A doom with a view
- Jul 6
- 9 min read
Mom guided the Wagon to an empty place in the blackness and pulled the all done lever. “The best thing about the wilderness is that you only have to figure out one move at a time. Now that we know the road isn’t really closed, we can put that worry behind us and rest easy.”
With confidence filling her head and nothing but wilder-ness around us, Mom drifted peacefully into sleep. When the sun returned in the morning, it shone straight through the front window, turning the entire desert into shadows on a white screen. We followed the glare as adventure knocked on the Wagon’s belly, quietly at first and then faster and more violently. Mom groaned with each sucker punch and squinted harder to find the next rock before it found us. By the time the Witch made her first announcement of the morning, Mom was squinting so hard that her face looked ready to turn inside-out.
“Continue on this road for thirteen miles,” the Witch ordered.
The Wagon rattled over machine-gun dirt and rocky landmines for what felt like forever. Each time we had to slow down to find our way over a pothole or around a big rock, time stretched to hold the suspense as the world shrank into the inch in front of us. The space between obstacles got shorter until it felt like we’d been staggering blindly down this road for weeks. Then, the road crumbled away completely. There was a drop half a wheel high, followed by nothing but a stream of sharp rocks disappearing into the glare. The Wagon stopped.
Mom squinted into the shadows in the front window for a moment before giving up and pulling the all done lever. She released the seat leash. “I’m gonna get out and look.”
“I’ll help,” I said so I wouldn’t have to admit that I didn’t want her to leave me alone.
In front of us was a strip of wildness as wide as the Wagon was long. The ditch was filled with rocks—some the size of softballs, others the size of basketballs, and all ready to shift and roll if the Wagon dared step on them. Mom poked one of the bigger rocks with her shoe to see how heavy it was. It twitched and settled into the same place it was before she nudged it. She looked at the Wagon’s bellyheight and turned back to the softball- and basketball-sized boobytraps. After studying the cheesology of the ditch for a long time, she stood up and announced, “I think we can get across!”
We remounted and Mom commanded the Wagon to back it up so we could get a rolling start. She took a deep breath, adjusted her grip on the driving wheel, and ordered the Wagon to charge. We all braced for impact.
The Wagon filled with bangs and crunches as the road savagely kicked its underbelly. Mom’s head rolled on her shoulders as I rolled from one side of the bed to the other and back again. The Wagon made the final leap out of the ditch and landed with a thud. It kept rolling.
“I think we’re gonna make it after all!” Mom hooted triumphantly.
“Turn right,” the Witch commanded, cutting off Mom’s celebration. I may not know how to drive, but I know that when the Witch doesn’t say the name of a road, it means either we’re almost there, or we’re so deep in the wilder-ness that places no longer have names in human language.
The Wagon turned and the squint fell from Mom’s face. Her mouth did The Scream while her eyebrows did gymnastics. “Aaaah, I thought my face would be stuck like that forever!”
“How much longer?” I asked.
“In two miles you will arrive at your destination,” the Witch said.
But the Wagon didn’t seem so confident. It swayed like it had just chased its tail for an hour and was too dizzy to stand.
“What’s wrong with the Wagon?” I asked.
“It’s this sand.” Mom steadied the driving wheel with stiff arms and kept her eyes fixed straight ahead. “Sand is a bit like snow. You may slip and slide a bit, but you won’t get stuck as long as you keep rolling.”
“Does sand melt?” I asked.
But Mom wasn’t listening because not-stopping took all the concentration she had. The Wagon staggered obediently on until its wheels finally found solid ground in the tiniest little car kennel you ever did see.
“See?” Mom shifted the Wagon triumphantly into recovery mode. “The trick to not getting stuck is to just keep moving.”
Again, there was something about that that didn’t feel right, but I still couldn’t put my paw on why. “But we did stop.”
“Right. We stopped after achieving our goal,” she said like she was letting me in on a clever secret.
I looked back at the Wagon prints in the sand. “But, like, what if the ground is too sticky and you do get stuck?”
“Sand isn’t sticky, it’s slippery,” she said, like it couldn’t be both. “It’s like a river, we might slide off course, but as long as we keep moving in the direction we want to go, we’ll get back to terra firma eventually. Like I said, once you’ve solved a problem in nature, you can put it behind you for good.”
I didn’t like the sound of terror-firma. “What if the Wagon gets hurt on the way back?”
“Then I suppose we’ll figure it out like we did the last time we were here.” She pulled down the corners of her mouth and did a lopsided shrug. “Aren’t you always telling me that I spook myself by seeing danger where it doesn’t belong, and that’s how I miss out on the best experiences?” She looked at the desert like it was a stray dog she planned to tame. “Isn’t this lovely?” Just beyond the car kennel, giant dooms curled out of the ground like the heaps of straw Rumplestiltskin weaved into gold. The gold-grey peaks looked like a less crinkly imitation of the ragged mountains on the horizon behind them.
“Yeah, but…” but what was squigging me out was still just out of my wisdom’s reach. So I stopped asking questions and waited for the thing that was bothering me to come closer so I could sniff it properly.
We left the Wagon to recover and turned toward the sand. Mom set her eyes on the tallest doom rising like a great pyramid out of the sandscape and we set off.
The side of the doom was as steep as any mountain, but it sucked in enough of our paws that there was no danger of slipping to the bottom. Instead, it buried our tracks before we even made them, as if determined to keep its shape no matter who tried to leave their mark. If I dug a hole or built a sandcastle, my work would disappear back into the overall design before anyone had a chance to discover it.
