Sometime during the night the flood dropped off and melted away, almost as abruptly as it had come. We awoke in the morning to the music of canyon wrens and a trickling stream, and found that our road was still in the canyon, though kind of folded over and tucked in and rolled up in corners here and there. It took us considerable roadwork and all day long to get out of North Wash. And it was worth every minute of it. Never had such interesting work again till the day I tried to take a Hertz rental Super-Sport past Squaw Spring and up Elephant Hill in The Needles. Or the time another friend and I carried his VW Beetle down through Pucker Pass off Dead Horse Point after a good rain.

At North Wash we had a midday rest at Hog Spring, halfway out. We met a prospector in a jeep coming in. He said we’d never make it. Hogwash. We said he’d never make it. He looked as pleased as we were, and went on.

Today the old North Wash trail road is partly submerged by the reservoir, the rest obliterated. The state has ripped and blasted and laid an asphalt highway through and around the area to link the new tin bridges with the outside world. The river is gone, the ferry is gone, Dandy Crossing is gone. Most of the formerly primitive road from Blanding west has been improved beyond recognition. All of this, the engineers and politicians and bankers will tell you, makes the region easily accessible to everyone, no matter how fat, feeble or flaccid. That is a lie.

It is a lie. For those who go there now, smooth, comfortable, quick and easy, sliding through as slick as grease, will never be able to see what we saw. They will never feel what we felt. They will never know what we knew, or understand what we cannot forget.

Drunk in the Afternoon

I’VE ALWAYS WANTED to write a story about getting drunk in the afternoon. Getting drunk in the afternoon was something I once did on a regular, weekly basis for many years. Me and my friends, such as they were. I say “were” because most of them are now dead, have disappeared or—making a transitive verb of it as in carefree colorful romantic Latin America—have been disappeared.

Alan was one. Fred made two, Bob the third.

These are fictitious names. The originals might have wives, children, family still living. Of course they do.

Friday was our favorite day of the operation, since none of us had classes on Saturday. We were students at the University of New Mexico when neither that university nor that state were much known outside of little circles in Carmel, Santa Monica, Cambridge, Greenwich Village, North Beach or Palma de Mallorca.

I’m talking about 1946–50. The three of us were World War II vets, G.I. Joes loafing through school on something called the G.I. Bill. Government issue: everything in the American world had somehow become Government issue. And we didn’t object one bit. We were anarchists. The Government had only recently tried to kill us, tried hard and seriously, shipping us overseas to Italy where people we had never met or even heard of, perfect strangers, did their best to shoot us dead with Mauser rifles, Luger pistols, burp guns, mortar fire, screaming Mimi’s, the Anzio Express.