US Route 93 shoots north out of Vegas as if it can’t stand the place, ditching the noise and nonsense of the casinos and the tedium of urban sprawl for the lean beauty of the high desert.
Thirty years ago this week I peddled a grossly overloaded bicycle up this highway, intending a marathon trip west across central Nevada. Along the way I planned to backpack in the mountain ranges that stretch north-south across the Great Basin Desert.
During spring or fall such a trip might have been lovely, but in the vicious heat of August it became a misery-fest. After two weeks I gave up on this foolish project.
Today, as I drive up Route 93 and retrace my bicycle tracks, the living is easy. The truck’s air conditioner whirs, the refrigerator in the camper is crammed with food and cold drinks. I’m two days into a month-long road trip to Idaho, Oregon and Wyoming, high as always on the freedom and possibility of the open road.
I think back on that bicycle trip, to a brief encounter on Old Route 66, a hundred miles west of Flagstaff. An old preacher had invited me into his home:
“You might think that what you’re looking for is out there,” the Rev. Warren Smith said, pointing out his kitchen window at the broiling pavement. “But it’s all right here in the Book.”
While he filled my water bottles, I wondered if my thirst was about to get me saved. At the moment, the only salvation I was looking for was gushing from that faucet.
The preacher handed me my duct-taped Gatorade bottles and reached for a small black New Testament. I braced for a sermon. His eyebrows, white as mountain snow, arched over his horn-rimmed glasses. He cleared his throat.
“Would you like some lemonade, friend?”
Spared, for now.
We drank the lemonade. The clink of ice was a sweet music. The preacher told me that he and his wife had spent twelve years tending the Abundant Life Church, ministering to the Hualapai tribe and to whoever might pass by. Today that was me—a hairy, middle-aged guy on a bike headed through the furnace of the desert.
“Tell me again, son, where is it you’re going?” I described my plan to ride Route 66 to the California line, then into and across Nevada.
“Sounds ambitious,” he said, shaking his head. “Kind of dangerous too, this time of year.” I shrugged and told him that I was just another tourist.
I didn’t mention stopping earlier that day at an abandoned trailer with busted-out windows, and finding a child’s homework yellowing on the cracked linoleum floor. Or that for some reason this brought tears to my eyes. I didn’t reveal that scenes like these enchant me, and that I seek them out like oases on these dry old Western roads.
“I just like to ride my bicycle,” I said.
“Are you a believer, son?” he asked. I mumbled a non-answer that included vague phrases like “not exactly” and “many paths to the truth.”
Then he called me a seeker. I didn’t argue. Maybe he was right: my mission to cross the blazing desert in midsummer made no more sense than anyone else’s.
When I left, the preacher stood in the doorway. The white heat pressed down on us both. “There’s only one true road,” he said. I waved, already pedaling back into the glare.
Here on Route 93, decades later, I remember the preacher’s rock-solid certainty. I think of the way roads stitch through our lives, of the promises made by straight lines on a map.
Today the desert beyond my windshield seems unchanged—vast, indifferent and mysterious. But I am 30 years older, and still not certain of much.
I don’t imagine that desert roads will lead to simple answers. But they still deliver bright moments–cold lemonade in a stranger’s kitchen, the stillness of creosote flats under noonday sun, silent night skies powdered with stars.
Enough, I think. More than enough. For now and maybe forever.
