Breakfast At The Exit Cafe Part 10

We stop at the crest of Boulder Mountain, the highest treed plateau in North America, according to the sign. Why on earth did we imagine there wouldn't be snow? I aim the camera at the view and take a mini-movie: there is no other way to capture the panorama of gullies and gulches that stretches, snow-scarred, in every direction. A person could disappear here.

The road heads down the mountain in a series of loops and twirls at impossible angles; then we're climbing again, and before we realize it, we're on the Devil's Backbone, a thin spine of shoulderless road with long, sharp drops on either side.

"Look at that view!" Wayne exclaims.

"Uh-huh," I say, my eyes fixed straight ahead, my foot pumping invisible brake pedals.

"Do you want to stop and take a picture?" he says.

I shake my head. "Uh-uh."

Beyond the knife-edge, the road winds down among the trees. I breathe a little easier. Broadsiding a pine seems preferable to ending up as rubble at the bottom of a cliff.

"Looks like the worst is behind us," I say gamely.

Then the snow hits. For two hours we drive in silence through the eastern tract of the Dixie National Forest. The road has been recently plowed and sanded, though the sand is soon submerged in a trackless swath that plunges and swoops around fenceless curves, the only barrier a few tall, red-tipped extensions on skinny posts, scant warning that the road stops and thin air begins.

"They must get a lot of snow here," Wayne comments wryly.

I don't answer. I'm listening to the engine, which is labouring up the inclines. We are barely making thirty kilometres an hour. The sky has lowered until it seems to press against our foreheads. We meet a truck, then an hour later, another, just the three of us on this road: an old man who grips the wheel furiously, three young boys in cowboy hats waving, and the two of us, ashen-faced tourists in our summer wear. The others are heading for Escalante. n.o.body is travelling our way.

We pa.s.s the Escalante Petrified Forest. We pa.s.s the Anasazi Indian Village near Boulder, where the mail was still delivered by mule until the 1970s. We make it through a length of road I don't tell Wayne about. It is marked on the map in pink: Closed in Winter.

We have no interest in the sights-Mesa Verde, the Arches-I just want to get to a city where there are mechanics, car rental companies, good hotels, and at least one fine restaurant, in that order. If that makes us seem fickle, we don't care. There's a throughway farther north, but north seems like a bad idea. We need to get out of the mountains, into the desert again. The blessed desert, where there are snowplows. At Torrey, we stop at a coffee shop and ask a local couple how best to find our way south. They point to a road devoid of towns and even the named crossroads that pa.s.s for towns here. Never trust a local, Wendy said at Cliff Dwellers Lodge. We waver until we see a car pulling into the parking lot from that direction.

"Ja, the road is empty," the young woman says, adjusting her miniskirt as she gets out of the car. She speaks with a distinct German accent.

"Where are you headed?" we ask.

They point the way we've just come. "To Escalante."

"Not a good idea," we say. "See those clouds?" A dark blue ma.s.s presses like a bruise against the mountainside.

"In Bavaria, we have much snow," the young man says, pulling his tuque briskly over his forehead.

"We're from Canada," Wayne says. "We know snow, too."

The girl looks worried. They whisper together, then get back in their car, a yellow PT Cruiser with summer tires. Watching them start up the mountain feels like watching someone setting off on a long walk toward the end of a very short pier.

They were right about one thing, though. The road to Blanding is clear and dry. I feel giddy with relief. We drive down the gully of one soaring red canyon after another. The stone turns golden and soft, like the flanks of a young walrus, then green like lichen, then striped and rounded like Pippi Longstocking's socks. We run out of similes. Along what must, at another time of the year, be stream beds, rows of cottonwoods straggle, then miles of sage, now and then a hut, some cattle wandering aimlessly, big yellow, red, or orange tags dangling from their lobes like party earrings, but never a car, not even a truck. We are alone on the road.

The car is holding up. We congratulate ourselves on outrunning the storm. We'll find a place to spend the night and tomorrow we'll be in Albuquerque, where we'll get the car fixed and carry on. We continue making enthusiastic a.s.surances to each other, not mentioning how low the sun hangs in the sky, or that we have not yet seen a house, let alone a motel or a town. I call out names from the map, but they amount to nothing but sand.

We've crossed the state line back into Arizona and are about thirty miles from Chinle when the real snow hits. Big, fat flakes like feathers beaten in a fury from oversize pillows. The wonky headlight s.h.i.+nes straight up into the onslaught, st.i.tching the flakes into an opaque white curtain that moves down the road inches ahead of us.

