The reflection of the many colors of lights, from both the city and the cars on the highway, made squiggly patterns on the pavement as they sped along in the ever-increasing rain. The light mist had thickened to where it was now a downpour, and the windshield wipers could barely keep the road in sight. The spray from the tires made the cars in front of them look like hydroplanes, as they sliced through what was rapidly becoming a shallow river that they had to navigate as they continued East. When they got to the Mercer Island tunnel, it was a welcome reprieve from the drenching rain, but it only lasted a few minutes, and when they returned to the open, the rain seemed even worse. When they reached Issaquah, the divided highway changed to two lanes in each direction, and the oncoming traffic washed up a tidal wave of water onto the little Volvo. "I hope this doesn't turn to snow, going over the pass," Fred said.
          "Really. You don't have snow tires, do you?" Ellis asked.
          "I don't even have tread," Fred answered, peering intensely through the blurry windshield, trying to make out the road in front of them.
          "That makes me feel a lot better," Ellis said sarcastically. "We can take our choice between getting stuck before we get over the damn pass, or we can wait and get a flat tire on the other side."
          Fred glanced over at Ellis between swipes of the windshield wipers, and chuckled. "Why wait. There's no reason we couldn't have a flat right here. Then we could get soaking wet, changing it in the rain."
          "Yeah right!" Ellis added, "and then we could still get stuck in the snow, and freeze to death as well."
          "That's a cheery thought, Ellis," Fred said, reaching into his shirt pocket, and producing one of the joints he had rolled before they had left his sister's. "Here, light this." He held it out where Ellis could take it.
          Ellis took the joint and reached in his pants pocket for matches. "Might as well get high, can't see where we're going anyway, huh," he said.
          "I think this rain's letting up a little, besides, I'll do better if I can mellow out a little. This is too intense. I'm getting white knuckles and a stiff neck," Fred said, shrugging his shoulders and stretching his fingers a little, as he reached for the joint, Ellis had lit and was handing him.
          Fred took a long drag off the joint and handed it back. The normal routine followed, and they traveled quietly through the moist darkness, as they rose higher into the Cascade Mountains, as well as higher into their sense of being. The rain had diminished considerably and the "I-90 River", they were traveling, had receded back into the dark forest along the sides of the still wet road. The spray from the oncoming traffic had ceased to be a bow wave, and was now merely a fine mist that defused the red and yellow-white lights in front of them. The combination of the joint they had smoked, mixed with the moving lights on the tree lined highway in the surrounding darkness, made it seem as though they were climbing ever upward inside a drain pipe.
          Suddenly the red glow of the taillights on the car, some fifty yards, in front of them swerved and then spun around, becoming two bright white beacons that closed in on them as they sped along. Fred hit the brakes and turned away from the lights just in time, and they slid past them, only partially in control of the Volvo. Ellis, who had been off in the tubular world of tunnels and drain pipes, came back enough to gasp as they swerved past this obstacle and fishtailed for several hundred yards before Fred could get the car under control again. "Holy shit! What was that?"
          "Black ice!" Fred answered. "That car lost it, and God damn near got us. It's slicker than hell up here. It's gotten colder and the rain's frozen into black ice." He slowed down some and drove along steadily for a few minutes in silence trying to relax a bit from the rush caused by the near miss. They were nearing the top of the pass, and the black roadway was now lined with a small pile of snow that had been plowed up earlier in the day. He was glad to see the snow on the side of the road instead of on it, and knew if they could make it another couple of miles, they would be over the top and would have clear sailing the rest of the way home. Fred's thoughts of the car that had nearly brought their voyage to an untimely end faded into the past as they rolled along in the cold darkness. He listened to the re-built engine in the Volvo, and felt that it sounded good, as it pulled them the last little bit up the pass. There it was, the elevation sign that read 3010 feet. It seemed to him that they had been driving up hill for more than three thousand feet, but then the sign wouldn't lie, and the important thing was, that there wouldn't be anymore snow or ice on the road the rest of the way home.
          "It's cold up here," Ellis said, as he reached forward and slid the heat control all the way toward hot.
         "Turn the fan up a notch, but don't change it off defrost or the windows will fog up," Fred advised. "That was quite a scene back there in the parking lot. God damn, those bikers are going to be pissed when they get outside and find that mess."
         "If they ever get outside. Those dudes that went in as we were coming out didn't look like they had a friendly pool game in mind."
         "I would guess that there aren't any unbroken pool cues left in the place by now. There may not even be any unbroken bones in the place. Damn, I sure would like to have seen what transpired in there after we left, but we surely would have ended up in the middle of what probably is a really awful mess right now."
         Ellis stretched his arms and shoulders, and yawned. "Yeah, I'll bet the cops are in there right now trying to untangle things as we speak."
         "Probably, and I sure wouldn't want to be part of that. I'll bet those old men at the big table, slipped out the back and were long gone by the time the police showed up.
         The Volvo sounded good as it descended the east side of the pass. With the lodge behind them, they slid past the several ski areas that lay quietly waiting for enough snow to start up their chair lifts and open for a winter, of hopefully high profits. The ski resort business, like farming, depends on the weather for its profits and losses. The previous year, there was little snow, and it left the slopes early in the spring, leaving both the business owners and the skiers feeling cheated by the season. It was too early in the fall to tell what was going to happen yet this year, but the white skiff on the ground could only be a good sign. The sky was all but clear on the east side of the pass, and a nearly full moon shined through the few remaining scattered clouds. The highway leveled out when they reached Lake Keechelus, and for the next five miles they drove silently along with the reflection of the moon beside them on the surface of the lake. Leaving the lake, they climbed again slightly before descending into the Yakima River drainage. They followed the river for many miles, through Easton, and Cle Elum, and then finally Ellensburg, before the river tuned South and left them alone in the dessert. The clouds were completely gone, and the moon shone down on them brightly as they made their way up the long slow climb to Ryegrass, where the road broke off sharply and dropped quickly into the coulee that led to the Columbia River at Vantage where they crossed. Crossing the Columbia put them on the east side of the state for sure, and Fred felt a measure of safety flow over him as they started up the steep roadway toward Royal City and the long straight highway that continued east.
