours later, I had attained it, driving straight into a setting sun. The storm had abated, and the sky was immersed in sunset hues. It was sublime. Yet I was in a funk. Anxious. Due to my late start and the inclement weather, it was doubtful that I could reach Four Corners before dark, where I was hoping to find a camping spot on the San Juan River. I would probably have to wing it—which, after my Twilight Zone boondock experience outside Kingman, I was not thrilled about. (“Did you run over my dog?”) This is what I was mulling over when I passed by a black raven on a roadside fence post. I never gave it a second thought. Little did I know.
There I was, streaking across the desert—maybe I COULD make Four Corners before nightfall—watching the sun gradually sink below the horizon dead ahead, when I noticed Toby pacing back and forth in the back of the van. He was plainly agitated about something. Did he have to pee? Carsick? What? Suddenly, he reared up and clawed at the side door with his front paws. Okay, this was serious! I quickly pulled over and braked to a stop, then clambered into the back to find Toby up-chucking on the floor. In a panic, I flung the side door open and nudged him outside, me following close behind. But the instant I stepped out, I was met with blue smoke billowing from the right rear wheel. I froze in my tracks and gawked at the spectacle. What the… Then I remembered Toby—he didn’t have a leash on! I looked around. He was gone.
I found him on the other side of the highway, pooping in the sagebrush. That was the first thing that I saw. The second thing I saw was off in the distance, beyond Toby, where the giant monolith known as Ship Rock soared into the sky. To the Navajo, it is Tsé Bitʼaʼí (Rock with Wings), a sacred crag that is steeped in folklore. Legend has it that a gigantic bird carried the ancestral people of the Diné to the Southwest on its back, and at sunset, the creature landed where Ship Rock now stands and promptly turned to stone. Etched in shadow and light, it was simply mesmerizing.
After ushering Toby back into the van, I grabbed my Nikon and ventured into the desert to snap photos of Tsé Bitʼaʼí. I don’t recall how long I lingered there. Ten minutes? Twenty? But I sensed that everything that had happened, had happened to bring me here. To this spot. At this very moment. No cars were on the highway. The world was utterly still, as if time itself had paused for the last rays of the sun, and I was connected to it with a crystal-clear peace of mind with no past, no future, beholden to the beauty of now.
Back at the van, I fetched my headlamp and inspected the right rear tire. I crawled underneath and appraised the wheel hub; brake assembly; axle… No signs of a problem anywhere. I had already ruled out the emergency brake—it was not engaged. I was stumped. So, with nothing else to keep me there, I climbed back in and continued onwards. But as I followed my headlights into the night, many questions came to mind—questions with no answers. Toby's frantic behavior; the smoking wheel; the sunset on Ship Rock and the sensation that I was meant to be there to witness it. Then I remembered the raven that I had passed on the highway before all these events occurred. Could it be? Ravens hold a significant place in Navajo mythology. They can provide insights into the cosmos; pass on divine messages; reveal deep connections to the natural world. They can also be pranksters or teachers, and you can learn valuable lessons from them—or so I’ve read. How did I wish to see it? Was it all a coincidence? Or had my journey taken an unexpected turn?
hhhhhhhh
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