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AZ, SOMEWHERE WEST OF GALLUP, NM: I blasted past Gallup without even seeing it, my head in the clouds, apparently. Gallup was going to be my gas stop, but first time I noticed it was gone was when I passed the Welcome to Arizona sign with 200+ miles on the clock. Gulp. Fortunately there were billboards for a station up ahead, and when I saw the gas station itself, I breathed quite the sigh of relief.
Unfortunately the gas station and pumps and signs were decoys. The gas station itself was abandoned, abandoned a lot longer than the signs had been, and when I asked the nearby proprioters what the deal was, all they wanted to do was sell me Chinese copies of Native American artifacts, and if I wasn't going to buy any, they didn't know where the closest gas station was. Grr. I told them I had enough gas to get back to Gallup (in a one gallon spare tank I carry) and they suggested I might want to stop at their other store on my way east, maybe I'd find something I wanted to buy and somebody there would help me. Double-grr.
I took the first exit back east, and stopped at the store they hadn't recommended, figuring any place they didn't like must have something going for it--Chee's Indian Store and Rock Shop. The owner, whose got the place from her mother (etc etc for four generations of Chee) greeted me at the sales counter and was the most interesting person I've talked with on this trip. She introduced herself as Karen ("I have a Navajo name also, which I won't tell you."), she and I talked for about an hour on a far ranging line of subjects from...man, there was so much to talk about, the major categories were our differences (genetic, cultural, environmental) and similarities (ditto).
One environmental difference I'd never considered is, she lives on the high desert, she's lived 6000 feet closer to space than I have, which over a lifetime is significant for UV damage and other background radiation.
One cultural similarity is we've both read Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight", her because she has a young daughter and Ms. Meyer's teen vampire novels are all the rage with teen aged women, and me because I enjoyed Meyer's adult novel "The Host" and wanted to see if her young adult novels were up to the same standard. Anyway, we both had the same reaction, which is that Twilight stunk from a stylistic standpoint, and also stunk from the thematic side, and we both went "eeew" over the basic concept of this guy vampire in high school (he looks young because he got vampirized when he was 17) wooing a classmate, with lots of swooning and we-mustn't-ing and gazing longingly and resisting of urges, and the girls are going gaga and it's a major motion picture and it's Book One of the teen romance trilogy of the decade, and come on now, the guy's an 87 year old child molester, why isn't everybody grossed out by this? Because he looks great, that's why.
"To girls that age, it's all about appearance," she told me, and I had to confess there are plenty of men in my age group who feel the same way. Anyway, it would take an hour to tell you what we talked about for an hour, but the conversation (and a bottle of water) left me deeply refreshed, and ready to follow her instructions, back on the freeway west, to Exit 339, where there was no sign on the freeway but if I turned left and crossed the train tracks I'd see a gas station. A real one.
Back at the car, a couple of women wanted to take pictures of each other behind the wheel, was that all right? Of course,can I take pictures of you taking pictures of you? Of course. So here are Jeanetta and Barbara, who I suspect have Navajo names they won't tell me.
At the gas station (which was jumping, and appears to be a hangout for locals) my fuel pump started making a funny noise. Holy smoke, how am I going to get a fuel pump way out here! It turned out it was merely beginning to suck bubbles, which was cool, because it showed me exactly how much useful fuel was in that JAZ 8 gallon tank.
I never needed to dip into my spare gas can. I'd got 230-something miles (I'll have to dig out the receipt) which was a pleasant surprise, particularly since I'd done some freeway hooning with a Honda S2000. Bottom line is, I could take him at low speeds, but by the time I was in mid-4th he was pulling away like I was...well he was sure as heck pulling away at a fast enough pace that, had a policeman interviened, I could have used it as evidence we weren't really racing. Racing? Come now, Officer, if we'd been racing, would I have let him pull away like that? Aerodynamics makes a huge difference at high speed, but light weight is the answer for acceleration; it more than balanced his extra 60 horsepower 'till areo took over.
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Locost builder and adventurer, and founder (but no longer owner) of Kinetic Vehicles
Last edited by JackMcCornack on May 7, 2009, 2:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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