Page 15 of Sheltering Instinct

“Picturesque dirt.”

“You’d have to show me. I can’t imagine that.” Gwen gestured to the area around them. “This is pretty darned picturesque. I take back my snide comments.”

“Thanks. So there I am driving. After about an hour of that, there was no one and nothing. No pull-offs, no houses, no other cars.”

“No cell towers to tell someone you were freaking out. Given the fact that you did undergrad a very long time ago, I bet at the time the connection was zilch.”

“I had a flip phone, which was useless, and a GPS unit. The GPS said there was no gas for four hours in any direction, of which there were only two, where I’d come from and straight ahead. My car holds about four hours of highway gas miles.”

“Ah, I see. You’d already driven over an hour at that point. Not enough gas, what else was lacking?”

“Water for one. If I broke down, there was literally nothing and no one out—I take that back. That’s not right. I saw a lone cow that looked like it was lost, and I saw a guy on a bike heading the opposite way than I was. Shorts, shoes, no shirt, no camel bladder of water. Nothing extra on his bike.”

“No bells and tassels?” Gwen turned to the front of the line and scowled. “For heaven’s sake. What the heck is going on? I need to pee.”

“I’m distracting myself with the story. Okay, the guy on the bike should have been prepared with his survival ten and maybe saddlebags with food and water. A water bottle? A shirt and hat? Tire repair kit? I guess, in my mind, only a serial killer would act that crazy.” Tess wrinkled her nose. “As I say all this out loud, Namibia rings a lot of those ‘What the crap did I get myself into?’ bells for me.”

“No cows, though. But there were baboons on the side of the road who looked like they’d like to hitch a ride.” Gwen scuffed a foot into the sand. “So there you were … ”

“Terrified. Squeezing that steering wheel for dear life, telling myself that if anyone popped up in the middle of the road and tried to flag me down, I’d note the coordinates and tell the police.”

“But if they also happened to have an ax in their hands? You thought that one through, too.” Gwen grinned. “Tell the truth.”

“If anyone got in the road, I planned to floor it and drive right over them. I primed myself for that eventuality.”

The woman behind Gwen turned to give Tess a long, hard look.

Tess offered up a flat-lipped smile. “About twenty years ago. Everyone’s fine,” Tess said, and the woman turned back around.

Gwen raised her brow and tucked her chin. “See? You were fine. No need for all that worry.”

“Mmm. I think maybe my guardian angel was working overtime that day. There was the unusual compulsion to top off the gas, and then there was the thirty minutes of driving on an empty tank that, to this day, I can’t fathom.”

“You know this. When it says empty, you still have a bit.”

Tess shook her head. “I rolled into the gas station in New Mexico, and when I got to the pump, I couldn’t get the top off. I had to ask the guy who was gassing up beside me. He two-handed it and had to lean his weight to get it off. My tank was so empty that it had vacuum sealed.”

“And no people until that gas station?” Gwen asked.

“No one and nothing after the cow and the biker.”

“Wow.” Gwen shook her head.

“Yep. It was definitely wow. And since there wasn’t a bar in immediate view—”

“And you weren’t of legal drinking age to imbibe—”

“That, too. I soothed myself with fat and sugar.”

“Bunuelos?” Gwen lifted her chin. “Your turn in the loo. Please hurry.”

Tess handed off her survival ten bag to Gwen. “Bunuelos, yes. You know me so well.” She rounded the metal wall to takeher turn in the latrine. As she dropped her trail pants to her boots and squatted over the hole in the ground that had ripened to a nauseating smell with the sun's heat, she called out, “What are your thoughts about Big Daddy Dune? Do you want to climb it?”

“It’s not a hard climb. Hour up. Five minutes down.”

“Yeah. So you want to do that?” Tess held her breath as she pulled up her pants; a few more seconds, and she’d be in less noxious air.

Gwen traded places with Tess, calling out, “To be honest, I think I’ve climbed my share of dunes. It’s lost the novelty for me. I want to see the salt flats and the desiccated trees. They’re so beautifully stark against the horizon. I planned to spend my time photographing them.”

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