I woke up in a tick graveyard. When Mom turned on the light, their bodies polka-dotted the blankie like my like the speckles on my chest.
“Thank Dog. I think it worked.” Mom swept most of the dead ticks onto the floor. “This probably isn’t even the grossest thing that’s happened in a Motel 6 this week.”
“But it’s still night,” I yawned. “I bet if you let me sleep a little longer, I can kill a few more for you.”
“We’ve got to hurry if we want to hike before it gets too hot. Come on. Let’s get back to ‘take 2’ of our adventure.”
Even the Starbucks was dark as we drove away from the Motel-Six-Stars into the streetlight-less darkness. I lay in the bed behind the driving chair listening to the hum of the wheels and let sleep overtake me. When I woke up, the sun was high enough to peek over the mountains that had grown up around us in my sleep.
The trees zipped by as my body got used to being awake. Mom still had her eyes stuck to the road ahead, as if there were nothing interesting in the trees and mountains beside it. The Witch usually told her when to turn her head, but the Witch had been silent for a suspiciously long time.
I wasn’t about to ruin the peace and quiet by tattling, but the Witch ruined the peacefulness all by herself. “Welcome to Oregon,” she announced.
“Oregon?” Mom squawked, like Oregon was an insult. “But we’re not going to Oregon yet.”
She gave the Witch a look that demanded an explanation. “Dammit! It happened again.”
“What happened?” I asked. “And what’s so bad about Oregon?”
“The problem with Oregon is that our destination is in California.” Mom’s eyes flicked back and forth between the Witch to the road as if she were trying to match the reality outside the window to the Witch’s lies.
“Ah, I gotcha,” I nodded. “California is the only place worth visiting.”
“My phone keeps cancelling navigation without telling me when the cell service drops out. I don’t notice I’ve missed the turn until we’ve driven an hour in the wrong direction.”
The last time the Witch gave us the silent treatment like this, Mom used an ancient navigation technique and asked a man at a gas station to write the instructions for escape on a scrap of papyrus. “Why don’t you ask for directions, like that day when we traveled back in time?” I asked.
Mom’s eyebrows pinched stubbornly together. “We’re not lost. My phone is just acting weird.”
“We’re not?”
“No. I know exactly where we are. You heard her. We’re in Oregon. It’s the trail that’s lost. Every time I search for it, it seems like it’s in a different place.”
The mailman van pulled off onto a dirt road, but my excitement didn’t last long. A moment later, it climbed back onto the highway facing the other way.
When she got her bearings, the Witch asked, “How did you get all the way up here? You want to be waaaaaaay over that way. Turn right in two miles. You will arrive at 9:47am. Welcome to California.”
Mom was still grumbling about Oregon when the rumbling of the wheels got quieter. Momentum sucked me toward the cockpit as the mailman van slowed. Outside the front window, a house straddled the whole road from one shoulder to the other. It wasn’t a normal house, but more like a roof with passageways for cars to drive through. As we barreled toward it, a man dressed like the boy from Up appeared from the shadows. He sauntered into the road and stopped smack-dab in the middle of the car passageway with the confidence of a man who could stop a truck with his bare paws. He looked straight at us and held up his palm in the sign to stop.
“Oh brother,” Mom groaned. “Seriously?”
The mailman van crept under the roof and stopped beside him. As the window rolled down, I stuck my head over Mom’s shoulder and prepared to assert my dominance. I wanted to be ready to shove my nose into his space if he dared poke his pudgy face into my window. Instead of a face, a shirt filled the space where the window used to be.
“Where you coming from?” his voice asked from above the roof.
“Oregon. Somehow,” Mom told the buttons on his shirt.
“Do you have any fresh produce in the car?” the shirt asked.
“No. I ate all my carrots and other perishables last night. All I have left are two avocados.”
He lowered his drooling face to the window with interest. “I’m sorry. I’m going to have to confiscate them,” he apologized like he wasn’t sorry at all.
“What? Is this a joke?” Mom sputtered. “What’s this about?”
“Keep your paws off!” I barked. I thought I saw him jump a little. “And explain yourself!”
When he’d recovered from the shock of my mighty bark, the Man-Scout said, “Agriculture inspection. We can't let in unpackaged produce from out of state.”
“But I’m from California,” Mom said.
“You don’t know where they’ve been in between,” he said judgily, like Mom was irresponsible for not caring enough to check what her avocados were up to when they were alone.
“No, I mean the avocados are from California,” Mom said.
“It’s not where they’re grown, it’s where they’re stored. The way they keep fruit out of state...” He wagged his head sadly to show how shameful Oregon’s irresponsible fruit storage customs were.
“What do they do with them?” I asked. “Don’t they keep them in a bowl on the counter like civilized Californians do?”
“But I bought them in California,” Mom broke in before he could answer. “They were only in Oregon for 10 minutes. We didn’t even get out of the car.”
“You can’t prove that.”
“Oh for heaven’s sake!” Mom bonked her head against the head of the driving chair to show her exasperation. “But they’re finally ripe. Do you know what an investment a ripe avocado is? I practically had to adopt them.”
“You can eat them now,” he challenged.
