Quar-unseen

Beyond Las Vegas, most of the West is wild and untamed, even in modern times. It’s a land so fierce that even the plants have claws. The sky is full of sun and stars, and isn’t concerned with serving witches. Wild one-eyed dogs with peg-legged limps roam the roads like pirates searching for buried treasure in the food wrappers and bottled messages thrown from wagon windows. Car-trails run naked without pavement to hide their bumps and potholes. Even the road signs have bite marks like bullet holes. 

Mom is at her stillest when traveling. Her thought bubble shows nothing but static and a minute grows to fill a lifetime while a whole lifetime can fit into a minute. Now that we were beyond the land of traffic and rules, Mom settled into a road trance. Sometimes I thought she could drive round and round the world like that for the rest of her life, only stopping at a gas station a few times a day. 

We all get treats at the gas station: Mom gets bubbly water and bubblegum, I get cheese sticks or hot dogs, and the Wagon gets to fill up. The Wagon lived on an all-juice diet, feeding through a straw while Mom was inside the potty-and-cheese-stick shop. In northern Arizona, I sat in the driving chair supervising the Wagon’s snack time and spying on the people at the other juice boxes while Mom was inside. The shelter over the juice boxes muted the banging of rain on the roof, so I could hear their conversations through the closed windows.

“We’re just picking up some essentials before we go into quarantine for a few days,” the one from the car full of people puppies said. 

“They’re already out of canned soup and toilet paper in there,” the one with the pickup truck said. If Mom were one of those hikers who mark her territory with a tacky white flag, we’d really be in trouble. Mom hates to run out of things, so it was a good thing I’d taught her how to find toilet paper in nature.

“… We were only supposed to come for the weekend, but my sister’s refusing to come back to Boulder with me until Colorado is as safe as Utah,” a woman with a bike rack on the back of her car told a woman whose car was covered in bumper stickers.

As my ears roamed juice boxes, my eyes stayed stuck to the door where Mom had disappeared. Every time the door opened, instead of Mom, a bandit or a veterinarian came out carrying big bags of loot. I’d learned from movies how masked bandits roam the desert with bandanas over their faces, but I’d never heard of bands of veterinarians sticking up a train. Veterinarians give me the willies. You can’t trust anyone who covers their smile before patting you. Sure, they seem nice… until they take you into the back room where Mom can’t protect you. Whose temperature did all these veterinarians come to this gas station to measure? And was Mom okay in there without me?

Mom finally appeared in the door with a spooked look on her naked face. 

“Oh, thank dogness you’re safe!” I wagged. “I thought the place was being held up by a band of swashbuckling veterinarians with a bad case of diarrhea. I was afraid they were holding you hostage for a toilet paper ransom. By the way, what does quar-unseen mean?” 

“Where did you hear that?”

“The people in the next car were talking about it while you were inside. They said they needed lots of toilet paper because they were going into quar-unseen. Is that when you’re alone in the bathroom and no one can hear you call that the roll is empty?”

“Quarantine is when you have to stay away from people because your presence could kill someone,” Mom explained like there was no need to be so dramatic. “These people are talking about locking themselves inside their houses starting tomorrow. They don’t even know when they’ll come out again.”

“And they’ll be spending all that time in the bathroom? Is that why toilet paper will save their lives?”

“Nah, people just don’t know how to deal with scarcity. When they think about what they can’t live without, their first thought is the experience that makes them feel deprived most often. And do you know what the most lonely, isolated feeling in the world is for an American?” 

I imagined my own worst feeling. “Getting snacky when the treats are on a high shelf and you can’t reach?” Too late, I remembered that unlike dogs, humans can climb on counters to reach the highest shelves. “No, wait. Just kidding. That’s not my guess.” I thought through my years of Mom observations trying to figure out the one thing she couldn’t live without. It wasn’t thirst, because humans can conjure water inside their stuck houses. “Their witches!” I guessed. “Final answer.”

“Good guess, but the only situation where you feel more desperate and alone than when there’s no cell service is when you’re in a public bathroom and you realize too late that your stall is out of toilet paper. Nothing makes you feel more unclean and alone.”

“Did you notice the disguises?” I asked. “They must be doing it so no one can identify them when they kill someone with their very presence. Don’t they realize that a veterinarian running loose through the desert is bound to raise suspicion. If you need to disguise your face, you should do it with a bandana.”

“Yeah. That was weird, wasn’t it? People wear masks in the City all the time, but I’ve never seen it out here in Navajo country.” Mom thought for a second. Outside the windows, the town petered out into clusters of small houses. “Do you know why there aren’t more Native Americans around?” 

I knew the answer to this one. “Because they were eaten by dinosaurs and went exstinked!”