When we reached the summit, Mom made me stop for a picture with two legs planted victoriously on each side of the pointy ridge. I sat as if on a throne and the point flattened into a cushion under my butt. I stared confidently into the distance as Mom and the Witch climbed around me in circles taking pictures. The dooms were the only tile that stood out in all of that vast emptiness between rumpled horizons. You could rearrange all of the other tiles between us and the mountains and no one would ever know the difference.
I stared at the doom’s peak between my paws and waited for Mom to tell me she was all done. The crease wasn’t solid, but made of Jillians of grains of sand coming and going. Underneath the grains I could see, baJillians more were stuck in place, waiting for their chance in the sun. Only the fortunate ones got to ride wind up the slope to see the desert they were a part of. The lucky grains that reached the tip only got to stay there for a moment before the wind pushed them down the other side to make way for the next. All around me, baJillians and baJillians of sand grains rushed around, constantly on the move, and yet the shape of the dooms never changed.
I wondered if the story of the dooms was about a single grain trying to reach the top and stay there, or about the whole doom directing countless unpredictable events in a pre-destined plot that none of them knew about. I wanted to ask Mom about the story of the sand dooms, but she would probably need to count all the grains before she could answer.
When Mom told me I was all done, I leaped off the side of the doom just to see if I could still fly. For a moment that could have lasted forever, I did. Then my paws landed and the sand caught me gently for just long enough to blast off again.
We hiked Choose Your Own Adventure style, making our trail in whatever shape looked most interesting until we’d turned so many times that we lost track of where the car kennel was. We could see the Wagon from the top of the Great Pyramid, but down here in the middle of the swirling dooms, it was hard to get our bearings.
“Where to?” I asked.
Mom raised her arm toward a distant mountain that was bigger than the rest. “I recognize that mountain over there as the one closest to the road.”
We turned and walked the way her arm was pointing. Here and there, bushes grew in the flat sand, marking the beginning of regular, solid ground. With less to keep her mind busy, Mom asked the Witch’s opinion.
“You don’t need her,” I said. “We just walk toward the mountain, remember?”
“The van is just a tiny speck in this enormous desert. If we’re off by just a fraction of a degree, we’ll miss it,” Mom warned. “Even a slight muscular imbalance could be enough to set us off track.”
“Think of all the adventures that you’ll miss when you decide exactly where you want to go ahead of time,” I said. “If you don’t wander, you miss all the things you don’t know to look for.”
“True, but what’s the alternative? If you don’t take the most direct line toward your goal, you could miss it completely and be left wandering forever.”
All this time, I thought that Mom was wandering in search of happiness, or at least a fun time. It never occurred to me that she was aiming for something else. But what? Then again, aiming at the wrong thing is another kind of wandering. Perhaps every wrong turn was still a step toward where we were supposed to be. Maybe the point was to wander in circles, learning lessons on each lap, until we finally learned enough to recognize the path we were meant to follow all along.
“Have we been wandering aimlessly this whole time looking for our path?” I asked. “Did the boogeyvirus lead us astray?”
“There is no path. What do you mean?”
“Life was normal, and then we went out of our way to the dooms in Oregon,” I said. “Nothing was ever the same after that. Maybe that’s when we got off course and we never noticed.”
“It does have a kind of poetic resonance, doesn’t it?” Mom said, missing the point.
“No, I mean that’s when things started being harder than they needed to be, remember? They promised that we would only have to run fifteen and a half miles, but we had to go much, much farther than that. Maybe that’s when we stepped off the right path, and why nothing has been how we expected it to be.”
“I don’t think that’s how it works. There’s rarely only one true path. More often than not, getting blown off course is a sign to aim for a different goal. If you stop chasing the impossible, you might find an easier path to something better.”
“But the very next day you turned your back on the path that was calling you and took the easy way out. Are you sure we haven’t been on the wrong track ever since?”
“I guess we’ll only know when we get there.” She looked at the distant mountain. “But this story will be a dead end if we don’t find the van.”
“What if we didn’t look for it? What if we just let the desert lead us wherever fate wanted us to go instead of following the Witch’s dirty tricks?”
“Do you know how far we’d have to walk to find help? I suppose if we keep walking toward that mountain, we’d hit the road with the ditch in 2 or 3 miles, but I didn’t see any lights on the way out here besides the road work signs, did you? With the main road closed, we can’t count on anyone going past the roadblocks. The nearest man-made thing is the railroad crossing more than 13 miles away. We could try to flag down a train, but who knows if the conductor would be paying attention out here in the middle of nowhere. We’d need to keep walking a few more miles to Route 66, but since it’s closed, we’d probably have to walk another 30 miles back to the freeway before we saw anyone. Best to let the GPS lead the way.”
I couldn’t follow all those numbers. “But we could walk it, right?”
“That’s close to 50 miles,” she counted. “It’s theoretically possible, but not with the food and water I have in the backpack. We’d need to find the van first. There are enough supplies in there for at least a week.”
I looked back toward the distant mountain for guidance. A twinkling against the drab desert caught my eye. It was the Wagon reflecting the sun like a beacon. Even though we were wandering, we weren’t lost after all!
The Wagon always looked sleek and shiny like a space-aged egg from far away. Even though I knew every smell and streak, this sparkling version was a better portrait of how it looked in my heart than the grimy, banged-up thing that made the Law come knocking.
Mom looked at her wrist. “Oh good! We can still be in Las Vegas by lunchtime.”
Want to keep reading? Grab Oscar’s book, No Place Like Alone on Amazon.
