Driving in the Middle of Nowhere, New Years Eve
On the last day of 2023, we drive through 123 miles of absolutely nothing between Buckeye and Blythe, a nameless stretch of desert on the western side of Arizona, two desolate hours out of 8,760 hours that year.
There’s nothing here on either side of Interstate 10 but scrub and sand, and the occasional, orphaned saguaro, awaiting that spectacular sunset in the hours after we’re gone. You might think you are clear of the Phoenix sprawl, but you are not. The city extends a grubby hand west with a ghostly 339th Avenue highway exit.
Desert meaning “waterless, treeless region” comes from Middle English, but that doesn’t really capture a vast wilderness like this, which echoes a biblical wilderness of mad, raving prophets and Christ’s temptation by Satan in the Judaean Desert, as told in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke.
Desert like this reminds me of the word desolation. I like the Spanish word for desert, desierto, literally “the thing abandoned,” or the Latin root deserere, “to forsake.”
There’s a purple ridge over there that no one has ever stood upon, an arroyo seco that’s never known rain, such crowded isolation.
An exit sign for the town of Tonopah triggers a musical reference to the Little Feat song about willin’ truckers. Take that I-10 exit for Mecca (not even on the map), pilgrims, and you will certainly vanish.
We pass Old Camp Wash and Sore Finger Road, speculating on the naming of remote places, and the origin stories of prospectors and pioneers, settling there at Old Camp for a week or less, remembering it later on a deathbed as two years. And what was it that made your finger so sore, that we recognize it a century or more later?
Out here, the four-and-a-half-billion-year-old Ancient Earth speaks a subtle language in open spaces, and the winter wind might be the only thing to answer your cry for help, your desolate utterance.
One year dissolves into another, but there’s no one counting and nobody to witness it.
Black and white image by author. This essay will appear in his third essay collection, “Hear Me Out,” later this year.
