Night Drive

The bleak winds reminded Kate that California was, after all, a desert. Semi-arid. She looked out her car window, seeing the whistling wind send tumbleweeds across the road. Wind like this brought memories with it. The Santa Anas, here again.

The names of the places here told the story: Death Valley, Furnace Creek, Burnt Ranch. She was driving through the Mojave on her road trip to Utah. Roadside bushes picked up in the beam of her headlights what appeared to be ghostly coyotes.

She blinked and saw that they were just dusty-millers, mesquite, greasewood. Not small groups of people clustered near the road, arms upraised in prayer, but Joshua trees. In the Mojave snakes rattled quietly as a muted tambourine before lunging. Get a grip she told herself, noticing that her headlights skewed in different directions—one pointing up like a floodlight, the

other illuminating the broken median down the middle of the road.

The Santa Anas, a bad wind whipping, lashing, drying everything to tinder for a

conflagration. Orange fireballs rolling down the sides the San Jacinto’s, the San Gabriel’s. Kate remembered someone telling her that the indigenous tribes, the Chumash and others, called Los Angeles the Valley of Smoke.

She drove through the night into Nevada and then Southwest Utah where the rocks turned red; adobe brick red, burnt sienna red. The wind was long gone. The sun slowly turned the night sky to pink dawn.