Two From Chicago and an Empty Tank on Gold Road

There is a stretch of the old road west of Kingman that most people drive once, take a photograph of, and never come back to. It runs out past Cool Springs and then starts climbing into the Black Mountains toward Sitgreaves Pass, and by the time you are up in the switchbacks there is no shoulder worth the name and a drop off the right side that puts rental cars down to fifteen miles an hour and keeps them there. I ride it a couple times a month, always late in the day, once the heat has let go and the light starts coming in sideways across the rock.

Thursday I went out around six with no plan past Oatman and back. Stopped at Cool Springs the way I always do, that rebuilt station with the stone pillars where the tour vans line up at noon and nobody at all stops at supper time. Sat there a while and watched a hawk work the ridge above the building. The Glide ticking as it cooled, the rock giving back everything it took all afternoon, not another engine anywhere in earshot. That is the whole reason to go out there and I would have been satisfied turning around right then.

Coming up on Gold Road there was a convertible pulled off crooked with the hood standing open, which out that way usually means somebody misunderstood what the grade does to a car. Two people from Chicago, a rental, and a fuel gauge sitting flat on the pin. They had been there better than an hour with no bars on the phone and one bottle of water between them, both of them being extremely polite about the whole situation and neither one saying out loud what they were plainly both thinking.

I gave them the water I carry and rode on up to Oatman to find somebody with a phone that worked. The burros were already in the street doing their evening rounds and a fellow closing up one of the shops made the call for me without me having to explain much of anything, which tells you how often that road does this to people. Tow truck out of Bullhead, forty minutes, maybe an hour. I rode back down and sat with them until the lights came around the bend, because leaving two people in the dark on the side of that mountain is not something a person does.

The woman asked me whether the road was always like this. I told her it has been like this since before the interstate and that is exactly why some of us keep riding it. Her husband asked how much further to Oatman and I said closer than it feels, which is true of most things out here.

Came back over the pass in full dark with the headlamp doing all the work and the switchbacks arriving one at a time out of nothing. Cooler air on the way down the east side, the town spread out below with the lights on, and my water bottle riding home in a rental car headed for Laughlin. A fair trade for an evening.