Breakfast At The Exit Cafe Part 9

"That sounds promising."

Tropic is tiny, the size of the village where I grew up. Five hundred souls and counting. But it has a bakery, so we stop.

"Just sold my last loaf," the man behind the counter says.

We buy a Danish of indeterminate age and two small packets of hot, fresh-roasted cashews, which are neither. "The light bulb in the machine burned out," the man explains.

We ask if there are motels further down the road.

"Yep," he says, "but you'll have to stop in Escalante. You'll never get over the mountain in the snow, not with the storm coming."

"How much snow are they predicting?" we ask, thinking smugly, Come on, we're Canadians!

"About two feet."

We exchange surprised glances. That's real snow, no matter where it falls.

But as we leave Tropic, the sky clears, the desert resumes, and we congratulate ourselves for our decision to carry on. We are brilliant. We are making one excellent decision after another. From our blessed hands, even the cashews taste warm and freshly toasted.

WE drive between red canyon walls that loom above us, looking almost sculpted in the way their crenellated tops resemble chimneys and battlements, their crowns and lower talus approaches fringed with evergreens. There's St. Petersburg's Winter Palace! There's the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City! There's Vienna! There's the Royal Bank of Canada on Sparks Street in Ottawa! Everywhere is somewhere else. Despite the snowflakes swirling like shrapnel in the gyrating air around us, the sun is still s.h.i.+ning and the mini-greenhouse of the car interior is warmed by it. We forget that we are absurdly underdressed. Our Echo is invincible. We can see the black specks of birds floating on thermals above the cliffs, but they are too far up for us to identify, even when we get out of the car and look with our binoculars. Not condors: either eagles or red-tailed hawks, we agree, diving back into the car.

It's not that cold, we tell each other as we both reach to crank up the heat.

Even in the thickening snow, there is no mistaking the string of mountain bluebirds perched on telephone wires as we travel along Route 12. We slow down and count them: twenty-three on one loop, fifteen on the next. They have snow on their backs.

"Bluebirds of happiness," Merilyn says. At home we see only eastern bluebirds, and never more than one or two at a time.

She turns to me. "I am very, very happy," she says. "How about you?"

"Delirious," I tell her, hardly daring to take my eyes off the road to smile into hers. "Happy as a lark."

8 / ESCALANTE, UTAH.

WE press on, a tinge of urgency now in our pace. It is decidedly dusk, and I calculate that without incident we can be in Escalante by ten after six. There's a museum there that looks interesting, Merilyn says. The snow is falling heavily, a curtain drawn across the valley to our left.

"Funny to think that we came this far south to avoid driving through snow," Merilyn muses, her tone not as light as she'd clearly like it to be.

"Yes," I say, "but we're in Utah. It's the best snow in the world."

Back in Page, we watched a televised weather report that told us there is still no snow at all in the northern part of the continent; snowmobile dealers and ski resort owners are jumping out of windows. Here, meanwhile, it's a fair bet that those two snowplow drivers are revving their engines and checking each other's flas.h.i.+ng blue lights. We are gradually but a.s.suredly climbing, the weather becoming increasingly wintery. I weave the car back and forth on the highway to test the traction of the tires.

"Wayne, stop that," Merilyn says.

"I'm just checking to see if the road is slippery."

"Of course it's slippery," she says. "There are two inches of snow on it."

"It's not bad," I say. "We have snow tires."

"No, we don't. We have all-season radials."

"What are those lights down there?" I ask, changing the subject. Downslope to our left are the lights of what looks to be a small town.

"Probably cars that have spun out of control and gone off the road," Merilyn says, then relents. "Maybe Escalante."

A dark shape appears at my side window. Before my mind can say "Deer!" it veers toward the car. A sickening thump, and the road in front of us disappears as a pelt of coa.r.s.e, grey-brown hair presses against the winds.h.i.+eld. The road reappears, there's a breath, and another thump as the deer comes down on the trunk. It takes me another fifty feet to rein the car to a stop. We are marooned in the middle of the highway. I keep my foot on the brake and look at Merilyn. She is staring at me.

"Thank G.o.d it didn't come through the winds.h.i.+eld," she says, her voice shaky.

"I didn't see it until it was too late," I say, idiotically.

"You didn't have a chance," Merilyn says, staring straight ahead out the window. We are both in shock.

