North of 'Pretty Good', Ep. 31

Episode 31: Celebrating AZ

Julie drops us in on a round-the-clock truck stop haven, then Lisa takes us to Canyon de Chelly and other amazing sites on faraway Navajo land.

Mug: Canyon de Chelly National Monument

Marsh Pass, Journal of Sedona Schnebly

by Lisa Schnebly Heidinger

At Marsh Pass he hit a very wet spot (which he realized in hindsight must have been dark ice, where it’s thawed and refrozen to slickness but doesn’t show) and the car began to slide slowly sideways. Which was a terrible feeling since the road there is next to a sheer drop hundreds of feet down. Tad said he didn’t even know what he did except essentially absolutely nothing – no jerky or panicked or extreme reaction – just the tenderest lightest application of the brake. And the car stopped, as far as he could tell, with the front wheel on Lucille’s side already an inch or two over the precipice

       I know the quiet, sort of conversational tone he must have used to Lucille when he told her they were all going to move so very slowly out his and Larry’s doors onto the road.. Tad knows anything can happen when you travel in empty country, so he’s well prepared. Pretty soon he had a fire going in the large flat aluminum pan that’s always in the trunk of his car. He also keeps a tarp he was able to stretch from a big rock to an expandable set of poles he drove into the dirt over that fire, keeping his family warm and dry. Tad then let himself look down the edge of the trunk and saw that indeed the car was placed pretty much as he had surmised.

       He walked out into the road, waiting and listening in the rain. He thought it wasn’t more than an half an hour until a wagon pulled by a team came upon). The driver was Navajo, and Tad had picked up enough words to be able to explain their predicament in the man’s tongue. So for a negotiated price, the man unhitched his wagon, used Tad’s ropes (again, always waiting in the trunk) knotted to the front bumper of that new car, and those good horses pulled it slowly back into the center of the road. Tad said the Navajo didn’t waste any facial expression, but did give him a look like, “You know how lucky you were here,” and Tad nodded and thanked him again.

       They got home safely.

       That’s kept coming back to me: how swiftly something changes from mundane to dangerous, more out here than back east, I guess. There are still more wild places here. And fewer people. And extreme weather, and rough roads. How long would it have been before someone would have seen the wreckage glinting down below once the sun was back out?  I have to write it down to get it out of my head.

Copyright 2017 Lisa Schnebly Heidinger, All rights reserved

Highway

by Julie Morrison

Whips of motion whoosh past,

winds of their own making.

The passing world and me, white noise

to one another.

I want to whine that it won’t listen,

won’t slow down,

won’t attend, will only rush,

racing, roaring through, ever through,

pausing only to rumble, shift,

throttle, thrum, then resume.

I am nowhere if not part of its traffic.

A rest stop doesn’t rate— stillness

is the styrofoam cup of ambition—

I must restart, rejoin, regain,

lest I hear it say—

in the rare bare asphalt moment—

slow down,

to which I can only respond:

this is no place to brake.

Copyright 2025 Julie Morrison, All rights reserved