Part 10 (2/2)

Dust Storms May Exist.

”You can tell a lot about a people from their billboards,” Wayne says sagely. ”New Mexico is obviously a place of littering virgins with a metaphysical bent.”

”And very good taste,” I add, for suddenly the interstate is spanned with great soaring slashes of turquoise and terracotta. ”Why doesn't every place do this?” I say, awestricken by the beauty of the overpa.s.ses. As we sail under the two-tone arches, our spirits rise.

We're within fifteen minutes of the city when the cars ahead of us abruptly stop.

”The weather isn't that bad,” I say to them all.

But no one moves. After ten minutes, Wayne and I pull out a deck of cards and play gin over the gears.h.i.+ft. We finish four games. Wayne wins every one.

The cars start to move. We inch past a semi smashed into a truck and trailer. Half a dozen more transport trucks are jackknifed or flipped on their sides, or have snowplowed into the median. An ambulance has slid off the road, lights flas.h.i.+ng.

I get on the cellphone to the insurance adjuster. We agree to meet at the Toyota dealers.h.i.+p in the outskirts of Albuquerque. An hour later, as we pull into the lot, five men swarm out of the blizzard toward the car.

I crank down the window. ”Is one of you Paul?”

They look at each other, momentarily stymied, as if perhaps one of them is in fact Paul and they've forgotten which. Then they remember: they are salesmen, Toyota is having a sale-a-thon, blizzard be d.a.m.ned. Five business cards flash through the window.

”Not yet,” we say. We're pretty sure we don't need a new car, though when Paul examines the Echo, peering in at the odometer, he says sourly, ”Given the mileage, I doubt it's worth fixing. It's probably a writeoff. I'll let you know tomorrow.”

Our puff of elation deflates. We go inside and sit with one of the salesmen, figuring out how much a replacement Echo will cost in Albuquerque and what would be involved in taking it into Canada. A lot.

”We could junk the car and fly,” I say to Wayne. ”Or drive the wreck home.”

”No.” His voice is sharp, as if I've insisted. ”I'm not going to drive it like this.”

We've grown testy with each other. A writeoff won't give us enough money to buy another car. And even if it did, a car bought in New Mexico won't have a catalytic converter: we can't begin to think what that will mean at the border. And, we ask ourselves, do we really want to drive in miles per hour, moving through Canada on American terms, for the next however many years?

”Wait a minute!” It hits me like a deer in a blizzard. ”Paul took down the mileage, right? 155,000. I bet he thought those were miles! But we're Canadian! They're kilometres!”

Wayne lights up, too. ”And that's less than 100,000 miles.”

”Right.” The salesman is looking glum but Wayne and I are grinning as though we just won the lottery. I jump up and give him a hug. ”Everything's definitely going to be fine.”

WAKING in our hotel room in Albuquerque, I find myself thinking about that mule deer, especially when I look out the window and see a world completely buried in snow. The parking lot resembles a giant sheet of cotton batting with a few lumps in it; the lumps are cars. The interstate is deserted; the turquoise stripes obliterated by snow. There isn't a car on the streets. The city is as still as a forest. I picture the deer lying wounded, being slowly buried by snow, coyotes closing in. I once tracked coyotes in Ma.s.sachusetts with a professional tracker who told me he'd seen a coyote pack bring down a deer that had broken its leg by stepping through deep snow into a fissure. There was a lot of blood on the snow, Paul said, but when the coyotes were finished, nothing was left of the deer but a few tufts of hair. At the time, my sympathies had been with the coyotes. Now my guilty conscience is pulling for the deer.

Thoughts of the deer stay with me during breakfast in the hotel's dining room. Everyone has been storm-stayed; we are a gathering of environmental refugees. The television in the corner is tuned to CNN: every so often the blur of voices falls silent as everyone listens. Sixteen dead across New Mexico. In Albuquerque, snow up to three feet deep. Ma.s.sive power failures. Hundreds of roofs have collapsed, including most of the city's schools. Nothing like it in living memory.

The couple at the next table are desperate to get back to Denver for their daughter's wedding. The woman across the aisle says she spent the entire night huddled in her SUV on the interstate. In the lobby, people are sitting on the floor or on their luggage; there are no more rooms here or anywhere else in the city.

In the elevator, a husband and wife from Arkansas tell us they're going out to the airport to try to get their private plane in the air. They'd been flying to Salt Lake City, where the husband was due to start a new job, when the storm forced them down in Albuquerque.