         A mother coyote with a pup, casually crossed the highway in front of them, and clambered up the rough-cut that held the road from wandering aimlessly about the treeless terrain. The moon lit up the steep hills they were traveling through, and cast living shadows from the sagebrush as they blew in the brisk breeze. Ellis, without a word, took his tobacco and papers from his shirt pocket and began rolling a crude cigarette. He thought about how long he had been rolling his own cigarettes, and wondered if they would ever look as straight and uniform as the ones the old man in the park had rolled many years before. It seemed to Ellis that he wasn't getting any better, and he concentrated on the directions the old man had given him. Once the tobacco was in the paper, he curled the near side of the paper around the tobacco and pressed gently in the center with both thumbs. With one smooth motion, he rolled both the paper and its contents between his thumbs and fore fingers, producing a white cylinder. He licked the gummed edge of the paper, and finished up with the best cigarette he had made in a long time. He proudly placed it between his dry lips without twisting the ends, and lit a match. He was surprised to find that it didn't taste any better than the scraggly ones he usually rolled, and he leaned forward to crack the wing window for a bit of ventilation.
         Fred looked over at Ellis and his cigarette glowing in the soft dim light of the full moon. "That stinks!" he said, reaching into his shirt pocket for another joint. "Here light this. If you can smoke, then so can I. At least I'm smoking something worth while." Ellis lit the joint, taking in a large quantity of smoke as he did so, and handed it to Fred without a word. "I suppose you want some of this as well, you smoke hound."
         "Why not?" Ellis asked letting out a huge cloud of marijuana smoke that filled the Volvo. "I can smoke as many things at once as I can hold." He held out his hand for Fred to hand him the joint.
         Fred looked over at Ellis with a scowl that turned slowly into a smile and then handed him the joint. "I wonder if John and Duncan have quit school yet."
         "Gotten kicked out is more like it," Ellis said.
         "They don't kick you out for just not going, they'll have to quit or flunk out."
         "I think Duncan actually gets better grades if he doesn't go to class. When he goes, he gets pissed off at the teacher and writes some paper that gets him in trouble and drops his grade."
         Fred looked out his side window and watched the shadows of sagebrush dance with the wind for a while as he and Ellis rolled smoothly along in the Volvo. They had reached the top of the steep canyon that led from the Columbia River to the irrigated fields of the Royal Slope above. Here, they traveled through a rocky desert that some millions of years ago lay in the path of billions of gallons of water making its way, from what is now Western Montana, to the ocean. This aquatic exodus took place in a matter of several hundred years, and washed enough soil out of the area to make up most of Vermont. The hydraulic action washed the land clean of all its soil and left the basalt beneath it exposed to the elements. Time and wind have returned much of the soil to this area, creating a huge desert rock garden, which few people appreciate for its own nature.
         In the early fifties we began pumping water onto this fragile ground, and found it would grow almost anything. Today, because of our gluttonous requirements, we find this desert scattered with more and more green areas of farm ground, where nature had once made other plans. The stiff wind seemed to push the Volvo along before it, as it whipped up the bare soil from the cultivated fields into clouds of dust that made their way across the desert, finally settling out in the fields and streams to the East.
         With a soft breeze of his own, Ellis let out what was left of the last hit he had taken off the joint he and Fred had been smoking. The cigarette he had lit, and ignored in favor of the joint, had gone out and rested, dormant, in one hand, as he reached to take the joint from Fred with the other. He put the cigarette in his mouth, lit it from the glowing coal of the joint, and then handed the joint back to Fred. "Here, I don't want anymore of that," he said, and the two of them merrily filled the car with a mixture of smoke that finally obscured their view, and they had to roll the windows down and air out.
          "You got something I can use for a roach clip?" Fred asked, looking over at Ellis.
         "Yeah, I can handle that," Ellis said, taking a book of matches from his pocket and tearing off half the cover. "Here, give me that." He took what was left of the joint and rolling it into the scrap of matchbook cover, handed it back to Fred. "Here, hold it right here, and it should hold together."
         Fred took the roach, matchbook cover and all, from Ellis and immediately dropped the burning roach onto the seat between them.
         Ellis reached down and picked up the roach, took one last drag on it, as best he could, and pitched it out the open wing window. "There isn't enough left of that to risk wrecking the car for. You know, everyone hates this part of the trip across the state, but I kind of like the desert. I really think it has a beauty of its own. The sky is so big, and you can see for so far."
         "You can see a long ways, but there's nothing to see," Fred interjected.
         "There's lots to see," Ellis jumped back in. "It's just like the forest, but maybe a little sparser. There are plants to look at everywhere; they're just shorter. Sagebrush is just as attractive as a damn pine tree, and there are lots of flowers, especially in the spring, and I really like all the rock outcroppings. All the irrigation makes for some variation that wasn't here twenty or thirty years ago, but you know, I think I like it better dry and desert-like, the way 'Ma Nature' made it, before we started messing with it."

Copyright © 2007. Ed Gnaedinger.