“What a horrible thing to say! Of course not. The Europeans brought deadly germs on their boats when they came to America. Their diseases spread over the continent faster than the Europeans did. By the time the colonists caught up, 90% of the native population was already gone. Can you imagine what that must have been like?” 

“Yeah, but what are the chances that a deadly disease—the likes of which no one has ever seen before—will come across the ocean to kill Jillians of Americans again?” 

“If people are starting to quarantine, we probably shouldn’t draw attention to the fact that we’re traveling. It couldn’t hurt to keep a low profile and be a little more sensitive to the communities that we visit.”

“Turn here,” the Witch interrupted. The Wagon did as it was told. “In three miles you will arrive at your destination,” the Witch added without noticing that the Wagon was already stopped. 

In front of the Wagon’s nose, a cattle catcher was halfway through its transformation into a swimming pool. Water more than a cow’s-ankle deep filled hole underneath, and it wouldn’t be long before the bars would be underwater, too. 

“Well this changes things,” Mom said.

“Do cows know how to swim?” I asked hopefully. A bovine lifeguard-dog who spent his days barking at cows would be an excellent second career with my cattle dog heritage.

“The rain is turning these dirt roads into mud. This is a van, not a submarine,” Mom said. “If the mud doesn’t get us, the temperatures will drop overnight and turn the rain into snow and ice. I don’t want to get stuck out there.” 

“Where will we go if we can’t leave the road?” I asked.

“I guess we’ll have to go to a campground. A shower would be nice…”

“Going to a campground will blow our cover!” I yipped. “Everyone will know we’re travelers. What if they think you’re possessed with boogeyvirus?”

“Oh dog doo. I hadn’t thought of that. I don’t know.”

“Whaddaya mean you don’t know?” I asked, even more nervously than before. Knowing things is what Mom does. She knows how to drive the Wagon and how to convince the Witch to take us places none of us have ever been before. She knows how to tell if a store is open or closed before we get there. She knows how to talk to the Law so they don’t send us to the pound. She knows how to open the Food Fortress, and how to use money to fill it with delicious snacks.

“I’ve seen and heard so many impossible things over the last few days that I don’t know what to expect anymore. It’s like everyone started playing by a different set of rules overnight, and no 2 people are playing the same game anymore.”

The Wagon tiptoed into a campground across the street from a supermarket and the type of restaurant that serves bacon all day. Usually, we would need a reservation at a fancy downtown campground with a shower that didn’t run on coins, but today the only car-houses in the campground were the kind that dream of being stuck houses someday.

Mom dismounted the Wagon and hunched to hide from the rain. A chihuahua and two ladies sat on a porch. The ladies sucked on their smoke sticks and watched Mom skulk toward them. Only the chihuahua gave any hint of what he thought of her.

“Are you open?” Mom shouted over the rain. 

“WHO GOES THERE?” overreacted the chihuahua.

“Sure we’re open,” the bigger lady said, like it was a silly question. “We just haven’t had many people passing through because of this storm.” 

“I thought it was because of the coronavirus,” Mom said. “I came from San Francisco through Nevada and Arizona, and it seems like everybody’s closing down over this thing.” 

“You’re in You-tah!” the smaller one declared. I wasn’t sure what she meant, but by the way she stomped her foot, punched the air next to her hip, and straightened her spine, I guessed it had something to do with being tough and darned proud of it.

“Are there any tent spots available?” Mom asked.

The ladies waved their arms at the rain to show which puddle was our camping spot while the chihuahua warned us not to try any funnybusiness. 

After exchanging cards and clipboards for a few minutes, Mom came back to the Wagon and guided it into our puddle. When she returned from the shower a year or two later, her hair was as wet as Utah and smelled of anti-frizz and coconuts. We spent the rest of the evening quarunseening in the Wagon and waiting for Utah and Mom’s hair to dry. By the morning, both Mom’s hair and the ground were still wet and stiff with cold.

“Luckily we’re only doing a small hike today,” Mom said. “There’s supposed to be a break in the weather later this morning. Wanna risk it?” It may have sounded like a question, but suggestions are just decisions in disguise when you know how to drive. 

The rain beat on the roof as the wind rocked the Wagon like Noah’s Ark. 

“How about we take a nap day?” I suggested back, letting the racket on the roof back me up. 

“The trail is at higher elevation. There’ll be snow…” Mom tempted. 

“Yippee skippee! You promise?!” I wagged, throwing off the blanket and jumping into the copilot’s chair.

Snow is the word for the sparkly bits that flake off of clouds and turn everything underneath fluffy with white dirt. White dirt has magical properties that regular dirt doesn’t have. It smells like freezer burn and zambonis. It preserves a perfect buttprint when you roll in it. It cools you down on hot mountain hikes. It’s a great kisser. You’d have to be a real fuddyduddy to dislike white dirt. Mom can’t stand the stuff.

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