Judith and Linda's Excellent Adventure, Episode 10: No Pants in the High Chaparral

It's 5:30 a.m. at Sumner Lake State Park in eastern New Mexico. A thousand miles from nowhere. Made it through Texas stockyard row, vowing never to eat another Steak & Shake burger, the smell of death still clinging to our nostrils even as we slowly awake the next morning. Sun not up, although light is seeping over the edges of the plateaus. 40 degrees, high chaparral chill.

Gotta pee.

Both of us. Well, three of us, actually. Tosca jumps out, too, as JJ and I fall out of the van in our PJs: hers a full suit, mine -- well, mine just the top. I slide the van door shut behind us so the puppy can't escape into the dark.

We all pee into the creosote scrub. We come back to the van. JJ looks at me.

You closed the door.

Yeah, well, I didn't want the puppy . . .

We're in big trouble.

What JJ means is that the sliding door of the van has a broken handle. We can only open it by opening one of the other doors first.

And, because we're afraid of rattlesnakes, we locked all the other doors for the night.

I look at Jack, who is sitting looking sleepy and curly in the passenger seat.

I point toward the door lock. Open the door, I tell Jack.

Jack looks at me. We are locked out in the high chaparral, without clothes, in the 40 degree morning . . .



This is Yeso, where Judith's grandparents homesteaded before moving to Oklahoma City. "Homesteading" being a very loose term for what was possible in this desert environment, beautiful as it is. We passed through Yeso later that same morning, en route to Albuqueque, the roar of the dry wind in our ears through the garbage bags ducked taped across the broken van window.

We tried to get JJ's skinny arm inside the van to unlock it, but to prevent her from becoming stuck I pried the window a little too hard, and it shattered. We're gonna be delayed but . . . at least we have our pants on.

Despite the most recent episode in our excellent adventure, I tell JJ what I've thought a million times before: if I was ever forced to leave my beloved ocean and move into the desert, this would be the desert for me. Yellow and vermillion, the New Mexican high plains, ghostly Spanish land grants and abandoned missions, and native culture sing out to me.