From the Journals

Interlude: During the end of everything

Once we got the truck gassed up, we headed south. I knew that the interstate was clear at least to Colorado Springs, despite the Texan blockade attempt in Castle Rock; I’d seen a Twitch feed of that blockade in ruins that morning, a few minutes before the latest emergency broadcast interrupted every damn thing.

The streets were surprisingly quiet. The usual levels of traffic for a Saturday morning, not too shabby. The dog, tense and staring at the floor like she always did (the sounds of the road drew her to stare at the floorboard; she’s a strange one), the various radio stations and satellite stations all playing either the emergency loop or some reactive news. Texans, war, disease, most of the western US on fire, the usual. Except now there were rumors that the government had fallen, and no one could locate the executive branch. That was new.

I’d filled the truck along with another 25 gallons in gas cans, which would be enough to pretty easily get us through Colorado and most of New Mexico, which was good, since we were heading to the south of that state. The cabin, my stepfather’s that I’d helped build when I was ten years old, was in the Sacramento Mountains, south of Cloudcroft. A tiny creek ( the Sacramento River, a misnomer in all but the driest locations) ran through there, and between that and the 250 foot well, we’d have water and a roof. There was solar there, and a small cache of food, regularly replenished over the years, an assortment of canned veggies and dried stuff.

The first half of the drive, through Colorado, was tense and slow going at times, and completely normal at other times. The ruins of that roadblock in Castle Rock, that was shocking. Blood, skid marks, spent casings, safety glass scattered about. The Colorado State Police, maskless and terse, waving traffic through, shouting at people to speed up.

Then a lot of just normal highway traffic. Just north of Colorado Springs, a group of cars were pulled off partially blocking the right lane, and some sort of fight was breaking out. Two of the cars in tha melee had passed us earlier, driving very fast, passing people on the shoulder in the tight two lane stretches.

The Springs was partially on fire. Emergency vehicles were crawling through the surface streets, and the highway was diverted onto surface roads for one stretch. By then I’d been clenching my jaw for about two hours. Once we cleared the city, it was back to normal highway nonsense, with very few cars on the road. Trinidad showed some signs of the fire that had run through from the west some months before.

Then Raton Pass, and the state line. At the border, a roadblock made up of four Caterpillar tracked front loaders and a handful of Native men, all with rifles. We slowed because what else would we do? One of the men waved me over to the left lane, and another waved us over to the left shoulder behind a line of cars. In front of us, a van was being turned away, and an argument was very loudly breaking out. A man who’d waved us over held his hand up in the universal “stop” gesture, staring at us while the argument with the van petered out. Three men walked up to the truck as the van, through with a three-point U-turn, yelled curses and tore off back to Colorado in a cloud of tire smoke. The man closest made a “roll down the window” gesture. They were all dressed in jeans and T-shirts, tactical gear worn with the comfort of people who’d been in combat before. The guy who walked up to the driver’s window wore dark sunglasses. One other guy stood off to the passenger side, weapon down but ready, and one walked to the rear of the truck.

“Heading to New Mexico?” the guy at the driver’s side asked. He sounded and looked young, somewhere in his mid-twenties, Navajo with a mild reservation accent.

“Yessir,” I said. Our dog, all twenty-five pounds, was vibrating and whining. She wanted very badly to meet him. He smiled looking back at her, his eyes catching on my rifle case. “Heading to the Sacramentos,” I said. “Just south of Cloudcroft.”

“Oh, nice area. We used to go skiing down there. What’s the name of that ski resort?”

“Ski Apache? We always called in Sierra Blanca, after the mountain, but the resort is Ski Apache, there, outside of Ruidoso. Pretty far north from where we’ll be…heck, you can’t even hardly get there from where we’ll be.”

“What’s the nearest town to you down there?” His tone wasn’t interrgotational, it was purely conversation, but I was being questioned, officially.