”You want to come to Salt Lake City with us?” the man asks.

Merilyn and I consider it for a moment, then she says, reasonably, ”That airport is probably closed, too.”

”Well, we're gonna give her a try,” he says. ”You're welcome to join us.”

We've experienced this kind of neighbourliness before, during the ice storm of 1998, when most of eastern Ontario and western Quebec was without power, in some cases for weeks. Strangers would knock on our door and offer to lend us a generator to pump out our bas.e.m.e.nt or get the freezer or the furnace working for a few hours, whichever was most critical. Hydro crews from upstate New York and as far away as North Carolina came up to help repair the downed Canadian lines. Just as Canadian crews headed south to New Orleans after Katrina. In times of crisis, we become an altruistic species. Borders cease to matter.

In our room, I lie on one of the two double beds, thinking maybe we should offer it to someone in the lobby. Merilyn is sitting at the table writing in her notebook. She has already had several conversations with the insurance adjuster, who really doesn't want to know us until next year-which starts on Monday.

”Looks like we have the weekend to do what we want,” I say. ”What do we want to do?”

Merilyn shrugs. ”Rest,” she says. ”This will be the first time we've spent more than one night in a place since we left Vancouver.”

I'm reading a book by Charles Bowden called Desierto. Merilyn lies down beside me and I read her a pa.s.sage about a Navajo man whose wife sent him out to shoot some meat to go with the tortillas she was making. The man went out, and after a while he came back, sat down in a corner of the pueblo, and said nothing. Eventually, some elders went up to him and asked him what was disturbing him. The man said he had seen a mule deer and shot it, but he had only wounded the animal. The deer had run off and he'd followed it into the hills. He tracked it to a cave, and when he went into the cave he saw an old woman sitting on the ground, crying bitterly. There was a deep wound in her side. He had come home and sat quietly thinking about what he had seen. That night, the family ate their tortillas without meat.

THE SNOW has stopped but the sidewalks are deeply piled with the kind of heavy, wet snow that causes heart attacks and hernias. A few cars fishtail by and several fellow refugees stand at the corners looking down at their pant legs. We make our way to the small plaza in the old part of the city, looking for somewhere to buy food. Whether it's the storm or because it is New Year's weekend, not much is open. Eventually we find a Walgreens near the plaza and buy a few perishables for the room. In front of the store is an old covered wagon and a cl.u.s.ter of p.r.i.c.kly pear cacti, each with a thick crown of snow. There's something wrong about a snow-covered cactus; it's as though two parallel universes have collapsed in on each other.

The walk and the cold make us hungry. We'll have a hot lunch now and eat dinner in our room, we decide, and head down a narrow alley off the plaza toward a small, steamy Mexican cafe whose tables are comfortably strewn with tourism brochures and local newspapers. A good place to sit out a storm, I think, although it's all but empty. A shelf of books is fastened to an adobe wall beside a fireplace: Carlos Castaneda, Aldous Huxley, Aleister Crowley, Margery Allingham. I take an English-Spanish dictionary and order a Corona, and Merilyn asks for a small pot of decaf coffee. We share a plate of corn tortillas with refried beans and avocado chili. No meat.

I look up ”avocado” in the dictionary. I've always thought the word had something to do with lawyers.

”Hey, listen to this,” I say to Merilyn, who is reading the weather page in the Albuquerque Journal. ”'Avocado, from the Aztec word ahuacatl, meaning ”t.e.s.t.i.c.l.e,” from its shape.' We're eating prairie oysters.”

”They're calling for another major snowstorm tomorrow,” she says with a frown. ”This one's coming from the north.”

”And did you know that 'refried' beans aren't fried twice?”

”Two more feet of snow.”

”The Spanish prefix re doesn't mean 'again,' it means 'very.' Frijoles refritos means 'very fried beans.'” I think about the word ”redeem.” Very doomed.

”All the major highways will be closed.”

”You know the country Chile?” I ask.

”Snow everywhere, except maybe south.”

”Did you know that the country's name comes from the Indian word tchilli, which actually means 'cold'?”

”The I-25 is still open.”

”Or snow. Tchilli can mean 'cold' or 'snow.'”

”Well,” says Merilyn, ”tomorrow it's going be tchilli in New Mexico.” She has been listening.

”Where does the I-25 go?” I ask. I have been listening, too.

”El Paso.”

”Then let's go there,” I say. ”Let's spend New Year's in El Paso.”

”Oh, let's,” Merilyn says, thawing already. ”We'll leave first thing.”

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