"I can't see a thing." There's an edge of panic in Wayne's voice I haven't heard before. "I have no idea where the road is."

"Don't stop," I insist, applying a rule I learned in defensive driving forty years ago: if you stop, someone might crash into you from behind, though who that might be on this deserted road, I can't imagine.

I roll down the window and lean out. A snowplow must have been through here earlier in the day. A thin ridge of snow lines the edge of the asphalt.

"A little to the left," I say.

"Okay, right . . . Now straight."

We inch down the highway, me calling out instructions, Wayne adjusting the steering wheel without complaint. I silently pray that the snowplow operator hasn't veered down a desolate rancher's lane or stopped suddenly in the middle of the road. I stare at the narrow ridge of plowed snow, afraid to blink for fear we'll drive over a cliff, if there is a cliff, which seems entirely possible because we are now travelling sharply downhill. Is this a plateau we're descending? Or a mountain slope? Will there be a sharp curve at the bottom, or a gentle easing onto level ground?

Level ground, as it turns out. The G.o.ds are with us.

"Stop," I say to Wayne when we pa.s.s a cl.u.s.ter of lights. "Let's find out where we are."

We turn in to a small subdivision planted in the middle of nowhere. I get out, pull a scarf over my head, and pound on the door of the nearest house. I imagine being invited in, served hot tea and biscuits. Canadians love a good storm: it makes us hospitable.

I see shapes moving around inside. A curtain flutters at the window. I call out, trying to sound honest, reliable.

"Please, can you help me? I just want to know where we are."

The door opens a crack. "There's a gas station down the road," a woman's voice spits out before she slams it shut.

Wayne pumps gas while I go inside to ask about motels. As I enter the station, a man grabs the door. "Can you help me out?" he says, holding up a necklace and earrings made of cheap red beads. "Ten bucks. I made them myself."

The gas station attendant inside says there is an inn down the road, but when I go back to the car, a young First Nations girl puts her hand on my arm and says softly, "Go on to Chinle. There are lots of places there. We just come from that way. The road's fine."

In Chinle, the snow subsides. We find a Best Western and check in alongside an adolescent wrestling team and the driver of a Pepsi big rig. The restaurant attached to the hotel closes just as we get to the door, so we drive out to the only other place open, the Thunderbird Lodge Cafeteria, where sullen women dish out blocks of meat loaf and ice-cream scoops of gelid mashed potatoes and bowls of pork-and-bean soup that is actually quite delicious. We haven't eaten anything but chocolate bars all day. One of the women comes out of the kitchen holding a plate high in the air. "Who ordered frybread?" I did, apparently. It comes with, as Wayne is so fond of saying. The deep-fried puff of dough is the size of a Frisbee, not good for the arteries maybe, but after the day we've put in, awfully good for the heart.

Back at the Best Western, I call Bob Butler in St. George.

"We made it," I say. If we hadn't, he is the only person in the world who would have known enough to call out a search party. I want to hug him in grat.i.tude, as if his vigilance alone has pulled us through the storm. He gives me the name of the insurance adjuster we're supposed to meet in Albuquerque.

"You could have hit a deer and driven through a blizzard in Canada," Bob laughs. "You better come on back and see us in golf season. It isn't always like this."

IN THE morning, we open the last two snack-pack cereal boxes and eat Frosted Flakes out of water gla.s.ses with the dregs of the coffee cream. We're on the road by first light.

"Look, there's a rainbow! Two rainbows! Double luck."

"Maybe not," Wayne says. "That's a halo: there's ice up there. See those bright spots? Sun dogs. Omens."

"Good or bad?"

"Hard to say."

Now that Albuquerque is a few hours' drive away, our mad dash through the snow seems a bit of a lark. "A mere bagatelle," Wayne says. By mid-morning, we've crossed into New Mexico. Land of Enchantment, according to the billboards. When we stop again for gas, an older First Nations man sidles up.

"Can you help us out?" he says, nodding to his buddies standing around the car at the next pump. "We overfilled the tank and we're short a dollar. They're going to call the cops on us." Without a word, Wayne digs in his jeans and hands him a bill.

Almost as soon as we get back on the I-40-obscured, but still the Mother Road to us-the snow begins again. It's daylight, though, and the road is clear: we can almost see Albuquerque. Everything is going to be fine.

We amuse ourselves by reading the billboards aloud: 24,000 Tons of Trash Removed from New Mexico Roads in 2005.