“Eat two whole avocados out of spite while you watch?" Mom glared at him for a moment while we all imagined it. “No thank you.”
“I once watched a woman eat a whole bag of oranges,” the man bragged.
“And you’re proud of that?” Mom pulled on the door handle and hesitated. The Man-Scout only took a half-step back. They locked eyes as Mom pushed the door to within a whisker of his bellybutton. Mom blinked first. She slithered through the too-small opening in the door and held up the stay hand to the Man-Scout before stomping back toward the kitchen.
The highway bandit and I stared each other down while Mom harvested avocados from their no-impact hiding place between the icebox and the wall. She slammed the kitchen door and came stalking back to the driving chair, avocados hanging from her paw like two sad turds in a poop bag.
“Here!” She shoved the bag toward his chest. “Enjoy my lunch.”
I thought Mom was going to tell the mailman van to giddyup and storm off in a huff of smoke, but instead she relaxed. She watched the Man-Scout inspect her lunch. “Hey, have you ever heard of the Devil’s Punchbowl?” she asked. “It’s a hiking trail somewhere around here. Maybe west of Happy Camp?”
“Rings a bell,” he said. “I’ve got a buddy that goes hunting and camping a lot. I think he’s talked about it.”
“Do you know where it is? My GPS keeps crapping out when the signal drops.”
“I think so. Hang on, I’ll write down the directions.”
He took Mom’s lunch and went into a room in the roadside edge of the house. When he opened the door, I saw a flash of a hungry-looking woman dressed in the same scout costume as he was.
“See, Mom? He needed both avocados to provide for his family,” I said. “Don’t you feel selfish now, trying to keep both avocados for yourself?”
“You’re missing the point. Relying on someone else always costs you something of value.
Even asking for directions cost me two hard-earned avocados. That’s why we need to be self-reliant.”
“You worked hard for your avocados?”
“Of course I did! Those avocados were like baseballs when I bought them. It takes commitment to let something sit on the counter for a week. Not to mention everything I had to do to keep them from getting banged up in the car.”
The Man-Scout came back with a paper in one hand and no avocados in the other. “I just remembered something,” he said as he handed the paper to Mom through the window. “The road isn’t open yet.”
“What do you know, you pompous fool? You just said you’ve never even been there,” Mom’s thought bubble said. She pulled the let’s get outta here lever and shouted aloud, “Enjoy the avocados.”
Mom followed the Man-Scout’s instructions, which led us up a road so steep that the mailman van's snout blocked our view of everything but sky.
“Good golly. I sure hope that this van has good brakes,” Mom said as the mailman van growled its way into outer space.
“Why? We’re hardly moving,” I pointed out.
“Sure. But what goes up must come down.” She craned her neck as we came around a curve to make sure there was still road ahead. “I thought I read somewhere that you can’t have roads steeper than a certain grade, but that must be a lie or else this road would be illegal.”
Suddenly, the road reared up steeply enough for me to see it over the mailman van’s snout. It wasn’t so much a road now that I looked at it. More like a headstone to mark where a road had died. A gate stood in front of the gravesite to keep mourners at a safe distance. Behind it, one of those concrete walls from the middle of the freeway was almost entirely buried in a pile of rocks and gravel.
There was an inscription on the gate—not a nice, shiny, engraved sign from a factory, but the kind of shaggy billboard that Mom might make with supplies she found in the trunk.
“What does it say?” I asked.
“Damn,” or maybe she said, “Dam. It says Road Washed Out. The trailhead is only two miles ahead. I wonder if we can get through...”
“The mailman van will never make it over the barrier,” I said. “We’ll have to brave the obstacle course without the mailman van to protect us.”
The mailman van started the careful do-se-do of a car turning around on a too-narrow, too-steep road. After a seveny-thirteen-point turn, we we were finally lined up with the ski-jump-like road again. I gulped as the mailman van prepared to take the plunge.
At the last moment, I noticed a Subaru in a clearing beside the road. “Wait, Mom! Look!” Next to the car sat a summer igloo like the kind people build below freeway underpasses. “Do you think they live up here because they don't know how to get down?”
“Hunh. They must have slep up here.” Mom looked even more puzzled than I was. “Why didn’t I think of that? Imagine how much time we can save if we just sleep at the trailhead rather than trying to find a random sleeping spot along the way.”
“No more Motel 6 Stars?” I asked. “Do they serve Spam at trailheads?”
“You can get Spam at any Seven Eleven or truck stop in the country,” Mom said, like she wasn’t describing a miracle, “and motels are for amateurs.”
The mailman van rolled into the clearing and came to rest.
“Hullooooo?” I awooed, running to the igloo to greet our new neighbors.
But the igloo was silent. The faint scent of breakfast still hung in the air and the stink of fresh dude-doo drifted from the trees on the far side of the clearing, but when I sniffed around the igloo’s doorstep, it was silent as a grave inside.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
Mom didn’t even look up to help me investigate. She just kept digging in the mailman van for things to put in the packpack. “They’re probably already out there hiking. It’s almost eleven o’clock.” She swung the packpack onto her back and hit the game on button on her watch.
Let’s do this the watch beeped back.
To be continued...