A Way Out Better Than I Ever Expected

Growing up, a well-running automobile was a true luxury, and the ones we had, we held onto with great care and practiced selectivity with our destinations - mostly, the cars were reserved to get people (usually my grandmother) to and from work.

My grandmother was an RN. She was trained at the historic Sage Memorial Hospital School of Nursing in Ganado, Arizona (the Sage School of Nursing, blending Western medical knowledge with Native American healing practices, is deserving of it’s own story, but many folk more knowledgeable than me have written whole books on it already), and she kept the steadiest employment of anyone in the family after her husband passed in 1964 leaving her with three daughters, aged 16, 14, and 7. Being a Native American woman in mid-century Arizona, she was not offered, despite any real talents she clearly possessed, the best jobs. She was, however, able to get a regular graveyard shift at the Arizona State Prison in Florence.

Florence was roughly 25 miles from our home in Sacaton, and usually my grandma would take the car to work while everyone was sleeping, but when the car may have been needed, my mom would drop her off and pick her up.

In the hot summer months, my brother and I learned that if we woke up at 4:30 or so, we could get a couple hours of playtime in before it got too hot (in the 1970’s, far from any urban areas, the Sonoran Desert cooled off significantly overnight, and we could often enjoy early morning temperatures in the 60’s), and sometimes my mom would invite us to come along for the ride to get our Grandma when her shift ended at six a.m.

I should clarify. I, personally, definitely planned on getting up before dawn every day to beat the summer sun, and my brother would join me - though often reluctantly.

My brother was always more comfortable living with late nights and later mornings. He enjoyed playtime in the “cool”, but if given the option to sleep in, he would definitely take it. Consequently, if my mom thought to invite us to pick up Grandma, my brother almost always declined in favor of more time in bed. I, on the other hand, relished the chance to break free from the limited extent of my existence whenever I could, so I would typically (and gleefully) accept any offer to go for a ride.

The flat desert plains of the “Basin and Range” lands of southern Arizona are not the most exciting. (When we would take our annual school field trip from Sacaton to Tucson to visit the Arizona Sonoran Desert Museum and Old Tucson, we would leave extra early and get back relatively late due to more than 3 hours of driving to get over and back. From my perspective, and I know it was shared by almost all of my classmates, the drive felt more like 30 hours. That 40 mile stretch between Casa Grande and Picacho Peak was the worst; we might as well have been simply incarcerated for a few hours.) Fortunately, there was just enough skirting of “Range” territory to break up the flat monotony of the Gila River flood plain enough to make the half-hour drive to Florence at least tolerable for an eight year-old boy.

On our drives, I’d listen to my mom sing along (very well, I might add) to the songs on the radio or just sit quietly thinking. She wasn’t unfriendly and would gladly respond to any questions I had, but I could tell she thoroughly enjoyed the solitude and sanctity of the road.

As I grew older, and moved back to the Salt River reservation from my grandmother’s home on the Gila River reservation, I found those similar opportunities for thought and introspection (and separation from others, truthfully) that my mom so clearly enjoyed were moments I also sought.

Carrying on the practice of early mornings, I would often go for solitary walks just to ponder and imagine. I thought they were marches of good measure, but in fact, they were probably no more than five miles at a time, limiting the total departed distance from my home to maybe two or three miles.

Our tribe offered summer jobs for the youth once they turned 14. Our family was always struggling, so I seized the chance to get a job once I was 14 (my first work being cleaning up the construction residue from the building of the new Pi-Copa Construction warehouse) and contribute to the household income. I did, however, set aside a little bit of the paychecks from my minimum wage work to buy, at the end of the summer of 1986, an item I’d always desired but could never afford - a bike.

Now, I had to learn how to ride a bike, so I taught myself. Remarkably, like when I learned to tie my shoes in a single try the morning of my first day of Kindergarten, I learned to ride my new bike in a couple hours, and then I was OFF.

The bike extended my range of exploration significantly, but “rez dogs” and “Bullhead” thorns on the ground (which managed to easily pierce and shear bicycle inner tubes with pure ease) did pull back my hopes a bit. Taking a ride to Red Mountain, while theoretically possible, was not allowed by personal sanity - or parents. Still, I found bliss in getting out, as often and for as far as I could, and floating, thinking, and seeing.

