VERONICA KUFFEL

JUNE 12

“Shit Show” – Peter McPoland, 2021

On the first day of my trip, I made a pretty large error.

As I pulled into a Basha’s in Kayenta, AZ for the night, a quick thought came to mind. I was in Diné/Navajo Nation, and although my camping app told me I could sleep in this grocery store parking lot, I was skeptical.

After a quick google, I discovered it is very much not allowed. It is, in fact, trespassing, punishable by citation and in some cases, jail time.

Out of respect for the Diné people, I did not want to trespass on land that wasn’t mine. As a houseless 23-year-old that just left her full-time job, I also had neither money nor time to afford these penalties.

So here I am in the dead center of this indigenous nation at 9 p.m. To my left and right, I had two-hour drives, in total darkness, to alternate campsites. To the north, a few paths through the mountains. Very little reception in all directions.

The sky was getting darker with each passing moment I took to think. I was running out of time.

But as it may, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start from the beginning.

Leaving Tucson was an odd experience, to say the least. I had prepped for the arrival trip for about a month, almost better than the one last fall. And yet I still felt unprepared for the road ahead. Will the van be okay? Will I be okay?

Needless to say, my first day on the road cleared those thoughts from my head. I needed that space for the…. incident.

WEEKEND IN PHOENIX

I drove from Tucson to Phoenix to spend the last weekend with my grandparents. I then set off into eastern Arizona, driving through fields of sand, cacti and bramble. Wherever I go, there are always fields, plains or wide open spaces at some capacity. What can I say, plain girl is back.

I crossed roads with no discernable speed limits and blue-filled aqueducts before reaching the Tonto National Forest.

As I’m driving across the desert, I wonder how famous artists would paint this landscape. Would bushes be splats, or balls or swirls or intricate taps of a fine-toothed brush?

Then I started to think about how yes, there is beauty in this world and we can all appreciate it, but we also see it differently. I mean hey, there are some people out there who look at the desert beauty like I look like midwestern plains. Wild.

Green desert shrubs turned into short yellow grass and what looked like scorched hills. White ash spots mingled with saguaros and I passed over pink fire repellent dusted across the highway.

I pulled into Petrified Forest National Park with a few hours to spend jangling in my jeans.

PETRIFIED FOREST NATIONAL PARK

The forest is also, oddly enough, a large desert plain. If I remember it right, a ton of logs were cut down by rapids and sunk into a huge body of water. That water dried into the plains, but the waterlogged logs crystallized into, well, basically rocks.

Today, these petrified logs are scattered across the valley in grey, blue brown and orange piles. It’s a place where wood transformed into stone to survive.

I drove through the park and made it to an area comparable to the Dakota Badlands. Unlike most of the southwest, the badlands here are muted shades, as opposed to the crisp sunset colors of iron and sulfur and other elements.

The petrified forest does have one thing that the rest don’t: blue in its mesas, hence; the Blue Mesas.

INITIAL PLAN

So the plan was to cross through the national park and make my way up to northern Arizona. I wanted to drive through the famous Monument Valley, one of the most beautiful desert rock formations and an iconic scenic highway.

I decided I would spend the night in a nearby city and drive through it in the morning. Only, there was one problem–I opened my map to see only a handful of campsites in the area. Usually, an attraction this big would have at least five or ten to choose from.

Maybe I should’ve taken the hint, but I shrugged it off and decided on a Basha’s grocery store parking lot.

Walie glided through the valley and into the painted desert, a tapestry of hard rock hills splattered in red and orange earth tones. I passed a highway marker that read, “Welcome to the Navajo Nation.”

I thought, wow. That’s so cool, who would have thought (clearly, I did not).

The one thing I will say is the northeast region is a collection of small towns amidst the desert rocks. I stopped at a gas station, but other than that, I just drove to the Basha’s.

By the time I got to Kayenta, AZ, I had about four or five hints that I should double-check my rest spot. But the one that actually made me think twice is kind of bizarre.

I stopped in the grocery store to pee, and walking out is when I noticed the dogs. There were a handful that just ran around town with no collars. In Minneapolis and Tucson or Phoenix, this wasn’t common.

I thought back to a story I wrote with an animal nonprofit called Rescue Me Marana. During our interview, my source told me that they also help tend to animals on reservations and near the Mexican border.

At that moment, I remembered reservations are their own territories with their own regulations. I walked into a sovereign nation. So I did my research and discovered I couldn’t sleep in the reservation–right in the middle of the reservation.

I took a little longer than I should have to freak out. I jostled between freecampsites.net and Apple Maps, my mind freezing up on what to do.

Eventually, I let out a couple of big screams in the safety of Walie. I decided to travel all the way to Cortez, Colorado, about a two-hour drive in daylight. Definitely slower at night.

I grit my teeth and rolled out of Kayenta around 10. The desert highway was black. There were no streetlights for miles. Minus a few vehicles here and there, I was alone in the middle of nowhere. With no signal, I didn’t dare touch my phone to mess with the path Apple laid out for me.

As I crossed Four Corners, I remember whimpering, trying to find safe areas to pull over before Cortez. I was scared, wired and exhausted. I white-knuckled the wheel. My eyes were bulging and wet. The only thing keeping me up, frankly, was fear and weak adrenaline.

I pulled into Walmart by 1 in the morning. I let out weak sighs of relief–I was too dog-tired to cry. Walie settled in a spot circled by larger vans and RVs, and even he exhaled a thankful sound as I turned off the ignition.

It doesn’t happen a lot, but when I get like this, my limbs coil around my body. I stepped over my cup holders and faintly made my bed. I crawled under the covers, body still wired from the drive, and closed my eyes.

What a great start to the trip!