I Choose to Wait-Abstinence until Marriage.

Dust Storms May Exist.

"You can tell a lot about a people from their billboards," Wayne says sagely. "New Mexico is obviously a place of littering virgins with a metaphysical bent."

"And very good taste," I add, for suddenly the interstate is spanned with great soaring slashes of turquoise and terracotta. "Why doesn't every place do this?" I say, awestricken by the beauty of the overpa.s.ses. As we sail under the two-tone arches, our spirits rise.

We're within fifteen minutes of the city when the cars ahead of us abruptly stop.

"The weather isn't that bad," I say to them all.

But no one moves. After ten minutes, Wayne and I pull out a deck of cards and play gin over the gears.h.i.+ft. We finish four games. Wayne wins every one.

The cars start to move. We inch past a semi smashed into a truck and trailer. Half a dozen more transport trucks are jackknifed or flipped on their sides, or have snowplowed into the median. An ambulance has slid off the road, lights flas.h.i.+ng.

I get on the cellphone to the insurance adjuster. We agree to meet at the Toyota dealers.h.i.+p in the outskirts of Albuquerque. An hour later, as we pull into the lot, five men swarm out of the blizzard toward the car.

I crank down the window. "Is one of you Paul?"

They look at each other, momentarily stymied, as if perhaps one of them is in fact Paul and they've forgotten which. Then they remember: they are salesmen, Toyota is having a sale-a-thon, blizzard be d.a.m.ned. Five business cards flash through the window.

"Not yet," we say. We're pretty sure we don't need a new car, though when Paul examines the Echo, peering in at the odometer, he says sourly, "Given the mileage, I doubt it's worth fixing. It's probably a writeoff. I'll let you know tomorrow."

Our puff of elation deflates. We go inside and sit with one of the salesmen, figuring out how much a replacement Echo will cost in Albuquerque and what would be involved in taking it into Canada. A lot.

"We could junk the car and fly," I say to Wayne. "Or drive the wreck home."

"No." His voice is sharp, as if I've insisted. "I'm not going to drive it like this."

We've grown testy with each other. A writeoff won't give us enough money to buy another car. And even if it did, a car bought in New Mexico won't have a catalytic converter: we can't begin to think what that will mean at the border. And, we ask ourselves, do we really want to drive in miles per hour, moving through Canada on American terms, for the next however many years?

"Wait a minute!" It hits me like a deer in a blizzard. "Paul took down the mileage, right? 155,000. I bet he thought those were miles! But we're Canadian! They're kilometres!"

Wayne lights up, too. "And that's less than 100,000 miles."

"Right." The salesman is looking glum but Wayne and I are grinning as though we just won the lottery. I jump up and give him a hug. "Everything's definitely going to be fine."

WAKING in our hotel room in Albuquerque, I find myself thinking about that mule deer, especially when I look out the window and see a world completely buried in snow. The parking lot resembles a giant sheet of cotton batting with a few lumps in it; the lumps are cars. The interstate is deserted; the turquoise stripes obliterated by snow. There isn't a car on the streets. The city is as still as a forest. I picture the deer lying wounded, being slowly buried by snow, coyotes closing in. I once tracked coyotes in Ma.s.sachusetts with a professional tracker who told me he'd seen a coyote pack bring down a deer that had broken its leg by stepping through deep snow into a fissure. There was a lot of blood on the snow, Paul said, but when the coyotes were finished, nothing was left of the deer but a few tufts of hair. At the time, my sympathies had been with the coyotes. Now my guilty conscience is pulling for the deer.

Thoughts of the deer stay with me during breakfast in the hotel's dining room. Everyone has been storm-stayed; we are a gathering of environmental refugees. The television in the corner is tuned to CNN: every so often the blur of voices falls silent as everyone listens. Sixteen dead across New Mexico. In Albuquerque, snow up to three feet deep. Ma.s.sive power failures. Hundreds of roofs have collapsed, including most of the city's schools. Nothing like it in living memory.

The couple at the next table are desperate to get back to Denver for their daughter's wedding. The woman across the aisle says she spent the entire night huddled in her SUV on the interstate. In the lobby, people are sitting on the floor or on their luggage; there are no more rooms here or anywhere else in the city.

In the elevator, a husband and wife from Arkansas tell us they're going out to the airport to try to get their private plane in the air. They'd been flying to Salt Lake City, where the husband was due to start a new job, when the storm forced them down in Albuquerque.

