Saturday morning…up with the glare of the sun, last loadings, closings

and so we go down

the dirt to Gardner, 69 to Cotopaxi, Highway 50 west…a perfectly autumnal day over

Monarch to lunch at Gunnison Reservoir, pause for roadwork on Cerro Summit

and descend to Delta.

[’64 Suburban]…Grand Junction;

[’16 Taco]…Rabbit Valley;

70 West…

further west…

50 to that other Delta

and

the Nevada Border for merlot, a martini, bad Utah TV and sleep.

Sunday in the parking lot met a cheerful little guy in a camo Duck Dynasty cap needing a ride to Milford; his girlfriend got drunk Saturday night, threw him out of the truck and drove the 84.6 unpopulous miles home on her own, leaving him to walk back [from where?] broke to the motel. “I’m through with wimmen” he said, smiling [probably as good a pickup line as any in the Border Casino] on his way to the bar.  Seven in the morning; we weren’t going to Milford but

seventy miles west

to Ely for breakfast where the restaurant in the Nevada Hotel is now proudly a Denny’s so continued another seventy-seven to the Owl Club in Eureka to avoid disappointment.

Then

it was White Boxes Day all day [Austin, ever attuned to the zeitgeist, continues to applaud American Greatness – bring on the Nukes, Chump; Austin’s ready!] as far as Fallon.

By Pyramid Lake the boxes were inbound, making it easier to navigate not to mention

less perilous than swimming upstream against early September’s Burning Ineptitudes of yore.

We were at Wall Spring by three o’clock, where Storm Queen abides, as did we for one

brief

day

before Cali’s disastrous smokes began blowing in

and we went over the hill to the source.

From Wednesday Benicia, nearly too smoky to walk the dogs, we rushed to Vallejo to cash in

our advance tickets for an anticipated mobbed-even-in-the-morning 3D screening of “Blade Runner 2049”, ending up instead in the nearly deserted multiplex for two and a half hours

of a dystopia whose atmospherics were not dissimilar to what awaited outside.

California’s burning…wasn’t there a Clash song along those lines long ago?  London, maybe?

Something, anyway.  Let’s just nuke Korea [North? South? Who cares?] and precipitate …something. Yeah, we saw this shit comin’, WAY long ago, but how ya gonna stop it?

Just set up some bleachers out in the sun and call in Kim Jong Un and The Chump…

*[as a lifelong connoisseur of junkyards there’s no way I can dignify the pathetic mess that we  passed through as a “junkyard”, but the phrase does resonate nicely with Banksy’s “Exit through Gift Shop”]