Bart had warned me before I'd left to stay off of Route 66, and his reasons were sound... but it would only be for a few miles.

I needed a story, and it needed to sound authentic, but it would be a story that I never wanted to be forced to tell. Basically, I needed a believable answer to the possible question of what're you doing out here in the desert, where are you headed, and where are you coming from.

No matter how I scraped the deepest corners of my brain, I couldn't come up with a decent story to answer those questions. Verily, a fellow driving a blue convertible pickup truck in the desert needed a decent story, but the only thing that I could admit to was that I was doing something extraordinary.

There's something about driving a convertible through this desert land-- a land that is made mostly of sky-- when the eastern clouds catch the western sun like ornate castles towering over the faraway mountains, and above is a relentless blue depth beyond time and space. The highway's wind a-roar and the sun's rays ashine, an extraordinary trip in a surreal wasteland of color and uninhabitable distances of petrified earth.

So why did I need a story? Well first you have to imagine rolling a big blue bubble full of gigantic clouds through a sea of sunlit plasma, holding the wheel steady and straight, pushing the whole thing along with a generous but steady press of the throttle pedal-- minding your own business-- when suddenly another car appears far ahead, and as it approaches you realize that it's the first car you've seen in quite a long time on the lonely stretches of desert. Imagine further that as the car gets close enough to be seen in some detail, you see that it is in fact a police car.

The policeman did a little wave with his finger as we passed each other on that desolate highway, but I didn't wave back. I wasn't expecting a wave. I wasn't ready!

It's courtesy, or just friendliness, that compels drivers to raise a hand or wave with some kind of gesture when passing each other on a country road. It's called the 'finger wave', and shows that we're all getting along just fine thanks.

I needed a story. He didn't seem to be turning around to come after me, so I drove on until I reached a little outpost junction with a souvenir shop, the Triple Arrow Junction. I pulled in slowly, and with a puff of whitish dust into the desert wind from the gravel lot, and with great relief, I parked the Blue Barbarian.

Inside the shop, it was dark, but a little silver lizard caught my eye immediately. I took a fancy to that little silver lizard in an instant.

So it was that I paid about forty bucks for a little silver lizard necklace at the Triple Arrow Junction gift shop, put the roof back on the truck so as to blend back in with the desert and the next highway, and got back on the road.

I had my story now: Would you believe I drove all the way out here to pick up this little silver lizard?

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the artwork above is mine, 'Blue Barbarian' 2017, the story is made up because I needed a story

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