“Well, the cabin we’re heading to is in Timberon, just south, southeast of Sunspot. A town called Weed is pretty close by there.”

“Here’s the situation. We’re not letting anyone through New Mexico to Texas,” he didn’t clarify who “we” were in that sentence, but I got the feeling it was literally the Navajo Nation. “We’re not letting anyone from Texas into New Mexico. And we’re using our judgment about people coming in to New Mexico and staying. What we’re going to ask you to do is follow this truck in front of you. It will lead you a few yards past the border. There’s a small building there, and they’re handing out virus test kits, they only take about fifteen minutes. We’re also taking a small sample of your DNA. We’re going to take pictures of your truck, the both of you, and the dog. Do you have your vaccination records?”

“We do, and we have all the dog’s paperwork, she’s current too.”

“That’s funny,” he said, not laughing. “There will be a vehicle in back of you, and we have four drones on you. Be cool.” He waved us on as the truck in front of us started rolling, hazards on. We followed it to the parking area, and it pulled back around, heading back to the checkpoint. The parking area had a few armed folks milling around, and three other cars with folks packed in them, waiting. Two Navajo women wearing a white lab coats and full PPE walked up to the truck. We rolled our windows down, and they did nasal swabs and mouth and cheek swabs while an armed guy took photos of the truck. We were instructed to get out, and out pictures were taken. The dog’s picture was taken as well. We handed over copies of our vaccination records and the dog’s records, then were told to get back in the truck.

After a few minutes a group of more heavily armed guards walked to one of the cars next to us. I’d been reading a book, but the purposeful, engaged motion of the armed men quickly got my attention. They surrounded the car, which was only about twenty feet from us. Another man came out and knocked on my truck, waved me to pull forward following him, getting us more out of the way. The other car, surrounded now by armed men who were all pointing weapons at it, emptied. There were six of them, four adults and two young kids under ten. Everyone got out, sheepish, looking down, hands raised. The armed men called out one of the adults, a chubby Hispanic guy in his 40s. He walked forward, then lay down on the ground, absolutely resigned. Hands behind his head and legs crossed, he was zip tied and walked over to a panel truck pointed toward Colorado. In the dim light inside that truck I could make out at least one other person. The rest of the car’s occupants were released, and some discussion followed. While that was happening, a white coated Navajo woman, minus any PPE, walked to our truck.

“OK you all are clear to go. These are identification cards for you, and a tag for your dog. She’s got a chip, so she’s registered to you via these IDs. Any time New Mexico or Navajo police stop you, you will need these IDs and your driver’s licenses. You currently do not need to quarantine, OK? You also need to check in with the state once you get where you are going. That has to happen within ten days from right now or we will void your data and you will be subject to arrest OK? Once you get where you are going, call the number on the back of the ID, or go online, OK?” She handed us an envelope with IDs on lanyards and paperwork. “Be well and be safe, welcome to New Mexico. Hágoónee’!”

Once we’d made it a little further down the road, just outside Raton, we pulled off to let the dog out. I unclenched my jaw for the first time in hours. My wife and I stared at each other; I felt a little giddy. The highway was empty, the air was relatively clear with the smoke north of us, smelling of creosote and dust. New Mexico has that deep blue sky, horizons are much further away than they were in Colorado. A straight-as-a-ruler highway lay ahead, the high desert and grasslands divided and bounded by mountains. Clear and cool, it was 375-ish miles via highways 84 and 54, which would get us off the interstate pretty darn quickly.

The trip was mostly uneventful. One checkpoint just north of Carrizozo lazily waved us through when we showed our passes; they’d scanned the truck plates and looked us up, wished us well “on the road to Timberon.” We stopped at a tiny Mexican restaurant in Tularosa; I waited outside with the dog, wandering around the parking lot while Laura went inside and ordered some food to go. Quiet, small town. I imagine they hadn’t had any interruption to their days even with the massive problems the rest of the country was facing.

