Tarantulas walk across the road just outside the border of Texas. At first, I can’t believe this; I see one shadowed above the hot asphalt skittering straight across and fast. “Did you see that spider?” I ask the boys, who are dubious. After all, we used to tell them that retreads littering the road-shoulders were shed skins of giant ants. It made for long minutes of silence through deserts as they scanned the horizon for huge, robot-like, black insects. Eventually they figured out we were making it up.
“No. Really. Look, there’s another one,” and a second creature scuttles by. We are driving through southern New Mexico and the sky appears much closer to the ground than almost anywhere. Cloud-shadows blot the road and we count “1, 2, 3” to measure their width in the seconds it takes to pass under them. We see White Sands stretching like foam, pistachio groves, and stands selling wind-bells, chili, tin birds.
A red cross made of old telephone poles rises up beside a white-planked shed. It is all the color we see for miles, save the pale green sage-brush, and brown kick-dust arroyos. Hours pass before we begin the slow wind up RatonPass. It is raining ever so slightly. We should have taken off our sunglasses miles ago; the brightness is gone, replaced with grey and hovering clouds.
We’ve traveled this road countless times. My husband is driving. The boys suck the salt from sunflower seeds. The radio plays an old Van Halen song and the rain begins to fall harder.
What happens next, happens fast. Before I can hand back more seeds, before the song has ended, before we have a moment to consider, we are in the middle of a torrential thunderstorm.
I adjust my seat straight up, the boys fall abruptly silent, my husband turns the wipers up so high they fast-knock like gunfire. It takes less than moments for the water to rise almost level with the road; I eye it coming closer as we drive, then I can’ t see at all.
“We need to stop,” I say flatly, definitively. “We need to keep going,” he says, just as definitively.
Who knows the mechanisms of the mind when it is moving so quickly, thrust forward by adrenaline and fear? You do what you can, process what facts you have or make-up, plunge in, decide: I was thinking, “We can’t see the road. This is crazy. We have to stop.” He says he was thinking, “Rocks are coming down, the water is going to flood the road, someone will hit us, we have to keep going.”
The inside of the car has become a cave – the hysterical snap of the wipers and the banging on the roof the only connection to outside.
We argue, voices rising, words edged with the fake tone adults use when trying not to upset children – as if they couldn’t see the windshield buzzed over like a hose blasting water from inches away.
And then it is over. We come out the other side and light slices through the glass. We try to breathe but tension still sticks.
“I’m calling the Car Guys,” I said, “Click and Clack. Tom and Ray”. My husband knows this public radio show where the hosts answer questions about cars and considers smiling. “And you’re going to tell them what?
“I’m going to ask them if we should have pulled over.”
This starts it again. “Did you see the rocks, the water? We had to get out of there,” he says.
“I saw it for a minute, and then no one could see anything,” I say.
“I couldn’t see where to stop,” he says. “You couldn’t’ see where to go,” I say.
And on and on. Perhaps the thunderstorm driving was like any sudden crisis. You have a split second to decide what to do, and then you take a chance, all the while praying or calling from a place beyond your conscious control, because every synapse you have is focused and firing on the movement at hand, on saving yourself.
And perhaps everyone wades through a crisis differently; perhaps there is no wrong way. Perhaps the way that gets you through is all that matters.
