Stuck

Photo by Kyle Keller

When we finally decided to call it quits, we were camped out in the back of my Toyota Sequoia with our legs pulled up to our chests. I had called my dad a few times at that point — Triple A once, the fire department once, a towing company twice — and my phone was dipping in and out of service, keeping my conversations brief. Before I hung up to call the tow guy one last time, he said, “Tthere’s one thing I need to know.” His voice was tight, forcibly upbeat. “Are you in a riverbed? Or even a furrow?”

I motioned for Chelsea to move a bit, crept close to the window, and squinted. It was mid-afternoon. The dirt road we’d been driving on followed the ill-fated path of our tire marks into a cocoon of trees, flanked by rolling desert hills to our left and a railroad to our right — beyond that, raw, flat desert, solemn ranges, even the occasional dune seated comfortably between spans of more gnarled, plant-speckled terrain. The sunshine, approaching the end of its journey through the sky, coated the world in a dreamlike mist. “Yeah, maybe,” I said.

“Really?”

“I think it would qualify as a riverbed.” I eyed Chelsea, who had been staring at the floor of the car. It was (like most of our possessions and most of us) crusted with thick, dried mud, and she was picking at it as I spoke. She nodded. “Yeah, we’re in a riverbed. Or a furrow.”

“Oh, shit,” he said. “Oh, fuck, really?”

My heart started to beat a little faster. “Yes. Why?”

“Are there clouds over you guys? Does it look like it might rain later?”

The sky was bunched up with white-gray clouds, gleaming with sunlight. “Yep.”

“Okay,” my dad said. I could picture him now, leaning over the kitchen counter, his hand on his forehead. “Okay, Kyle, the tow truck is your only option, bud. If it rains tonight, you could be dealing with a flash flood. Do you know what that means?”

A scene shot through my head: Chelsea and I standing on the railroad tracks with whatever possessions we’d managed to save. Pitch black all around us. Water roaring in our ears. Watching it tumble over the Sequoia, burying the headlights, the only light we can see. The death of our vehicle. The feeling of torrential, irreparable, ground-shaking loss.

Unrealistic? Maybe? I wasn’t sure. But I knew one thing. “Shit,” I said. “That would be really bad.”

“Yeah. So, uh, pay whatever the tow place wants. We need to get you guys out of there. You can’t spend the night. This just turned into a potential emergency.”

Chelsea and I were no strangers to ill-advised desert trips. Throughout our senior year of high school, we’d spent the occasional Journalism class looking through Google Maps for odd, out-of-the-way places in the California deserts — a strange habit, sure, but imagining ourselves going to such outlandish, out-of-the-way places was rather addictive. Over time, we’d gone on two successful voyages, one overnight, one not. Our confidence was high going into the first few months of 2020, and when physical school ceased to exist due to the coronavirus, we saw our chance to drive a route I’d been daydreaming about for months: a nameless dirt road next to a railroad track that cut right along the Mojave BLM protected zone. It passed through several nonexistent town names — Glasgow, Kerens, empty dots on a map — and ended at Kelso, the site of a small historical ranger station and the nearest establishment to the Kelso Dunes. We knew nothing about it other than that it probably existed.

Going into an outdoors situation blind is submitting to surprises. They could be wonderful, the kind of thing you talk about for years down the line, or they could be incredibly awful. Worst-worst-case scenario? Well, we die, of course, but that was unlikely. Worst-case/, slightly-more-plausible scenario? For whatever reason, the car stops working and strands us out there, and we’re either forced to abandon it or pay a small fortune to get it out.

But we were blind to the risks. Our second trip, an overnighter along a more established (though no less obscure) route called Cadiz Road, was glorious. We tumbled down some of the most isolated dunes in California, night-hiked a small, rocky peak, slept in an abandoned storage car, picked through a field of dusty, broken-down vehicles and mining equipment, and reveled in the absolute stillness, the endless quiet, of the desert. It put us in a desert craze: we had to get out there, to be the roving adventurers we fancied ourselves to be, to live the kind of life that has a bottomless supply of stories.