We talked about it while chowing down on relleno burritos. Best guess is, when you live in a place that has been around since humans first settled, a place that had buildings dating back to the Spaniards, with ruins dating back to the Pueblos, you carried a different perspective with you every day. You weren’t unaware of the things happening, you just understood them against a much larger backdrop, a much wider horizon.

Up into the mountains on highway 54, passing from the warm desert to the chill of pines through the tunnel that separated the town of High Rolls from the Tularosa Basin, I was hit with a flood of memories, a heavy nostalgia. While there were some changes, this part of the world remained pretty much the same. There was another checkpoint at the tunnel, which made good strategic sense. They waved us through without checking anything other than the truck plates. “We heard from Carrizoso,” the guy who stopped us said. “You haven’t picked anyone up, have you?” This said with a smile, and he waved us on.

Cloudcroft sits at 8600+ feet. Always small, its population had dwindled even further. We found out, once we got to Timberon, that there’s only about a hundred people in that town, and they live spread out in the mountains. We ran across signs of accidents along the road south of Timberon; always a little treacherous in the winter, without any snow removal it had apparently been pretty bad. Up around Upper Karr, above 10,000 feet where the aspen grew, the road had been heavily scarred by fire. That got us to thinking about the cabin. There hadn’t been any huge fires in Timberon in at least fifteen years, and there’d been plenty of mitigation and clearing for fire breaks. Plus it wasn’t heavily wooded, like we were used to in Colorado, since Timberon sat at 6700 feet and on the southern slope of the Sacramento mountains. It was more high deset with pinon pine trees. We talked about the “what if”, but weren’t very worried; the huge fire storms that hit the reat of the dense woodlands just didn’t get hold in southern New Mexico. It was nearly desert as it was, and the deser wasn’t far off. Just south of the Timberon (on a seriously rough dirts track) was the vast upper Sonoran desert, with mostly Army and some ranch land in the basin between New Mexico and Texas. We talked about El Paso, where my mom’s family lived. They were safe as houses, as El Paso had been pretty much taken over by the feds, and it existed now as a weird little outpost, guarded on all sides by the US Army and by Mexico.

Finally getting to the cabin was surreal, genuinely. After hours and hundreds of miles, and years since we’d last been, it was like a dream. The cabin was dark, quiet, with low voltage lights coming on as the darkness fell. We parked behind an old Buick station wagon that I recognized as my stepbrother’s. He’d been up but he’d gotten sick, and he’d died in a hospital in Alamogordo. That was six months past.

The keys were in the usual hiding place, and we opened everything up, started the water running, got the heater going. “Cabin” was a bit of a misnomer; you tend to think of cabins in woods that people build as being these small rough things. This was a house with two bedrooms, a den and sunken living room, central heat and air, a decent sized kitchen, two fireplaces, two full baths, and a second smaller house with an apartment and garage / workshop. We removed the boards from the windows, unpacking a house that had been prepped about as well as the one we’d left in Lakewood what felt like a hundred years ago.

I got a fire going, using a lot of muscle memory from my teen years, knowing where everything was located. Unpacked the truck and our trailer, we worked at it for a couple of hours getting things squared away well enough to call it a night. Dialed the 800 number on the back of the ID around my neck and verified where we were and who we were. They pinged my cell phone. Wished us well.

Sitting that first night in front of the fire, sipping some whiskey (wine for her), quietly uncoiling from the pressure of the day, I felt safe, finally. Secure.

Somehow, we’d escaped the madness of metro Denver, of America. Now we just had to be here, until we couldn’t be. The night was cool and instantly dark, darker than anything, very still and quiet. I thought about my parents, about my childhood here. I thought about the surviving family, my nephews. We’d sent word as well as we could, left word at the house in Lakewood, left text messages and emails. After a few months of being in a fight-or-flight mode, panicky and frayed, we sank into deep sleep there in front of the fire, in our chairs, fully clothed, drinks in hand. Dreamless. Home.