The engine is still running, the headlights glaring c.o.c.keyed into the snow. Even more idiotically, I say, "I don't think there's any damage to the car."

"That's not possible," Merilyn says.

"I know."

In the rear-view mirror I can see the deer on the side of the road, struggling to its feet, falling, getting up again, Bambi trying to get his footing on ice. I move the gears.h.i.+ft into reverse, absurdly thinking I can help. When I look again, the deer is gone. I get out of the car-the door opens, thank goodness-and walk to the back to look for the deer. We are on a deserted stretch of snow-covered road, high wooded hills to our right, low sloping valley to our left, a fringe of trees along the roadside where the deer must have been lurking before we came along. But where is it now? Surely the impact has at least broken its legs? But there is no sign of it, no blood on the road, no tracks leading up into the darkness. Nor are there any marks on the car's trunk. This is one of those freak accidents, I tell myself with relief, in which the car is not damaged and the deer is not hurt. But my heart is still racing, and I have a sick feeling in my stomach.

I walk around to the front of the car. The entire hood is crumpled in on itself, as if the Fremont troll had sat down on it. The driver's-side fender is crushed, the grille broken. The right winds.h.i.+eld wiper pokes awkwardly into the night sky. The left headlight is smashed, but the bulb, dangling in its socket at the end of its cord, still s.h.i.+nes valiantly. The car looks mutilated, but the engine is running. I think the tires will turn without rubbing against the wheel wells. We can drive; we even have lights, of a sort.

"What do we do now?" I ask when I'm back in the car and have given Merilyn an account of the wreckage.

"We have to report it," she says.

I've never hit a deer. I once hit a racc.o.o.n. It staggered in its humpbacked fas.h.i.+on out of some tall gra.s.s beside the road, not far from our house, and it was its hump that I hit. You think you have time to stop, you think you have reflexes and instincts and peripheral vision and hand-eye coordination. You actually have none of these: you see the racc.o.o.n, you tell yourself it isn't going to run out onto the road, it does, and you say, "Hey, get out of the-," and there is that sickening clunk as undercarriage hits bone.

There is a story by Barry Lopez in which he describes driving across the northern United States. Every time he sees a road-killed animal, which is often, he stops to drag its carca.s.s off the highway into the verge. Animals should die with dignity, he says, or at least have some posthumous dignity after an ignominious death by transport truck or family sedan. I suppose I have something of the sort in mind when I go back to check on our mule deer. But it isn't there. There aren't even any tracks. I look again up into the swirl of snow that closes in like a shroud between us and the trees, and see nothing.

I put the car in gear and inch forward, watching for smoke, listening for shrieks.

"Let's hope we can make it to Escalante."

WELCOME, SAYS the sign on the first motel we come to. Open Year Round. The motel is a ranch-style row of modern units along an unroofed, pressure-treated deck set at a right angle to the highway. There is something that looks like a convention hotel across the road but this isn't the time for comparison shopping. No cars are hitched to the boardwalk, no tracks mar the snow in front of the units. The place looks quiet. This time we both go into the motel office, a low affair attached to a bungalow near the entrance to the parking lot, Merilyn to negotiate the room and me to call the local sheriff.

A large, middle-aged woman comes into the office through a Dutch door behind the desk, bringing with her the smell of pizza and the sound of a television game show. She seems distracted, as though mulling over a tricky Double Jeopardy! question, until we tell her about the deer; then she perks up and calls another woman, who comes in from the back. "This is my sister," the first woman says. The sister is younger. She has dark hair and is wearing a yellow-and-white floral-patterned housedress. I wonder if they are Mormons, if "sister" is code.

"I know someone who'll take care of that deer for you," says the sister. "Was it a doe?"

"No idea," I say. "We need to call the sheriff."

The first woman looks at me with a blend of surprise, concern, and mild disdain.

"We have to report the accident so our insurance will pay for the repairs," Merilyn explains.

The sister shrugs and composes the sheriff's number. She talks for a minute, then hands the phone to Merilyn. I feel left out of the sisterhood.

"He's going out to look for the deer," Merilyn says when she hangs up. "He wants us to wait in our room until he comes to take our statements."

