Not Life Or Death

After lunch in Rock Springs, Thursday, I drive past Evanston and into Utah. I-80 south of Salt Lake City is a tough drive, with 6% grades. Trucks drive 30 mph to 75 mph, depending on the moment and depending on the lane. They also have a lane for runaway trucks, but I saw none, and my 1976 Dodge RV didn't runaway either.

The salt desert is a much smoother drive. The view of clumps of mud over the salt fields reminds me of Minnesota in early-February.

As evening approaches, I take the Wendover exit, on the Nevada state line. As I pull toward the stop light, I notice that the RV isn't stopping. I push all of the way to the floor, where brake pedals aren't suppose to go, and the RV halts in an almost legal spot. As I turn left, I notice the police officer in the other lane and I do my best to be inconspicuous.

I am able to park behind the Bonneville Motel and to get a $24 room. Next, I walk to the neighboring Montego Bay State Line Casino and order a $6 prime rib sandwich. I ask about repair shops and the waitress tells me that Sinclair is the only place in town. Sinclair is about a block away on this 1 1/2 mile strip of casino town bordered by trailers and shacks.

At 5 am, I wake up feeling spiritual about my "near death experience" of faulty brakes. I walk to the Sinclair, which is still closed, thinking about my mother, who had recently died. At 7:45, I try again, and the Mexican-American school crossing guard tells me Sinclair opens at 8. When I notice the students from the shacks going to school, I think about Grandma Rasmussen, who was concerned about the Mexican-American students in the border town of Donna, Texas, where Grandpa and Grandma used to spend winters.

I look up and see the red-orange-yellow-green portion of a strip of rainbow and the blue-indigo-violet colored sky. Just next to it, I see the green-yellow-orange-red portion of a second rainbow. I contemplate rainbows and figure that the colors are always reversed when you see two.

The rain falls and I wonder how the Utah salt fields must look now. Have the mud clumps disappeared into whiteness, just as the mud disappears when the snow melts in Minnesota?


I look up again and see the ends of two rainbows, only now the colors aren't reversed. Instead of side by side, the rainbows are one above the other. The lower rainbow is shifted by one rainbow width. Nature has just taught me that it is possible for double rainbows to exist both forward and in reverse.

Is Physics just our best explanation of what we know God to do?

Then, I wonder how people would feel about God if people were like plants and the dust of your skin caused random offspring without you really being involved. How powerless would we feel?

Could we be even less powerful than we already are?

The owner with his kit car and personalized license plate pulls into Sinclair at 8 am. He adds brake fluid and the brake light of the RV goes off. Then it goes on again. At about 9 am, the owner babbles to me about what could be wrong. Then, he sends me 1 1/2 miles up the hill to Brad's Auto repair on the opposite side of the strip.

Brad is very young looking. He also seems clean cut. "There's not much for me to do here," Brad tells me.

I'm impressed by Brad's maturity at his young age, given that his shop shares walls with a bar, where strippers are already performing.

Brad has me pump the brakes and out spews fluid. Progress. It's too hot down next to the exhaust line to work now, so, Brad sends me away, and I find a bus to my motel.

I take a shower, while I still can, and make it back to Brad's just before noon. It's raining, and there's an inch of water under the RV, so he's trying to pull it into the garage stall. It clears by a hangnail.

"I thought this was a desert," I tell Brad.

"Me too. I don't like it when it rains here. The rain drops are huge and it gets real cold," Brad tells me. I sit on a wooden crate, away from the wet breeze.

"This is your lucky day," Brad explains thirty minutes later as he holds a five foot section of brake line with fifteen bends.

"I've had quite a few lucky days," I respond.

But, he's not being sarcastic. Brad has found a hole in the brake line, and will fashion a replacement brake line after a visit to Carquest.

I walk to the Mexican restaurant next to the strip bar and have the best shredded beef, egg taco meal in my life. Then I spend the afternoon wandering amongst casinos and Welcome Centers.

At 4:45, I pay my bill to Brad and wonder if I am his first billing. (Normally, Brad, Sr. is in charge, I've figured out. Brad might actually be fifteen years old.)

Then I head through desert rain, toward the sun of Elko, NV, where I learn that Minnesota people root for the Twins at sports bars during their $150 round-trip casino vacations.

Despite the drama, I've made great progress, and have seen a lot. I'm anxious to tell my story, so I find a library. Checking e-mail on the Elko library Internet computer, I learn that while I was at Wendover, my step-father's 99-year old mother has died, a cousin has given birth to a new baby girl, and a friend is celebrating her fifth anniversary of being cancer-free.

My "near death" experience seems trivial. Or maybe, in the bigger picture, life and death are ordinary events.