Heart Of The American Dream

We were somewhere around the Roseburg when the thick smoke began to take hold. Forest fires burned everywhere and the caliginous haze enveloped the horizon in every direction, from Sutherlin, Oregon all the way to Blythe, California in the Colorado Desert along the parched Arizona-California border.

To complicate the situation, we were driving the Great Yellow Beast, a fully packed, 26-foot long rental truck with questionable credentials: manual windows, flickering engine light and temperature gauge, intermittent stereo, broken headlight and faulty air conditioning, especially annoying in the 100-plus degree heat.

My sister, functioning as co-pilot, navigator and communications officer, appeared dubious. I figured the heavy smoke was bad enough; no point in mentioning the bats. She would see them soon enough. The mission? Move parental units from Oregon to the heart of the American dream in a gated community in Arizona.

This particular odyssey would literally entail driving a large lemon (an International Harvester, no less) about 1,400 miles along smoke-infested highways in unfriendly terrain with no air conditioning while dodging 18-wheelers and motorhomes. The possibility of physical and mental collapse had now become very real.

But no sympathy for the devil on this cruel cavalcade: keep that in mind. You buy the ticket and you take the ride, and if it gets too heavy for you, chalk it up to forced consciousness expansion. The good news: we arrived safely if not soundly at our desert destination, considerably worse for wear.

Take it from me, there’s nothing like a job well done, except for the quiet, enveloping darkness at the bottom of a bottle of brandy after a job done any way at all. Besides, we would have been fools not to ride this strange yellow torpedo all the way to the end. There would be no reasonable way to stop. We were in bat country.