When I was 16, Dartmouth College flew me out to New Hampshire to visit. I was enraptured and happily committed to attending college almost 3,000 miles from the southwest deserts. I bided the next nearly two years impatiently, and I planned for the start of college just after my 18th birthday.

I turned 18 while spending the summer after my high school graduation with my Grandfather Dr. Wolfgang Klose, my Uncle Peter, and my dad in Germany. My Uncle Chris brought his wife and children, my cousins, (along with an old school wooden beer keg) from Aurich on the North Sea to celebrate my August birthday. My Opa invited friends of the family to join as well, and the hedgehogs in the extensive backyard “garden” even came out to play. It was unforgettable.

My 18th birthday also granted me access to my “claims” - specifically, my share of the financial compensation part of the formal, legal water settlement between the United States government and the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community. For me, in 1989, that meant about $5,000. So, upon my return to the U.S.A. a week after my birthday, I applied for the disbursement of my Individual Indian Monies account.

As I mentioned, cars were a rare commodity for me growing up. For most of the six years living in Salt River while I was in junior high and high school, we did NOT own a car. We would get rides from relatives and neighbors to go to the store or use the tribal transit system (“the Van”), or walk (or ride a bike!) to get where we had to go. One of the very first things I did with my “claims” money was to spend $1,500 on a (new for us) used van for my parents and brother.

Everyone knew I was going to have a little money, and the expectation was that I would pay for my own air travel to school in New Hampshire. I had other ideas.

I figured I would be settling in at school for a good while. I knew coming home for Thanksgiving was out of the question and future back-and-forth travel was likely to be limited, so I planned on taking almost all I owned (admittedly, not a whole lot) with me to remind me of my distant home. Rather than haul everything on a plane (which actually may have been possible in the pre-9/11 time), I asked my mom and dad if they would consider driving me to Dartmouth.

I had other motives, too, though. New Hampshire was on the opposite corner of the U.S., and I wanted to see what lied between where I was and I would be. I wanted to take my aspirations of getting a little further and a little further away from my home and explode them into realms unimagined - and I did, further than I ever anticipated and more often than I could have ever dreamed.

My parents did drive me to New Hampshire (while my brother stayed with my aunts - our “little” moms). It was “ok”. Honestly, I underestimated the expanse of country we had to cover, and it humbled me at first, but I came to appreciate it. We had car trouble and had to work through finance issues in a pre-interstate banking situation. We saved on hotels by sleeping in the van in rest areas (only being woken and told to move once). It was kind of a slog, but it was also eye-opening - an awakening, and I still hold those few days of just me and my mom and dad extra close to my heart.

Within the year, I had broken my leg at Dartmouth Winter Carnival (a celebration notorious for its intoxicated exploits - while “researching” the event to write a screenplay, F. Scott Fitzgerald fell famously far off the wagon as a consequence of the boozy influence of festival), returned home to Arizona to recover, and my mom, aunts, and uncle all became millionaires (because the State of Arizona needed a freeway right-of-way, and they owned lands the state needed). Less than 12 months after I bought that old very-used van for my parents, my mom bought me a brand new Jeep Cherokee.

I hit the road.

That first cross-country road trip with my parents was fun, but traveling by myself, or with new, so close friends my same age, was a revelation in every way that expression can be defined. I had found my place and peace.

Eventually, between 1990 and 1995 (and even a bit after ‘95), I criss-crossed the United States more than 30 times. I burned out the transmission on the Cherokee within 18 months and 100,000 miles and upgraded to a highway-worthy Mercedes in early 1992. From 1995 to 1999, I lived on the Navajo Nation and continued to rack up the miles - easily putting 100,000 miles a year onto “Old Blue”.

Recollecting those memories, emotions, and adventures was, and remains, one of my motivating reasons to write. I want to preserve some of the transient, yet incredibly personally meaningful, serenity and inspiring, enacting rapture I discovered in the altogether emancipating freedom of driving to all corners of the country in the days before social media, email, and cell phones - when separation was threatening but solitude was true.

I want to recall for me, but I would also like to share. I hope to brush aside hazy thoughts and re-create, likely limited in talent and capacity, some of the life - the discovery, joy, fear, enlightenment, menace, and ecstasy of some of my personal explorations traveling the common road.

Be forewarned. Be blessed.