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It worked well for the Donner
Party, right? Besides, I was fairly young and up for an adventure.
And it worked, too, at
least somewhat, the first few trips.
I took the US Highway
50 route that splits off from I-70 a little South of Salt Lake City and
takes you straight across Western Utah and most of Nevada just before it
links up with Interstate 80 which then takes you over Donner Pass in
California. The road is one of the most desolate but
beautiful drives I've ever been on. I mean, you can stop at the top of
Little Antelope Summit (a whopping 7,438 feet) at night, and not even
see the light of a ranch house in any direction. One time I
car-camped (remember the bed in the truck? Please do, as it will be
important later in the story) on the salt flats right at the Utah/Nevada
border. It was Fall, cool and comfortable and very quiet - perfect for a
Colorado mountain boy to get some sleep. The next morning the sky
was light but the sun wasn't yet up, when I got my wake-up call: the
shrieking scream of jet engines just a few hundred feet overhead .
Banshees couldn't have been worse. This is why the Scotts invented
bagpipes in the first place. How could I have known the Air Force
practiced it's runs where I was camped?
I wouldn't like to
think our professional fly boys would stoop to buzzing a sleeping camper
in the middle of nowhere, but...?
The next time I took
this route, I was careful to camp in the foothills.
I did take this route
again, too. I was making a little money in the Fall when Colorado had no
shows, and there are some incredible things to see and experience both
on the way there and in California itself.
Then came 1988.
I had three shows
scheduled in the Bay area (do NOT call it "Frisco" to the locals), with
time to kill and explore in between the weekend shows. They were
all in and around the Bay, which besides San Francisco itself is really
just a bunch of large towns that have grown and linked into a huge
metropolis, interwoven by a highway system that is almost always jammed
with traffic. The shows were not making much money, so I was thankful
for the bed in the truck (Aha! you say. Now you come to the bed in the
truck!) to call home, avoiding massive hotel bills. It wasn't really
roomy, as I only had a half shell to snuggle in and out of, not a full
camper, but it worked great! Getting in and out took a little extra
effort, but once inside my sleeping bag it was very comfy. I even had
curtains for privacy. You're just a little more exposed to the elements
than in a hotel room, that's all.
So here I am, at the
second show, low on funds and feeling a little desperate.
Saturday's sales were less than hoped, and I'd hoped for very little.
After I closed my booth and had dinner at a Chinese restaurant which I
could barely afford, I crawled into my bed in the back of the truck,
read my book for awhile, and drifted off to a restless sleep. A sleep
made all the more restless by the fact that, as I had emerged from the
restaurant I could see the beginnings of a storm which appeared to be
building over the Pacific.
"Great!" I worried. A
storm when it hasn't rained in weeks!
I really needed to
have a chance to sell something the next day, plus my art was in my
booth. It was zipped up and wrapped up as sound as I could make it, but
the best outdoor booth is still a temporary shelter. A
phrase like "the sense of pending doom" would not be inappropriate to
have hanging in my thoughts as I fell asleep.
I was securely parked
in the lot of a strip mall, pre-approved by the authorities, with my
small trailer hitched to the truck and the whole rig pointed downhill,
down the slight incline of the lot. I sleep with my head at the back of
the truck bed, so I like to have it elevated. Who wants to sleep with
his head lower than his feet, right?
It was almost pitch
dark when I was shaken awake. The truck was rocking.
I lay there in my
sleeping bag, suddenly wide awake, waiting for the sound of the rain
that would follow the wind which was obviously causing the shaking,
wondering if my booth would survive a storm, or if the storm would wash
out my last chance to make some money. Then I lifted the curtain to see
the storm.
It was dead calm. No
wind. No rain. My truck was still rocking.
Then I made the
connection: California! Earthquakes! Damn!
Should I flee? Should
I hop out and drive somewhere? Where would I go? There were no tall
buildings around, so if I fled, what good would it do? Hell, I
decided, unless the ground opened up underneath me (which almost never
happens even in the worst quake), I was safer here than anywhere else.
So I took a deep
breath and decided to ride it out.
Riding, in fact, was
exactly what happened next, as the truck was rocked out of "park", and
started forward down the tarmac. I was laying there in my sleeping bag
and my BVD's when I shouted something crude, jumped out of my comfy
camper and landed on the pavement, watching my truck, trailer, and
livelihood start rolling away into the night. It had gained very little
momentum at that point, so I did the next desperate thing - I grabbed
onto the tailgate of the truck and heaved back!
Thank God for all the
years of working out. I managed to stop the truck from rolling into the
brick wall where it was aimed. It's amazing what panic can accomplish.
Except that now, of course, came the next problem...how to keep it
stopped. I mean, I couldn't hold it like this for very long, and
the possibility of just walking it down hill without losing control was
pretty unlikely, so that the only option left was to let go of the truck
and jump into the cab and hit the brakes.
Except the cab was
locked. And the keys were in my - pants? Sure. Laying in the
bed, just a few feet away. Not far, but a little out of reach, when
holding a truck by the tailgate.
Right about now would
have been a great time to be a nearby resident looking out the window.
The next steps would
have been difficult to choreograph: let go of the truck, grab the pants,
grab the truck. Let go of the truck, fish the keys out of the pants,
grab the truck. Finally the big plunge...let go of the truck and run
like hell along side it while you jammed the key into the lock, unlocked
the door, jumped in and hit the brakes.
Which I managed to do,
and stopped the whole thing from rolling just about five feet short of
the wall.
I looked around,
surveyed my situation (realizing nobody was even enjoying the show) and
decided what the hell? All's well and all of that, so I repositioned my
rig and, making really really sure I set the emergency brake,
crawled back in and went back to sleep. Why not? It was the middle of
the night and no matter what happened at the show the next day, it was
bound to be a little anti climactic.
The following day at
the show I actually made a couple of sales. This gave me some to get by
on until the next show, so I broke out my credit card got a Motel 6 for
the night, feeling pretty smug with myself for having survived this
event, and planned what to do for the next few days, until the show next
weekend.
Point Reyes National
Seashore and the redwood forests just North of the Bay looked
interesting.
Interesting.
Yeah. That's what it was. |
