Found on a Lost Highway

We get lost here. There is no way to avoid it.  Roads shoot this way and that -
to the distant Pueblo Mountains,

View of Pueblo Mountains from a ridge above Fields

to Steens,

Blue-eyed Mustangs and foal on South Steens Loop Road

to Diamond Craters,

Malheur Maar in Diamond Craters

???? Diamond Crater Beetle

to Catlow Valley, to Trout Mountains...Highways twist and wind every which way. Even though the roads are numbered on a map and head some compass direction and even though there are official signposts - FRENCHGLEN is 18 miles, BURNS is 46 miles (because a sensible person needs a destination for the Google lady, a distance for the maps they are following, a travel time and an ETA and, besides, this is no place for getting lost). But roads break their promises to us all the time and do not follow the straight and narrow as they should. We are deceived time and again. They lead us down crooked paths the first chance they get.  One day, a splendid Golden Eagle spreads its wings in the morning sun and glides by the windshield to land on a telephone pole just down a dirt lane we’ve never seen.  Alright, just ONE picture and then we’ll have to go. You turn onto a crunching red road. The Google lady chirps unhappily at you and tries to call you back. But it’s already too late.

Too late because the Golden Eagle has led us to a small herd of pronghorn, who take us further along another road with sparkling gravel mounds which, by some amazing grace, turn out to be unburied treasure chests of jasper and agates and fire opals. We pick through them and collect handfuls.

A snake wriggles off in the brush, and we come back to the moment …what is that? A shepherd’s deserted cabin stares at us with busted window eyes. It’s just down a barely visible road dotted with treacherous quicksand water ponds.  No map can help us now. The Google lady has given up and spins tragically in her software architecture as if to say, “You FOOLS! I’m done with you!”

Tick tock, the dashboard clock reports the hours and minutes as they slide by. But the effortlessness of going nowhere takes hold. We thought once, a long morning ago, that we would go toward cold ice cream shakes and juicy burgers in Fields. The Google lady was confident and trusting then. We had a time and a place (it closes at 3:00 or 12:00 or some time, when was it?). But now, there will be no pity or negotiation and, therefore, no sustenance for outlaws like us, riding through the sagebrush on no road at all into the Alvord Flats – where, no kidding, someone once set a land speed record, going nowhere as quickly as they could.

Eric tries to count paces across the Alvord Desert 

But maybe we could just make it. Lynn arm wrestles the steering wheel and leaps from one bump to another. Our dog, Lexi, stuck in the wayback, levitates in time. We see the blacktop, we’re almost there…. And then, a wild Mustang peeks out from a grove of cottonwoods with a shake of his mane.

There is another road that skirts the open range and we could stop, just for a quick picture. But then another Mustang steps out into view and she is nursing a foal. We have to wait for her to turn to us just so, which takes time and costs us distance and a last chance at food. Ah well.

No point to Fields now. We abort the mission that never really was, turn around and rattle back to the blacktop while the sun drops lower and lower. We haven’t seen a single car. We pause on the roadside for a communal pee. Eric sees a Starbucks cup pinned to the barbed wire. Some pilgrim on a journey from there to there had no time to stop and talk to Twyla at the Frenchglen Hotel over a proper cup of joe. We take the wayward cup on board. We have been on similar land speed journeys and will be again. No moral superiority here, just gratitude. Lost and found.

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