Whiter shade of trail

...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.

The village looked like a ghost town as the Wagon rolled through empty streets. The buildings disappeared at the edge of town as suddenly as if Mom had changed the channel on the front window. I watched the rain trying to turn to snow as the slush under our wheels got chunkier and grew a white crust. Usually, Mom’s eyeballs stay stuck to the road when the weather threatens to yank it out from under her, but this time her eyeballs slipped around the desert. 

“I think we’ve been here before,” she said. “Remember that time we wound up on the wrong side of the Grand Canyon?”

That was during our first expedition in a borrowed car-house, before we met the Wagon. We were so new to traveling that we didn’t know about AllTrails or saving mapps for when the Witch wasn’t talking to us. Back then, Mom didn’t want planning to ruin the surprise of what the trail had in store, so we drifted through the desert, hoping adventure would find us. With so much emptiness and no plan, most of what we’d seen of the West in those early days were its roads. We hadn’t yet learned that the best place to hunt the wilder-ness is away from pavement, signs, and other things to mark the way. 

“You thought the Wagon would die if its paws touched anything but pavement, remember?” I said.

“Back then my biggest fear was not having cell service,” Mom said like she was remembering a cute puppy. “Everything I knew about the wilderness came from Hollywood. I thought if I left civilization I would immediately have four flat tires, get mauled by a bear, have to crawl through frozen rivers, and sleep in rotten logs like in The Revenant. It took a lot of experience to figure out what was fiction and what was reality.”

It was too hot to hike the last time we were here, so I’d lain in the shade under a tree and waited for Mom to come to her senses. I tried to find the pygmy tree whose shade I’d panted under that day, but today the trees were disguised under heavy cloaks of white dirt and there was no shade anywhere in the gloomy morning. Now that we weren’t searching for significance by the side of the road, the place looked like any other spot between here and there. It’s funny how a place changes every time you see it, as if the place isn’t as important as the self you bring to it. I still wanted to flop down under the trees, but this time to wallow in the white dirt and make a snow angel.

“Just think; we were surrounded by trails that day and had no idea,” Mom said. 

“Travel takes practice, doesn’t it? Remember how you thought that a trail too technical for running was a waste?” I remembered something even funnier. “Remember how you thought you needed to take a shower every day?”

“Cleanliness is a lot more important when you’ve lived your whole life with pavement between you and the earth,” Mom said. “With no real danger indoors, you need to find something to fill the time, and some people find meaning by cleaning. Showers every day, washing the dishes after dinner, changing the sheets every week, folding your laundry… that’s the sort of nonsense that gives life meaning in civilization.” 

“There are people who change their sheets every week? Do they throw up in them that often?” I asked. Maybe Mom was testing if I knew fiction from reality. She looked like she meant it, but it was just too incredible. “Nah, that’s fake news,” I decided. “Whoever told you that must have been in the pocket of Big Soap.” 

The Witch commanded the Wagon to turn into a car kennel. It obeyed, aiming its nose between where the parking lines might be. The ground was hidden under white dirt, and the rest of the world was swallowed by a smudge like an overexposed photo. Moving through it, I began to make out the difference between the grey sky, the grey snow falling from it, and the white ground it was falling on.

“It’s mountains of white dirt!” I squealed, executing an expert somersault-hole-digging combination. Then I discovered something even more exciting. “And there’s sand under here!” 

“They’re coral-pink sand dunes,” Mom corrected me. 

Being colorblind means you never know if your grey is the same as someone else’s gray, or if your white is someone else’s coral pink. “Whatever you say, Mom,” I rolled my eyes and then I rolled my body in the white—I mean “pink”—dirt again. 

I sprinted in loops, leaving pawprints, buttprints, and backprints all over the dooms. The whiteness blended ground into sky and gradually filled in my pawprints as if it meant to offer a fresh page for each dog to make his own mark on the world. I smelled no sign of anyone else, but it was hard to know that somedog wasn’t doing his own gymnastics routine just out of sight over the next doom. Behind me, even Mom was doing her best to disappear.

