While I’m finishing up the book, I thought I’d share one of the outtakes. We cut this chapter from the book, but it was much too fun not to share with my Friends.
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The Rockies shrank in the back window, while outside the front window, the land relaxed into the smoother blankness of Nevada. We continued our sprint westward through Nevada’s furrowed brow, where the land rolls up and down through unremarkable hill and forgotten valley after another. The hunerds of miles of slow-rolling earth lulled me into a trance of deep thoughts. It wouldn’t be long now before we were back in My Hometown at the End of the World.
I didn’t want our adventure to end, not just because I didn’t want a new routine to stick us in our Stuck House. In the time we’d been away, the human race had gone from a cuddlicious bouquet of human-mutts to a cesspuddle of plague and suspicion. It wasn’t just me, it was like the boogeyvirus had cast a spell that turned the whole world into crotchety cats.
Even the Witch, who enjoyed nothing more than sewing conflict, warned that suspicion was spreading throughout the land, breaking people apart like the two sides of the Grand Canyon. The Witch reported daily accusations from Friends who thought that leaving a stuck house was murder, and other Friends who shouted that everyone who didn’t mind their own beeswax deserved what they got. Mom was afraid to talk to anyone but me, lest they find out where we were and say those nasty things to her.
But we couldn’t hide in the desert forever. We needed to come home to report to my new business posting in a few days. There was nowhere else to turn except toward home.
There should have been endless things for a dog and his Mom to do in all that empty Nevada wilder-ness, but without anything special to aim at, it was hard to know where to start an adventure. If there were trails out there, Mom couldn’t find them on her own, and all the Witch could find was a shrug.
The Wagon’s almost there click woke me from my daydreaming. I climbed into the copilot’s seat to see if we were arriving at a camping spot or just a gas station. It was a gas station — one of the ones that's too small to sell hot dogs but possibly big enough to have cheese.
Across the street was one of those big, balloon-shaped towers like a mapp uses to mark somewhere special. I couldn't see much worth stopping for in the dried grass and empty dust lots that made up the little town. The tower wore a name tag like the towers that mark country towns usually do. A mural of happy people frolicking in rolling hills filled the space behind the letters. While Mom was inside, I studied the bikers and hikers for hints about what message the words might hold.
“Read it to me,” I commanded when Mom came back with my cheese stick.
“It says Welcome to the Outback of Nevada,” she read.
“Oh goody! Steak!”
“Not the restaurant, dummy. People call empty areas of land the outback. Or, that’s what they call it in Australia anyway.” She mounted the driving chair and plugged the Witch back into her charging straw. “It’s solid branding. With a name like that, I bet we’ll find tons of resources on the internet. Maybe we’ll even find an excuse to stay for a few extra days.”
“Do outbacks have trails?”
“Let’s find out.” To the Witch she said, “Show me trails in the Outback of Nevada.”
“Did you mean Outback Steakhouse in Nevada?” The Witch asked, judgily.
“Yes!” I said.
“No!” Mom tried again. “Trail maps: Outback of Nevada.”
“Here are some articles about Australia,” the Witch offered, like she thought Mom might be so lost that she’d driven to Australia without noticing. Even the Witch knew this wasn’t America anymore.
“Show me images of the Outback of Nevada,” Mom tried. Some of our best adventures started with Mom seeing a pretty picture, followed by a quest to find where it was taken.
“This is what Australia looks like, you dope. Do you see any koala bears outside? Is everything on fire? No, because you’re in Nevada.”
“Sheesh. What’s the use of having such a great name if you’re not going to optimize the hell out of it for search engines?” Mom said in her business voice.
“Maybe we should drive to Australia next.” I didn’t know how long it took to drive to Australia, but it couldn’t be too far. The pictures on the Witch’s screen didn’t look all that different from the pictures in the Wagon’s windows. “It looks nice there. Do you think that koalas like to play tag?”
“You can’t get there from here,” Mom said, giving up before she even tried.
The Wagon remounted the freeway and we continued toward the sinking sun. Besides it being the straightest route back to California, there was a second, more important reason why Mom had chosen this route home from Wyoming all those days ago. The real reason we were in the Outback of Nevada was because we both wanted a reason to say Winnemucca.
Try it: Winnemucca, Winnemucca, Winnemucca!
See? It sounds like laughing at a Fozzy Bear joke!
The Wagon found an old abandoned highway a few miles outside of Winnemucca¹ and rolled off the freeway in search of a place to spend the night. This twin pair of dusty lines may have called itself a “highway,” but there wasn’t a scrap of pavement on it. It looked like it hadn’t seen four wheels since it was the most feared section of the Oregon Trail.
A herd of deer grazed on the grass strip between the wheel tracks and the Wagon halted to give them time to scatter. When the road was clear again, Mom looked through all the windows and into all the mirrors. Instead of ordering the Wagon to giddy up, she pushed the all done lever instead.
“This is silly. Ain’t nobody coming down this road tonight. Let’s just camp here in the middle of the road.”
“Hey, Mom. What do you call a blind deer?” I wagged at the herd grazing a short sprint away.
“I’ve heard that one before,” she said with a groan in her voice.
“No-eye-deer!” I brayed. “Winnemucca², Winnemucca³, Winnemucca⁴!”
She didn’t laugh for some reason. She just clicked the leash on my collar before opening the door.
The next morning, Mom tickled the Witch as she drank her poop juice, still searching for somewhere to go. “I guess this trail is fine. Everything looks the same around here, so we might as well go somewhere that’s easy to drive to.”
“What does it look like?” I asked.
Mom looked out the window on the side that didn’t face the freeway. “Like that.”
I looked at the grass and hills for something to say about it. “Oh,” I said.
