And the time me and my friend Jim from college and his girlfriend from Rawlings, Wyoming that he had met working as a cook in Yellowstone were driving across the Nevada wasteland, towards sunset one summer evening, and we tried to listen to Nixon's resignation speech on AM radio from a distant station that faded in, faded out that whined and crackled between syllables of Nixon's voice as he so selfservingly announced that he was going away for good this time. We had been driving and chasing the sun that day for an hour and a half. Heading west towards California, the sun would set behind the next low ridge of hills just as we approached it.
We'd crest the ridge, and there would be the sun again up above the horizon, with another crest appearing off a ways at the next horizon. We'd speed along the flats after that, not another car in sight and only the straight blacktop and the faint white dotted line in the middle and solid line on both sides stretching ahead to that next ridge. Like sleep walkers we drove hypnotized by the sound of the wind and the low hum of the engine and the stead vibration of the wheels, and as we approached that next ridge it got darker and darker as the sun disappeared behind it, only to reappear once again when we crested the ridge. We did that three or four times until finally the sun out raced us and the stars began to poke out insistently. That's when we found a state park and decided to stop for the night.
Later we sat in a camp site with the jeep door open so we could hear the broadcast. The stars were 0coming out as the sun went down. The plains were dotted with a sage here and there that tossed strange shadows in the deepening starlight. We had a campfire in state park camp ring that crackled as it caught the scrap wood we had left over from previous camps in the wooded high country we had just come from. We sat on the dusty ground around the camp fire, tall Jim with his straight blonde/brown hair and his wide forehead, intelligent eyes and sarcastic and funny bearing on everything, his girlfriend an unknown quantity, cute, desireable, we were taking her to California, she and Jim were going to visit Jim's brother, who lived in San Jose. It was, I guess the summer of 1974.
The radio crackled and whined some more, Nixon's voice dripping and dropping into the intervals between the cracks and the whines like strobe light flashes from a plane way up high on a night full of thunder and lightening. The radio became part of the scene, we didn't talk, we just sat on the dusty ground and gazed at the crackling campfire and listended, tried to make out the sense of the speech and to plug the randomness of the Nixon's words and his phoney balony voice into what we knew about our times and the recent past and our own personal histories, and what we could make out of each other there on that cool night in the summer on the plains of the Nevada desert.
We'd crest the ridge, and there would be the sun again up above the horizon, with another crest appearing off a ways at the next horizon. We'd speed along the flats after that, not another car in sight and only the straight blacktop and the faint white dotted line in the middle and solid line on both sides stretching ahead to that next ridge. Like sleep walkers we drove hypnotized by the sound of the wind and the low hum of the engine and the stead vibration of the wheels, and as we approached that next ridge it got darker and darker as the sun disappeared behind it, only to reappear once again when we crested the ridge. We did that three or four times until finally the sun out raced us and the stars began to poke out insistently. That's when we found a state park and decided to stop for the night.
Later we sat in a camp site with the jeep door open so we could hear the broadcast. The stars were 0coming out as the sun went down. The plains were dotted with a sage here and there that tossed strange shadows in the deepening starlight. We had a campfire in state park camp ring that crackled as it caught the scrap wood we had left over from previous camps in the wooded high country we had just come from. We sat on the dusty ground around the camp fire, tall Jim with his straight blonde/brown hair and his wide forehead, intelligent eyes and sarcastic and funny bearing on everything, his girlfriend an unknown quantity, cute, desireable, we were taking her to California, she and Jim were going to visit Jim's brother, who lived in San Jose. It was, I guess the summer of 1974.
The radio crackled and whined some more, Nixon's voice dripping and dropping into the intervals between the cracks and the whines like strobe light flashes from a plane way up high on a night full of thunder and lightening. The radio became part of the scene, we didn't talk, we just sat on the dusty ground and gazed at the crackling campfire and listended, tried to make out the sense of the speech and to plug the randomness of the Nixon's words and his phoney balony voice into what we knew about our times and the recent past and our own personal histories, and what we could make out of each other there on that cool night in the summer on the plains of the Nevada desert.