The Hole in the Wall

Day 220

I was commenting on my cousins Facebook post. He lives in Las Vegas and likes to drive his Jeep Wrangler around in the desert. I told him he needed a lake to go fishing and he responded, "No, I need to see what's over the next hill."

That got me thinking of a time when I was driving from Los Angeles, California to Salt Lake City, Utah.

I was hummin' along on a long, flat, ink black ribbon of highway in the middle of one of those deserts out west where most all you can see is sand and rocks. Some scrub brush and maybe a cactus dotting the landscape.

A place where the temperatures are so high, you hope your tires don't melt on the macadam. Where Satan himself can't wait to get back to hell, so he can cool off.

As I was driving along, with the air conditioning on full and barely staying ahead of the heat, out in the distance I saw a rock wall. A very high rock wall. Like the backside of a mountain rock wall. What they call "the face". Rising straight up so high the hawks went around it. And my little two lane was headed right at it.

Now, I know some engineer probably loved doing this. Freaking out people in the middle of a desert into thinking they were on a road to nowhere. As the miles clicked by, I had to wonder if some of the travelers had actually turned around and gone back, worried they couldn't get through.

There were cars, occasionally, coming from the other direction. They had to be coming from somewhere, right? Or were they just cars ahead of me who had to turn back when they reached the wall?

This highway had better go somewhere as I was scheduled to fill up my fuel tanks in Salt Lake City. I kept going. Soon the wall started to move.

Was I hallucinating? That chili dog I had eaten at the last stop did taste a little funky. Then it started working it's way back up. "Better up than down," I thought. There weren't any rest stops out there.

As I closed within a few miles of the rock wall I saw that it was actually two rock walls. The one to the right was nearer to me than the one on the left and the road was curving in between them.

Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and their hide out "the hole in the wall" it was impossible to see, unless you were close enough and knew where to look.

Some days that was as exciting as it got on the road. That was alright with me.

Until tomorrow,

Ken