¹ One Winnemucca! Ah, ah, ah! ² Two Winnemuccas! Ah, ah, ah!
³ Three Winnemuccas! Ah, ah, ah!
⁴ Four Winnemuccas! Ah, ah, ah!
“Something looks fishy about the driving directions.” She nudged the Witch to see what she had to say for herself.
The Witch’s screen looked back at her blankly. After a moment, the Witch said innocently, “You will arrive at seven thirty-two a.m.”
“It looks like the route stops a couple of miles from the trailhead,” Mom interrogated.
“Oh goody!” I said. “Extra hiking.”
“You are on the fastest route,” the Witch promised, without mentioning it was Opposite Day.
“I have a feeling the directions aren’t taking us to the trail at all,” Mom said suspiciously.
“Oh goody! Exploring!” I cheered, forgetting what happens when the Wagon explores.
She may have had an inkling that something wasn’t right, but Mom follows the Witch’s orders as obediently as The Wagon follows Mom’s. The Witch pointed the way, and Mom followed instructions as if hypnotized. She aimed the Wagon back onto the freeway and did as she was told when the Witch commanded her to exit. When the Witch announced that our final turn was imminent, a sign appeared to mark the way.
“Whoopee! We’re going to make it after all!” I panted. “What does the sign say, Mom?”
“It says Buffalo Canyon.”
“Hooray! That’s right, right? What were you so worried about? I knew everything would work out in the end.”
“But we’re supposed to be going to Horse Thief Canyon…” Mom said, almost breaking the Witch’s spell, but not quite.
“After they mounted a thorough search for the horse, and a respectful time had passed for grief, I bet they adopted a buffalo,” I concluded. “Hey, what’s the difference between a buffalo and a bison?”
“I told you in South Dakota, I have no idea.”
“Wrong joke. The right answer is that you can’t wash your hands in a buffalo. Winnemucca⁵, Winnemucca⁶, Winnemucca⁷!” She wasn’t laughing, so I hinted, “Get it? Bison? Bason? Wash your hands? Like, because of the boogeyvirus?”
⁵ Five Winnemuccas! Ah, ah, ah!
⁶ Six Winnemuccas! Ah, ah, ah!
⁷ Seven Winnemuccas! Ah, ah, ah!
Before Mom could laugh, the Witch interrupted, “Turn here!”
“Yeeeeees, Masteeeeerrrrrrr…” Mom didn’t-say. The Wagon pitched two-leggedly off the highway and halted nose-to-latch with a gate so suddenly that I flew from bed to the copilot’s seat.
“Oh no!” I wagged. “Once the horse was abducted they must have tightened security.”
“It’s only closed with twine,” Mom observed. “Why would they have a sign on the highway if it were private? I think the gate is for cows.”
“Are the cows the ones stealing horses?”
“No, dufus. It’s so the cows don’t escape.”
“What do you get if cows jump over a barbed wire fence?” I panted. I could hardly contain the punchline long enough to let Mom guess.
“I don’t think cows can ju—”
“You get udder destruction! Winnemucca⁸, Winnemucca⁹, Winnemucca¹⁰!” I was so pleased with myself that it didn’t matter that Mom wasn’t laughing.
“Enough with the puns already,” she groaned, climbing out of the Wagon. I was pretty sure it wasn’t to get away from me.
⁸ Eight Winnemuccas! Ah, ah, ah!
⁹ Nine Winnemuccas! Ah, ah, ah!
¹⁰ Ten Winnemuccas! Ah, ah, ah!
She untied the gate, and once she’d led the Wagon through, she tied it shut again with a bow. Now we were on a car trail that looked like it hadn’t been used since dinosaurs drove the earth. We bumped and jostled down a road that was no more than two marks in the grass, sometimes tilting to drive on the not-road when the ruts were so deep that they would have given the Wagon a fatal wedgie. Occasionally, there was a thump and a bump when a rock gave the Wagon a kick in the crotch and Mom groaned as if she were the one who’d been kicked. After the longest two-mile drive in history, a giant mud lake stole the wagon trail from in front of us.
“I guess it’s time to continue on foot,” Mom surrendered.
“How far is it to the trail?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Based on the map, I’d say it’s a good 4 or 5 miles that way.” Her eyes pointed past the puddlake, beyond where the tracks faded to distance and a mountain’s outstretched foot blocked the view.
“But there’s a mountain in the way.”
“I’m pretty sure we’re one canyon over from where we wanted to be,” Mom shrugged. “But there’s no way we would make it all the way over there with the road in this condition.”
I was about to ask why we didn’t go back to the other perfectly good road that went in that direction too, but she distracted me by opening the Wagon door.
While Mom prepared the packpack, I scoped out the spot where we’d run out of road. The Wagon straddled a tuft of grass with shoulder-high pile of dirt crowding the wheels on one side and a tree-bush scratching at the doors on the other.
“What if somebody comes to check on the horses?” I asked. “They won’t be able to get around the Wagon.”
“The chances of somebody driving this far into the middle of nowhere, choosing to pull off the highway exactly here, untying the gate, and driving 2 miles up that pile of rocks you’re calling a road on a Tuesday morning in the middle of a worldwide lockdown is basically nil.”
“How do you know? I bet if you went potty right now, somebody would turn up in time to see your butt.” It’s a scientific fact that as long as two living humans are in the same woods, one of them will turn up the moment the other thinks that she’s alone.
“I just know. Anyway, I have no idea how we’re going to turn around. If we hike from here I won’t have to figure it out until later.”
“Are we trapped?”
“I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”
Mom strapped on the packpack, hung the leash around her neck, and we set out to capture some horse thieves.
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