Road Trip Captain: Scarcity in the Desert

The American Southwest is a tapestry of deserts that covers hundreds of thousands of square miles.  The Chihuahuan Desert stretches north from Mexico and mingles with the Sonoran, which in turn blends into the Mojave Desert and the even larger Great Basin area.  Striking for their sparsity, these regions can be alternately beautiful and melancholy, inspiring and ominous.

Edward Abbey wrote fondly of the desert's poetic equilibrium¹. Such balance has been lacking of late for the UW football team and its fate in the state of Arizona.  You'd have to go back to 2006 to find the last road win for the Huskies over one of the two Arizona schools, and since then, the contests have not only been losses, but most of them lopsided at that.

Nonetheless - I elected to plan a trip to Tucson for this year's UW-Arizona game, and to do so with my good friend Brian - a veteran of these posts and one of the only people I know deranged enough to agree to a 1,700 mile road trip over the course of three and a half days.  The rendezvous point would be Salt Lake City, where a base-class Fiat 500 awaited pickup.

Our route started off heading for the southwest part of Utah, painstakingly close to Zion National Park.  The return trip would run the opposite way, up through Moab near the eastern border.  Sticking with I-15 would have been faster, but would not have afforded us the scenery and adventures² of the desert.

Game day in Tucson welcomed us with shorts-and-t-shirt weather.  The first half featured some promising resolve by the Huskies, who held a 10-point lead early.  Still, some sloppy turnovers and a missed field goal left a lingering feeling that this game, like so many before it, was not destined to end well for the visitors.

Late in the fourth quarter, UW freshman cornerback Sydney Jones intercepted a pass in the end zone and the Huskies regained possession, leading by 2 points.  Two first downs later, with 90 seconds left in the game, it appeared that Washington would upset the #14 Wildcats and make the drive back to Salt Lake that much more cheery.  But fate intervened.  A Husky tailback fumbled the ball, Arizona recovered, and moved the ball downfield just enough to kick a long, game-winning field goal as time expired.  This was about as deflating a loss as any fan could endure.  Brian and I left the stadium, stunned and dejected, and vowed to fill the voids in our being with the first In 'N' Out Burger we could find.

We awoke on Sunday in Chinle, AZ - Navajo country near the state's eastern border.  A long day separated us from Salt Lake City.  Upon cracking our hotel door we discovered a new development: a heavy frost / light snow clung like a lattice to the landscape, a tableau of pinyons and juniper and sandstone.

This seemed to us like a good time to test the Fiat's land speed capabilities³.  And even at full speed, a day spent traversing the desert from one end to the other did wonders to dull the pain of the football game's outcome.

¹With passages like (from Desert Solitaire), "There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount, a perfect ratio of water to rock, water to sand, insuring that wide free open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation.  There is no lack of water here unless you try to establish a city where no city should be."

²What sort of adventures?  Well, we almost hit a wild boar on the road in the middle of the night on Saturday, somewhere near the Petrified Forest.  This was the most dangerous moment of the trip, eclipsing a point of weakness when, due to lack of all other options within 50 miles, we nearly had to resort to eating lunch at Flinstones Bedrock City in Valle, AZ.

Top taste-of-the-town honors, meanwhile, go to Bobby Q in Phoenix, with The Blu Pig in Moab also making a very respectable showing.  And "Senoran"-style street dogs in Tucson also now hold a special place in my heart.

³Initial tests on Thursday confirmed a very lackluster 0-60 time of ~14.5 seconds.  Sunday was our best opportunity to max the car out and we found several long straightaways, with gentle downhill slopes and not another vehicle in sight.  All we could do, though, was coax the Fiat to 99 MPH...and with considerable frustrated shouting and grunting.  THIS is what those girls in the commercials were so excited about?