He said, “Well, good luck, Pop. I won’t declare you dead until you are at least 70. If you get to Mars and decide to stay, send a postcard and papers so that I can have my inheritance. Deal?”
I laughed and said, “Deal. I love you, Son. I’ll see you in a few weeks. I’ll let you know if I find something.”
We laughed and joked and he insisted that I tell him some of the juicier bits of Barsoomian customs and we finally said goodnight.
I walked to the parking lot to my truck, which I had already packed and fueled, and as I started the engine I decided to go ahead and leave that very moment. I could drive a few hours and find a motel around midnight. I pulled onto the freeway and headed down the road, not really knowing my destination.
I drove until just about midnight and finally pulled into a mid-grade hotel. I didn’t believe in staying in dumps unless I had to. The desk clerk was pleasant despite the late hour and my room was comfortable. I fell asleep quickly and was awake again about dawn and back on the road by six AM.
I usually don’t eat breakfast as soon as I wake up, so I drove for a couple of hours before stopping at a convenient diner, just off the freeway, for an omelet and hash browns. My habit was to leave a generous tip wherever I went, and the waitress thanked me as I left and I headed back onto the road.
The time passed easily. Most of my thoughts were about my wife and how different life was at this moment. I didn’t fret over plans for the future, I just embraced the emotions that came to me. Each day memories, emotions, trials, or joys come to us and knock on the door and visit; we need to invite them in and offer them tea and sit and let them tell their stories and triumphs and woes. My grief was the process of letting go of conditioning based on over 25 years together, not a crushing depression or loss of purpose. My wife had been a wonderful woman, full of life, and now that was over. She would always be part of me, but a much smaller part than she had been.
I’d known friends who lost a spouse and who never themselves lived again. From that moment on, they lived in the world of what they had lost. They lived entirely in the past; in the life they used to know that was never real again. Or, they lived partly in the future, never being able to imagine a life of happiness for themselves again. My wife and I had worked hard to learn to live in the present, to be with each other when we were together, and I was living in the present now.
Right now, I was driving down the freeway through open country. Memories of my wife sat with me in the passenger seat and we talked about where we were at right now. We laughed about past things and cried over tender moments. But they were being discussed now, as I drove and watched the miles tick by; not reliving past moments, but sharing them. This quest was a step forward, a new thing… and the start to who knows what. Every beginning starts with and end. The beginning of every new thing comes at the death of an old thing. How I react to it depends on which thing, the end or the beginning, takes the biggest portion of my thoughts. When both are in proper proportion, when they are in balance, there is peace.
I was at peace with my wife’s passing. I was at peace with my transition to a new life without her. My memories and thoughts sat in the passenger seat and passed me a piece of beef jerky to chew on, and I drove down the freeway.
I like eating just after normal hours, when there’s a lull at the restaurant. I like it when the staff isn’t rushing and when you have a chance to smile at them and try to bring a bit of cheer. Waitresses are almost always single moms; I have compassion for them. My parents stayed together my whole life, but I feel for those who didn’t have that kind of family. I enjoy being kind to strangers, especially single moms who have such hard lives; working to make ends meet, looking for a relationship and a way to be loved and appreciated, raising a child without the help that could make a hard job just a bit easier.
Lunch was at a little dive Mexican place. The food was good. I don’t think that the waitress was a single mom. She wore a wedding ring. Come to think of it, I wondered if Mexican restaurants tended to have fewer single moms? As I think back, I think maybe that’s true. Maybe I’ll remember to pay attention and see if my theory holds. Is there a lower divorce rate, or a lower incidence of unwed pregnancies in the Hispanic community?
When dinner time came, I wasn’t really hungry. That isn’t unusual. I pulled into a place to stay for the night before 10PM and slept until dawn, like the day before.
The next day was much the same. I drove. I listened to the radio a bit. My thoughts were peaceful, and the time passed easily.
The third day of the trip started the same way. By noon, I was in Arizona. I began to make plans now.
I would want to start out as early in the morning as possible from a point as close to the destination as I could get and still have a decent night’s sleep in a comfortable bed. I was expecting about two hours of driving after I left the highway, plus an hour or so to unpack the ATV before heading into the hills. I decided that I’d stop and stay about an hour’s drive before the point where I would leave the freeway.
Once again, I woke up at dawn. I hadn’t used an alarm clock for many years, but regularly woke when the sun came up. I ate breakfast at the hotel before heading out because there wouldn’t be many amenities or places to stop for meals from here on out. I was on the freeway for the last leg of this part of the trip early.
Chapter 3
The Desert and The Cave
This was it. Now my thoughts turned to this moment and the few moments to come over the next few hours.
This was it. Today I would really begin my quest. I had brief thoughts of self-doubt. Any time you build up to something for several weeks, something really important to you, as the moment approaches, you question what you’re doing. What if it turns out to be a big disappointment? What if you ‘fail’?
Of course, that fear of failure is nonsense. What is there to fail at? Not just in what I was doing, but in life in general? I was driving into the desert to look at a piece of property that I had bought sight unseen over the Internet. A worthless piece of property. A piece of property with no resale value that I would be required to pay very modest property taxes on for the rest of the time that I owned it.
But, it was more than a piece of worthless property: it was a treasure map. Did it matter if the map was a fake? It only mattered if it mattered to me. There was no one but me to judge me, and I wasn’t judging me. I had studied the treasure map and decided that it showed real locations and a path to a real destination. That destination may have been one of Burroughs’ favorite camping spots and nothing more… but what if it was? If that were the case, I would be exploring, and the owner of, one of my boyhood hero’s favorite camping spots.
I wasn’t sure about that though. Nearly a hundred years ago, could Burroughs have even gotten to this place? This freeway was certainly not that old. Burroughs had lived in southern California, about 530 miles from my destination, but in those early days, there wasn’t a freeway here. Would the trip have even been possible without spending a week on horseback? Why go to that trouble when Yosemite was so much closer and more beautiful? The only reason for coming here in those days was for mining; the reason that John Carter was purported to be here. Burroughs had never held a mining claim, or any interest in the property I had purchased according to any records that I had been able to find. It was a mystery.
I had a map, that I had drawn myself, that detailed a location that seemed to exist, and no good reason for anyone to have ever been here. That didn’t bother me. I was on a quest and the bigger the mystery, the better.