It was just before 9 AM (Nevada time) when I got to Clayton, New Mexico. I stopped to get some pictures of the neat old buildings downtown. It was a step back in time. The long, deep buildings still had high, tin ceilings. The lady at the R. W. Isaacs Hardware Co. still did her paperwork from a wooden, roll-top desk. At the Allsup’s store, I made a pit stop and asked for directions to the state park. The road goes around a bridge and makes a sharp turn down a steep valley. It was down that road that Satori clicked over 298,000 miles. It was a little over 10 miles to the park. I was there for dinosaurs.
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A million years ago, that whole area was a beach. At some point, several
different dinosaurs walked through the wet mud of the shoreline. The mud
dried and turned into rock, preserving the footprints. A walkway goes down
from the pavilion and gives visitors a close-up look at the footprints.
Butterflies and dragonflies were in the air. A rabbit scampered across
the prints and under the walkway.
One footprint was as big as a basketball. From another set of prints, scientists could tell the creature stopped and hesitated before going on his way. There were even some baby dinosaur tracks. On the way back, I met an elderly couple, shading themselves with an umbrella. “You touristing?” the man asked. They were passing through from North Carolina, and were amazed at the lake. “You don’t expect to see this much water way out here,” the woman said. They were the only people I saw the whole time I was in the park. |
| I drove back to Clayton. There was a dragon sculpture built into the former Wild West Trading Post. (Currently for sale.) What a rusty Chinese dragon had to do with the wild west, I don’t know. I went back to the Allsup’s store for $20 of gas. I didn’t fill up because I kept thinking I’d find cheaper gas down the road. While I was sitting in the shade of the pumps, I returned a call from a prospective employer. They wanted me to come in for a face-to-face interview! I was so happy, I failed to notice the pickup behind me waiting to use the pumps. It was just before 11 AM (Nevada time) when I took Main Street out of town. I took Highway 412 northeastward towards the Oklahoma line. Boise City was 40 miles away. |  |
| Police lights flashed up ahead. As I got closer, I saw a police car and another vehicle were next to the wide median. I thought he’d pulled someone over, but as I approached I saw tire marks and big scratches in the highway. In the median was a houseboat, hanging half off its trailer. An RV was parked off the road up ahead. It looked like the houseboat trailer had come unhitched from the RV and swerved around the road before crashing in the median. It didn’t look like anybody was hurt. A family sat on what was left of the trailer, which may or may not have been serviceable anymore. I thought, Somebody’s weekend just took a wrong turn. |  |
| Epilogue
A couple of weeks after returning from Burning Man, I went with some friends on an expedition to the Great Salt Plains of Oklahoma. It's a state park that has a salt "playa" created from the remnants of a great sea that covered Oklahoma millions of years ago. People come from all over to dig for hourglass selenite salt crystals, which grow there with a pattern not found anywhere else on Earth. It was fun. I found a bunch of beautiful crystals. It was nice to know that I still had some adventure in me, the desire to go new places, the itch to explore. I'd much rather go looking for adventure than to wait for it to come to me. The heart of the "cargo cult" theme at Burning Man was the belief in
some higher power or intelligence coming into our world and making
our dreams come true. The truth is, the power to make our dreams come true
has been here all along. We often plod through our mundane lives, hammered
with problems and stresses, desperately trying to keep up, and it can all
be overwhelming. Goals look pointless, and dreams look impossible... But
people need dreams, so much so that they come to us
whether we want them or not.
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