Two hours later, through the window of our unit I see a burly, farm-faced man in a Smokey the Bear outfit walking around our crumpled Echo with a clipboard. When I go outside he introduces himself as the deputy sheriff. The name tag on his jacket says "Jared Porter." I invite him in for a coffee. We've had our dinner of smoked salmon and hummus (I abstained from drinking wine), the last of our Christmas h.o.a.rd, but we still have some of the good coffee we bought in Sacramento. We don't tell Jared that it's decaf.

"I didn't find the deer," Jared says after writing down our particulars on his clipboard, "but looking at your car it's obvious you hit something. Maybe you'll come back with me in the truck and show me exactly where the incident took place?"

I look at Merilyn in alarm. It suddenly occurs to me that the deputy is not taking for granted that what we hit was a deer. For all he knows it could have been a tree or a cyclist (in a snowstorm? why not?) or someone walking along the side of the road. I feel as though I am crossing a border to somewhere remote.

I put on my coat and hat. We need to find that deer.

Five minutes later, Jared and I are driving slowly west along the highway where I think I remember hitting the deer. Jared's Chevrolet Tahoe is so high off the ground I feel slightly giddy, as though we're flying. I can barely see the road over the Tahoe's hood. The winds.h.i.+eld wipers clear a cone of darkness ahead of us, faintly illuminated by the truck's headlights. Jared is watching the roadside through his side window while talking to a dispatcher on his radio. Between the deputy and me there's a computer on a swivel stand, and above the deputy's head is a handle that turns a spotlight mounted on the roof of the truck's cab. Jared plays the light over the shoulder of the road and up the steeply rising embankment, revealing rocks and deadfall and occasional lumps of snow that do not resemble a deer. We've been over this stretch a couple of times, each time the snow a little deeper. I'm beginning to get worried. Was it farther out, perhaps? A different road? I tend to talk when I'm worried. I want to tell the sheriff about the motel owner who offered to have the deer taken care of. Whoever it was has obviously beaten us out here and made off with the deer. Or the bicycle, the sheriff is no doubt thinking.

"I guess the deer was unharmed and has run off into the woods," I venture. I wonder if there is a "no body, no murder" rule for deer collisions.

Jared makes no response. I decide to clam up. I've watched the reality cop shows. Anything I say can and will be taken down and used against me in a court of law. Suddenly, Officer Jared stops the truck and jumps out. I can hear the voice-over: Suddenly, Officer Jared stops the truck and jumps out. I follow from my side, surprised by my freedom. I could run off. Jared is stooping over the road and brus.h.i.+ng aside three inches of snow. He picks up a small piece of amber plastic about the size of a yogourt tub lid.

"This is from your headlight, I would guess," he says. He pokes around in the snow and finds two or three more pieces, some amber, some clear. I notice he doesn't put them in an evidence bag. "This is where you hit it. But where the heck is it gone?"

He believes me. I feel like putting my arm around his shoulder, if I could reach it, in a manly embrace. He takes a flashlight from his jacket pocket and walks up into the forest, leaving me standing in the middle of the highway. With the truck running.

He believes me.

Given the lack of evidence, says the voice-over, Officer Jared has no choice but to let the suspect go.

THE NEXT morning someone named Leslie from the insurance company's Toronto office calls. She suggests we get the car towed back to Canada to be repaired. This strikes Merilyn and me as absurd. Merilyn pa.s.ses this observation on to Leslie. "We're in Utah," she says. Leslie says she'll look at a map and call us back.

"I wonder what property prices are like in Escalante?" Merilyn muses, obviously thinking of Blanche Russell and her mud-brick house.

I take my coffee out onto the deck in front of our unit. A foot of fresh snow hides the car's disfigurement and makes a still, white lake of the parking lot. In a field between the lot and a row of blank-faced bungalows, a boy of about twelve is wheeling doughnuts on an ATV, driving at full speed for fifty feet, then jamming on the brake and cranking the handlebars so that the machine goes into an uncontrolled spin. He does this over and over, a look of fierce anger on his face, as though the ATV is a bucking bronco and he's trying to break its spirit. I wonder what he really wanted for Christmas.

"Let's just pack up and go," I say when I'm back inside.

Merilyn looks dubious. "What if we get caught in another snowstorm?" she says. "What if the car breaks down in the middle of nowhere? We don't even know what is wrong with it."

Just then, Leslie calls back. This time she says the car can be towed to a Car Star repair shop in St. George, Utah, a hundred and twenty-five miles behind us. She adds that if we can get a garage mechanic to certify that the car is safe to drive, we won't need to have it towed.