"You want to come to Salt Lake City with us?" the man asks.

Merilyn and I consider it for a moment, then she says, reasonably, "That airport is probably closed, too."

"Well, we're gonna give her a try," he says. "You're welcome to join us."

We've experienced this kind of neighbourliness before, during the ice storm of 1998, when most of eastern Ontario and western Quebec was without power, in some cases for weeks. Strangers would knock on our door and offer to lend us a generator to pump out our bas.e.m.e.nt or get the freezer or the furnace working for a few hours, whichever was most critical. Hydro crews from upstate New York and as far away as North Carolina came up to help repair the downed Canadian lines. Just as Canadian crews headed south to New Orleans after Katrina. In times of crisis, we become an altruistic species. Borders cease to matter.

In our room, I lie on one of the two double beds, thinking maybe we should offer it to someone in the lobby. Merilyn is sitting at the table writing in her notebook. She has already had several conversations with the insurance adjuster, who really doesn't want to know us until next year-which starts on Monday.

"Looks like we have the weekend to do what we want," I say. "What do we want to do?"

Merilyn shrugs. "Rest," she says. "This will be the first time we've spent more than one night in a place since we left Vancouver."

I'm reading a book by Charles Bowden called Desierto. Merilyn lies down beside me and I read her a pa.s.sage about a Navajo man whose wife sent him out to shoot some meat to go with the tortillas she was making. The man went out, and after a while he came back, sat down in a corner of the pueblo, and said nothing. Eventually, some elders went up to him and asked him what was disturbing him. The man said he had seen a mule deer and shot it, but he had only wounded the animal. The deer had run off and he'd followed it into the hills. He tracked it to a cave, and when he went into the cave he saw an old woman sitting on the ground, crying bitterly. There was a deep wound in her side. He had come home and sat quietly thinking about what he had seen. That night, the family ate their tortillas without meat.

THE SNOW has stopped but the sidewalks are deeply piled with the kind of heavy, wet snow that causes heart attacks and hernias. A few cars fishtail by and several fellow refugees stand at the corners looking down at their pant legs. We make our way to the small plaza in the old part of the city, looking for somewhere to buy food. Whether it's the storm or because it is New Year's weekend, not much is open. Eventually we find a Walgreens near the plaza and buy a few perishables for the room. In front of the store is an old covered wagon and a cl.u.s.ter of p.r.i.c.kly pear cacti, each with a thick crown of snow. There's something wrong about a snow-covered cactus; it's as though two parallel universes have collapsed in on each other.

The walk and the cold make us hungry. We'll have a hot lunch now and eat dinner in our room, we decide, and head down a narrow alley off the plaza toward a small, steamy Mexican cafe whose tables are comfortably strewn with tourism brochures and local newspapers. A good place to sit out a storm, I think, although it's all but empty. A shelf of books is fastened to an adobe wall beside a fireplace: Carlos Castaneda, Aldous Huxley, Aleister Crowley, Margery Allingham. I take an English-Spanish dictionary and order a Corona, and Merilyn asks for a small pot of decaf coffee. We share a plate of corn tortillas with refried beans and avocado chili. No meat.

I look up "avocado" in the dictionary. I've always thought the word had something to do with lawyers.

"Hey, listen to this," I say to Merilyn, who is reading the weather page in the Albuquerque Journal. "'Avocado, from the Aztec word ahuacatl, meaning "t.e.s.t.i.c.l.e," from its shape.' We're eating prairie oysters."

"They're calling for another major snowstorm tomorrow," she says with a frown. "This one's coming from the north."

"And did you know that 'refried' beans aren't fried twice?"

"Two more feet of snow."

"The Spanish prefix re doesn't mean 'again,' it means 'very.' Frijoles refritos means 'very fried beans.'" I think about the word "redeem." Very doomed.

"All the major highways will be closed."

"You know the country Chile?" I ask.

"Snow everywhere, except maybe south."

"Did you know that the country's name comes from the Indian word tchilli, which actually means 'cold'?"

"The I-25 is still open."

"Or snow. Tchilli can mean 'cold' or 'snow.'"

"Well," says Merilyn, "tomorrow it's going be tchilli in New Mexico." She has been listening.

"Where does the I-25 go?" I ask. I have been listening, too.

"El Paso."

"Then let's go there," I say. "Let's spend New Year's in El Paso."

"Oh, let's," Merilyn says, thawing already. "We'll leave first thing."