Well, we got our story. Instead of one of adventure, it was one of unpreparation and adolescent stupidity. There’s no better way, my dad would tell us later, to get yourself into a bad situation than to plan your entire trip on Google Maps. He said he wished he’d known more about what we were doing — but could he really have stopped us? This was a lesson we had to learn the hard way. We had to understand the stakes, the cost of screwing up, and that’s something nature has to show you herself.

Two or three hours into our bumpy drive, the Sequoia got stuck in a patch of mud that, for all intents and purposes, looked like solid ground. This was thick, deep, rich mud, too, the kind that’s the most fun to play around in, but we didn’t have the luxury of enjoying it. A few hours of mud-scooping, mat-placing, and half-hearted rounds of “I’ve Been Working On the Railroad” later, we were seated on the train tracks coated in mud and faced with a monumentally uncomfortable situation. Luckily (and it would sink in later just how blind and monumental this luck was), I had cell service, so I bounced around potential sources of help for a little while before landing on A-1 Towing, a company in the nearest town of Baker that offered to yank us out at the delightful price of two hundred dollars per hour. Keep in mind, they said, if it took them five hours to find us, we’d pay a thousand bucks. Them’s the breaks.

It didn’t go that way. We were pulled out within three hours for a total of six hundred dollars. As I followed the tow truck back to the I-15 to pay, I felt a massive weight lifting off my chest. Then my card declined — once, twice, three times. We were instructed by Dennis (the tow guy we were getting to know better than either of us really wanted) to follow them back to Baker and, in the meantime, sort out the money business. Otherwise, our car would be impounded for an additional hefty sum.

What followed was the most panicked span of fifteen minutes I’d ever experienced. My dad, thinking the situation was over, had put away his phone and was deaf to my frantic calls. Chelsea’s parents were scrambling for a solution. Maybe call the Baker police? But no, they were within their rights to take our car; they’d performed a service, and we were unable to pay them for it. They promised Chelsea they’d be in contact soon and hung up. We pulled into A-1 Trucking forcing ourselves to take deep breaths. “It’s over,” I pronounced. “We’re fucked.”

We were less fucked than I thought. They gave us thirty more minutes to sort things out, and I decided to call my brother, which, shockingly, went through — when I told him of my predicament, he went “HA!” and said he was at In-n-Out but would try to get my dad’s attention — and, a few minutes later, received a call from my dad. He said, “give me fifteen minutes.” We relayed it to the (rightfully) impatient tow guys and stood around to wait. Baker was now dark, but still well-lit by the colorful, Vegas-style buildings in its downtown area — a stark, human contrast to the rest of the flat, void-like world of the Mojave. Chelsea and I, bundled up against the piercing wind, hugged and told each other we’d get through this. Everything would be okay. My dad would sort it out. “Come on, Will,” Chelsea said. We repeated it like a mantra. “Come on, Will. Come on, Will. Come on, Will.”

Will called. “Try it now,” he said. It went through. Though he’d threatened to raise the price for the amount of time we’d taken from him, Dennis only charged us the six hundred, which at this point seemed cheap. I tipped him sixty dollars. Chelsea passed him a twenty dollar bill, which he pocketed.

“Next time, you won’t get yourselves into this mess, eh?” he said.

“Oh, you better believe it,” I answered.

We piled into the Sequoia, giggled like maniacs, and pulled into a gas station just a few minutes away. The shame of the entire situation would have plenty of time to sink in on the drive home — for now, we were drinking in freedom from the dark, menacing impound lot and a long night waiting for our parents to pick us up from a 24-hour Denny’s. We took a couple pictures. Chelsea scratched a smiley face into the dried mud coating the driver’s side window. Then we were off.

On the drive home, the rain came roaring down. Approaching Barstow, we were locked in a hybrid rainstorm-dust storm so thick that we couldn’t see thirty feet ahead of us. But I could feel every trace of the mud washing off. It was almost as if the rain was healing our wounds, patching our ripped pride, and preparing us for the next adventure.