The Frailty of Everything Revealed at Last

Keeping Watch

Every time we drove over the long dirt road carved into the desert that stretched on with its sagebrush and joshua trees and dead populars, past the first house which sat far back from the road and was partially hidden behind trash and weeds and where the two kids used to live who ran away because their parents were abusive and shot up the welfare that should have fed them, who were eventually found and made the front page, although one of the kids got bitten by a rattlesnake before he was found and Thank God he lived but he lived elsewhere now thanks to CPS, right before the half-fallen wire fence that marked the beginning of Lloyd’s land, where my aunt would overdose and my cousins would lose a mother and a father and a brother to death, jail, and relocation, respectively, and before the road curved to the left to give you that vision of the “ranch,” more third-world slums than Western Ranch or drug house, I would watch for him.

The plastic soldier, standing at an angle, bayonet thrust forward, a nail driven into his base, securing him to the window ledge in the deserted shack that looked oddly like a guardhouse.

Only, to guard what? For whom? And who was the guard? I supposed it was the soldier. And I wondered if the person who nailed him there meant it as a joke. Or did they imagine him really keeping watch, like I did? 

I day dreamed about meeting him, the person who nailed him there, and discovering his world. Perhaps he had hidden plastic soldiers all over the property, bayonets at ready and a nail through their base, and they could all communicate with each other and the man and could watch over me and warn him when our green station wagon was making its way past the guardhouse on the dirt road to where my mother’s family lived. 

A Flat Tire

When I first noticed the tire give way I was driving home from working the Saturday shift at my job selling purified water at a water store in the Mojave Desert. My Geo Prism began to pull to the right. I slowed down, heart pounding from fear that I might get hit moving from the center lane over to the broad, dirt median to my left where Mexicans occasionally would sell fruit or flowers or flowers and teddy bears wrapped in red or pink plastic if it were Valentine’s Day. I was so overwhelmed with concern about pulling over that I hardly knew what I was doing, so although I saw the other cars and the van already parked in the median, I didn’t really see them at all.

I managed to coax the car over, kicking up dirt and thinking the entire time about how all the other drivers on the road must have been wondering what was wrong. Why’s that kid pulling over? Is he in trouble? When the car stopped, I got out and really noticed for the first time that I wasn’t alone; just ahead of me, maybe 20 ft away was a gray mini-van and a few other cars. A group of Mexicans were hanging out around the cars, but I wasn’t too concerned because most of them looked like middle-aged Mexican moms, heavy-set as Mexican mothers tend to be, and entirely harmless. 

Before I went to the passenger’s side to check the tire I looked around for a cop car. I figured I was probably breaking some law parking in the dirt median, but if and when the cop came I would just explain my situation and deal with the consequences, I decided. 

Kneeling down in the dirt to inspect the tire in plain site of all the passing cars, I felt conspicuous and I worried that someone might report me or offer to help fix the flat and then I’d have to decline their offer and how awkward would that be? But I also felt manly, adult. This was my first flat and I was going to deal with it myself. 

Only, I really didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I knew my dad would know. He was working as an autobody repair man at the time. It’s actually pretty funny that I didn’t know what to do, since basically my whole family worked on cars in one way or another. One grandpa was a bus mechanic, the other was a body man like my dad. Even my mom used to help her dad work on cars when she was younger. And I was once told that my great-great-grandfather ran one of the first chop-shops. But anyway, at 18, in front of the busy Saturday afternoon traffic, stuck in a dirt median, I couldn’t think what I was supposed to do, except call my dad. I owned a pager, which was pretty cool at the time, but no cell phone. 

I looked up and noticed the van and a few Mexican women standing in the dirt talking on a phone. Even though they looked nice enough, I really did not want to ask to borrow their phone; I didn’t even know if they spoke English. But the fear of getting a ticket and the pressure to act like an adult was enough to move me across the 20 ft of dirt to where they stood. 

The sliding door to the van was open. One woman was talking into a cell phone with frantic and ugly Spanish while the other stood resting her head on her right arm which clung to the roof. It wasn’t until I opened my mouth that I sensed that something serious was going on. 

“Excuse me miss. I just got a flat tire and I need to call my dad to get some help. Do you think I could borrow your phone for a minute?”

She lifted her head and said, “Sure. Just a minute,” and she gestured towards the other women who was still talking on the phone, “we just lost our sister in a car accident.”

I couldn’t tell if it was her real sister or her sister in Christ, because they both seemed so clean and polite I assumed there were Christians, and probably pentecostal. Anyway it slowly came to me why those cars were all pulled over in the dirt median. This was the scene of a car accident. And somehow the family or church family of one of the victims had shown up at the scene before the paramedics. I felt bad for them. Both of us in an accident, stuck in the median. Waiting to call family to share our burden and get help.

I didn’t have to wait long at all to get the phone. And my dad answered. His advice seemed pretty darn obvious once he said it. He didn’t seem to think a tow was necessary and he didn’t seem all that eager to drive the 25 minutes to fix the tire himself. “If your spare still has air in it, just change the tire.” 

“Thanks for letting me borrow the phone.”

“You’re welcome,” the woman choked out between tears.

The walk back over to the car was the worst. I felt even more aware of all the passing cars and my conspicuousness without the shielding of a vehicle to at least give me a reason for being in the median. I popped the trunk and moved empty Dr. Pepper cans to reveal the miniature, but still inflated spare tire, the jack, and the tire iron. I was tired from my long day at work, and I didn’t particularly want to get more dirty or sweaty, but then again I kind of did. It was satisfying lying down in the dirt, positioning the jack perfectly under the car, and using my strength to loosen the tough lug-nuts. I didn’t mind anymore that people were watching. It felt good. I was fixing my own problem, using my wits and strength to save myself. 

I’m pretty sure that the first time I tried to loosen the lug-nuts I had already jacked the car up, which meant the the tire just spun in the air whenever I put pressure on the tire-iron. Once I realized that I needed to loosen the nuts before jacking up the car it didn’t take all that long to finish the job and get back on the road. 

That evening I felt pretty darn pleased with myself. Maybe adulthood won’t be so rough after all.  

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

~ Albert Camus (HT Bruce Kirby)