Though one can leave an hour margin to get to missions in Phoenix on time—and you can avoid the rush hours with wise planning—still you don’t know when the system of pavement, exits and speed limits will seize up and there you are behind an idling semi truck, two lanes halted, with no escaping at Cordes Junction because you’re south of that already; you are ready for the downhill float into desert below Sunset Point but now southbound I-17 has stopped for no obvious reason.
An accident near Bumble Bee Road, says a friend I call on my cell phone who checks the az511.com map on his computer. A cattle truck overturned I’ll hear later. After a half hour of creeping I bail out at Badger Springs Road and turn back towards Flagstaff.
It was supposed to be almost the last trip to do what needs doing. Nearly a year has gone by since my mother’s passing and still details need managing down there. Tasks like sorting numbers for her last tax return and determining the value of her worldly assets at the date of death are tedious tasks. Placing all the Christmas letters in one pile and assembling a bookshelf from Ikea to put all her journals in a row are not efforts at all; they are tender gestures to stroke a life I’m missing.
But now I can’t get there from here. It’s like that labyrinth painted on the brick pavers in the garden behind the Church of the Epiphany on Beaver Street—how the path causes you to face opposite directions on your journey to the center. I was driving south. Now I’m driving north, but not without a lifelong map of Arizona in my head. I have a full tank of gas and five gallons of water in my truck and a handful of meal bars tucked into the glove box and a well-thumbed gazetteer behind the seat. Next exit, I head east. I know a back road to get to my brothers in Phoenix.
Ten miles later, I pause at the crest of a hill and pick up binoculars to study a remote valley with a long dirt road through it. I smile to be exploring again. Switchbacks slow my driving into gentle swaying. When I meet a water crossing I think, yes, this could be a turn back point some years, but today I roll on through, enjoying the small splashing and noting a kestrel’s glide to a willow branch.
I remember how my mother’s 80s began with a hot air balloon ride over the desert near Carefree Highway, our gift to celebrate her love of adventure. She climbed into a nest of family and friends all tucked into a woven basket designed for hard landings. I stayed on the ground to take the photos of their waving growing smaller and smaller against the blue sky. Her 80s ended eight years later, I think as a stretch of washboard makes the steering wheel tremble. I sigh.
At the next water crossing I pull out the binoculars again to watch two hawks drifting, lacing a pattern of flight together overhead.
Twenty more miles and the heat against the windshield causes me to stop at a line of cottonwoods where three inches of flowing stream lure me to sit right down in the water. Soon I lie down in the small stream to feel the flow against the top of my head. I close my eyes against the bright sun and feel gravel work its way into my shorts. Chilly ripples stroke the length of my legs. Sand nudges into my pockets and socks. I could be sitting in traffic. But I’m not.
The detour takes me over more than 50 miles of dirt road with multiple stops for hawks and gurgles and still I meet my brothers eventually. There’s time enough for us to put our heads together to imagine our way into a plan for our mother’s grapefruit tree, her land in Maine and the Christmas letters. On the bookshelf I place my father’s journals next to my mother’s. In one of them he wrote about his twin girls learning to walk in a grassy Phoenix yard. “Jean wanders too far when free,” he noted.
True, I’m still apt to steer toward the beguiling less-traveled path. I do delight in following my nose. I learned it from my mother.