“This sucks,” she sniveled. “I was really looking forward to the contrast of the sand against the sky in photos. There’s no contrast here, just grey.”

“No, Mom! This is awesome!” I corrected her. “It’s better than awesome. It’s… There’s no word for how awesome it is in your language.” So I barked the word in my language and did a cartwheel followed by a sprint to show her what it meant. 

When I was done, I slowed down to walk with her. “Weather is part of Nature, you know.” 

“I know, but rain and snow aren’t supposed to happen in the desert,” the Weather Jinx accused. “That’s what makes it a desert.” 

“You’re not exactly a ray of sunshine either,” I told her. “Just like how a trail reflects your mood depending on the eyes you brought that day, Nature brings her own moods. You wouldn’t trust weather that’s always pleasant and mild because you’d be a little suspicious of what it’s hiding.”

“Of course I appreciate weather that’s constantly pleasant and mild,” Mom said. “That’s why we live in San Francisco.”

“But if you only go out on nice days, you’ll miss the exciting episodes that make Nature a kickass show season after season.” Just like how the best jokes are the ones with unexpected punchlines, our most fun adventures were the unpredictable ones when Nature was feeling punchy. But Mom has no sense of humor when it comes to planning. If she could, Mom would put Nature on do not disturb mode so the weather would never interrupt. “Isn’t it just a little fun when the wind is so strong that it sends you chasing your hat down the trail?” I coached. “If all our stories were predictable, no one would want to hear them, not even us.”

“I suppose. Our best memories have come from the days that didn’t go to plan.” Mom looked around the dooms to make sure that no one had heard her admit she was wrong.

“Nature doesn’t show this side of herself to fair-weather friends, you know,” I reminded her. “You’ve got to accept the gloomy days and a few rainstorms to show you love her just the way she is. If you don’t judge her temperature swings or try to change her thunderstorms, she’ll open up and let you see things that she doesn’t show to just anyone.”

“I’m here, aren’t I?” With her paws in her pockets, her shoulders in her ears, and her eyes on the ground, Mom looked very much like someone trying not to be there. 

“Wishing you lived in a world without weather is a waste of a wish,” I said. “Making Friends with Nature means accepting her wicked sense of humor and laughing at yourself when she shows that she doesn’t give a cat’s sass about your plans. That’s how you make Friends. If you try to learn how to enjoy every day as it is, maybe Nature will stop messing with you.” 

Ahead, the Wagon’s white flanks emerged against the white background. “I think we’ve proven ourselves for today,” Mom said. “The sun had better come out tomorrow.”

Now that we’d earned Nature’s trust, she cleared the skies over Utah to let us in. The sun may have been shining and the white dirt gone from the mashed-potato-shaped rocks, yet Mom was still waiting for the other poo to drop. Some families sing or play license plate bingo on long drives, but my family plays a different game. Mom thinks of something that could go wrong, and I have to think of a reason why it’s going to be okay. Mom’s a really tough competitor because she practices her worrying constantly. If she doesn’t have anything obvious to worry about, she invents an imaginary worry to practice on. 

She’d been honing her worries about our next trail since before our trip began. Every time she convinced herself to stop worrying and go for it, she thought of something new to worry about and the disaster movie in her thought bubble would start again from the beginning. 

As we got closer to a little town called Escalante, Mom invited me to play the worry game with her. She made the first move. “Now that I think about it, 60 miles is a really long way on a dirt road. What if we get stuck?”

“If the Wagon is injured and no nice whales come along to help, we can always walk out. It would be a fun adventure.” 

“You can’t walk that far,” Mom doubted. 

“We’ll take our time. I bet that with enough naps and snacks we could walk around the whole world.”

“I can’t carry enough water to get you that far.”

“In one thousand feet, turn onto that sketchy dirt road over there and drive on it for sixty miles,” the Witch said.

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