When you find yourself that far from home, and with that little amount of money, and pride that would not let you ask for help from home, you should have a plan in mind before you set off home. We had discussed it at length with Troll, who had some experience with traveling on the cheap. We figured that it would take us about 5 days to make the trip home, as we would have to go mainly town to town where the interstate went through empty parts of the country. The plan was to hop from city to city spare changing and dumpster diving, and if all else failed, asking the authorities for help. Most cities or towns with more than 15,000 people in them will have some type of traveler assistance program. This sounded a little bold to me at first, and I did feel like a tool the first time I had to do it, but it got easier. It was easier and more pleasant than spangeing, that’s for sure. I would go to the police station, introduce myself, and let them know that I needed to get home. Most of them used vouchers that were good at the local gas station. Occasionally, they would refer us to a church or tell us that there was no program, but normally, they were glad to help us leave town. Ehem.
We headed north out of Silver City toward Socorro, NM. Things went well in Socorro. This was my first attempt at asking for help from the police, and it was as simple as filling out a form, handing over my ID for a moment, and redeeming a $10 voucher across the street. We started out of town late at night, planning to drive to the next rest stop and sleep. As we went up a slight grade, on newly paved highway, the Chevette’s lights blinked and dimmed. The car cut off halfway up the hill, and the shoulder was none too wide, and bordered by a guardrail. I couldn’t do anything in the dark, and while I felt like the car
probably wouldn’t be rear ended while we slept, I did take a relatively fatalistic approach to my repast. The car had that soothing rocking motion of trucks blowing by at speed and the wind they created in their wake. In the morning, I looked under the hood, found nothing awry, and scratching my head, tried the ignition. The car fired right up. I got us down the road a ways to where I had mor room to work, turned the car off, and back on. No problem. Huh. Shortly after this, as the day’s light became more complete, we looked out into the landscape south of the road and saw this along the roadside:
there were lots of these radar dishes. This was the
national radio astronomy observatory, and like the umbrellas, we had no clue about them until we got home and remembered to look it up.