The garage is on Escalante's main street. The owner and the mechanic are busy unloading a trailerful of new snow tires. I wait for them in the office, a large room smelling pleasantly of axle grease and with a nice selection of calendars on the walls. When the trailer is empty, I go back outside.

"You the fella that hit the deer?" he asks.

"Yeah, but we didn't find it."

The mechanic laughs. "What can I do for you?"

"I need you to tell me that the car is safe to drive. We have to get it to a repair shop in St. George."

"St. George?" he says, raising one eyebrow, but he lets it go. He goes over to the car and fiddles with the hood catch, and to my amazement flips it open. I was afraid to do that for fear I'd never get it closed again. Besides, my looking under the hood wouldn't have helped. Nothing about a modern car engine looks familiar to me. There are no fan belts to tug, no pulleys to turn, no distributor cap to jiggle, no spark plugs to ponder. The whole thing is a mysterious mess of cables and computer parts. I don't even know where the oil filter is. But I nod my head when the mechanic, after a cursory inspection, says he doesn't see anything wrong.

"Me neither," I say.

"I can't tell what shape the engine's in unless I get right into it," he says, "but I can say that whatever might be wrong with it wasn't caused by hitting the deer."

"So you think I can drive it?"

"You drove it here, didn't you?"

"Yeah, but if my insurance company calls you, will you tell them it's fit to drive?"

He considers. "I can tell them I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be."

"Good enough," I say. I go back into the office to thank the owner and ask him how much I owe him. "Oh, twenty bucks ought to cover it," he says.

When I return to the motel with breakfast-cello-wrapped Danish, the best I could do-Merilyn is on the phone again, this time with the insurance adjuster in St. George, a man named Bob Butler (Smith, Porter, Butler: does everyone in Utah have occupational names?), who tells her that the snowstorm of the century is heading his way and we'd be crazy to drive back into it.

"I was golfing yesterday," he says, "but I'll be skiing tomorrow. You're ahead of the storm where you are. Don't backtrack. Keep on going to Albuquerque, and when you get there, give me a call." He promises to have the name and telephone number of another adjuster by then. "But if I were you, I'd just sit tight in Escalante until this blows over."

"Snowstorm?" I say as she hangs up. "Great. This'll be fun."

Merilyn looks at me a little wild-eyed. "Maybe if we leave soon we can beat it," she says. "Once the storm hits, we could be stuck here for days. We're only a week into the trip. If we're going to be stuck anywhere, I'd rather be stuck in Albuquerque."

She spreads a map out on the table. It's three hundred miles to Albuquerque. Escalante is on Route 12, an All-American Road, a designation given only to the most scenic of the National Scenic Byways. It continues on in a wind-about kind of way for a hundred miles before T-ing on Route 24 at Torrey, where we would turn south toward the Four Corners. There are no towns between here and Torrey, and precious few south of it. I notice the road takes a few odd three-hundred-degree turns.

"Mountains," Merilyn says. She looks more closely at the map than I do. "Boulder Mountain," she reads. "Eleven thousand three hundred and thirty feet." She looks up at me. "In a century snowstorm."

"I guess we'd better get moving," I say.

She sighs. "I guess we'd better."

Officer Jared drives up in his truck just as we leave the motel office and hands us our copy of his police report. Merilyn asks him the best way to Albuquerque.

"Well," he says, "you have to go over Boulder Mountain." He points vaguely to the northeast. "The north side never gets any sun, and it can be pretty slick. And there's a hog's back where the canyon drops six hundred feet on one side and eight hundred feet on the other. We've lost a few up there."

A few what? We don't ask.

"Do you think we should chance it?" Merilyn fixes him with a sharp gaze, as if she's got him on the witness stand.

Jared lifts his eyes to the lowering sky. "It's not snowing too bad yet," he says, "and mostly they keep it plowed." He shrugs. "Just follow the speed signs; they're there for a reason."

Before we leave Escalante, we stop at Canyon Country Gas & Goodies. While I gas up, Merilyn buys some chocolate bars and a package of candles. Then we drive off in the direction of Boulder Mountain.

MOUNDED snow covers the road, but the day is fine, not too cold. We are in the mood to appreciate subtle positives. We take it easy, mindful of our crumpled Echo, rea.s.suring ourselves at frequent intervals that the car is good. The road is good. We're good, really good.