I gotta say I’ve driven from Tucson to Tucumcari and Tehachapi to Tonopah, but never on weed, whites and wine. Well, not on whites, anyway.

Like that time, so long ago, and we were driving somewhere in the vastness of the Great Basin and there was a zillion stars overhead and no other traffic, no nobody. I had the windows down and the desert air was so dry and pure, and “Willin'” came crackling off the radio and I was singing along and Lowell George’s words made more sense, just then, then any other song in the world. The bowl came my way and I drew deep and the night grew even blacker, the stars brighter, and I exhaled just in time to join in on the chorus. “Driven every kind of rig that has ever been made….” which was a lie, I was in a brand new Chevrolet Celebrity, and had always been in a Chevy, for years. No matter, I was on the back roads and no one was weighing anybody. Give me weed, whites and wine….but we had no wine, and coffee instead of whites, but I drew deeply on the weed again, and I saw a sign, all shot up, warning of flash floods, but not tonite, not with all these stars. and right then I was willing to drive around the desert all night, with nothing but the road and us and the keening coyotes and the crackling trucker songs coming all the way from Gallup, where the announcer said everything in Navajo like it was when there was no radio here at all, and we drove and drove till sleep caught up with us near Winslow, Arizona and we bedded down for the night.

There’s a meteor crater out there, you know, big and terrifying, and ghostly Indian cities deep in canyons, still and silent but for the wind. Up north they pull dinosaurs from red sandstone. But just then it was pitch dark and the bed was soft and we sank into it and slept deeply, and if there were dreams they were forgotten by the morning.