First of all let me state - I REALLY did not want to call this chapter “Fear & Loathing On The Extraterrestrial Highway” - I fully recognize that I do not come close to writing anything as brilliant as Hunter, and the whole "Fear & Loathing” thing in general has been grossly overdone and beat to death where it has been associated with him. Besides, if you go back thru my blog posts, I already did my true “Fear & Loathing In Pitkin County” piece in homage to my mentor back in 2005. So I tried to come up with another title, I really did, but the truth is I couldn’t. Why? Because fear and loathing is EXACTLY what I experienced on my jaunt down the E.T. highway. Big time. Intense fear coupled with an extreme self loathing that I was so stupid not to fill up my gas tank before embarking on this holy hell of a highway. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Wikipedia defines the E.T. Highway, in part, as follows:
“State Route 375 (SR 375) is a state highway in south-central Nevada in the United States. The highway stretches 98 miles from State Route 318 at Crystal Springs northwest to U.S. Route 6 (US 6) at Warm Springs. The route travels through mostly unoccupied desert terrain, with much of its alignment paralleling the northern edges of the Nellis Air Force Range. The road originally traversed through what is now the northern reaches of the air force range in the 1930s, when it was previously designated State Route 25A and later part of State Route 25.
The top-secret Area 51 government base is near SR 375 and many travelers have reported UFO observations and other strange alien activity along this road. Such stories prompted the state to officially designate the route as the Extraterrestrial Highway in 1996. The small town of Rachel, located near the center of the highway, caters to tourists and UFO seekers with alien-themed businesses. Although the area receives some tourism due to alleged extraterrestrial activity, SR 375 remains a lightly traveled route.”
That’s the first part - more later. Now boy am I glad I didn’t read this definition BEFORE I traversed this leg of my journey. It was only after, when doing research for this chapter that I realized my ignorance at the time was bliss. I really WAS hoping, in my naivete’ that the ET Highway had been so named because of some long ago happening like the Roswell crash in New Mexico back in 1947.
I’m also glad that after leaving Cedar City @ 9 pm that I didn’t stick with my original plan to "drive through the night". Knowing that there would be “nothing” to see out in the vast nothingness of SR375, I figured just driving straight through in the dead of night would be the best plan. I had joked to my older daughter on the phone in fact when letting her know of my route that I expected the aliens to see my shiny, silver Hammy glowing in the moonlight and abduct me. She was not amused. I now see why. I mean, I knew all about Nellis AFB & Area 51 being out there, and I was actually kind of excited to see what the big deal was all about. But until you get out there and you’re actually driving it, you don’t know what you’re in for. God, am I glad I didn’t drive through there at night; did I say that already? So, if you don’t know how “Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas” begins, then this reference will be lost on you: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold................"
I hit the Nevada state line somewhere around 11 pm. Around 11:30 I had to pull into a closed gas station in Panaca (@ the disco). I took a 20 minute uncomfortable cat nap with two state troopers hovering nearby then decided to keep going. By the time I got to Caliente @ 12:30 am I decided to throw in the towel. Night driving is not my specialty. You start to see things and my eyes play tricks on me. I found a church to pull next to off the main road for quiet (churches are usually good spots for this). I left the dogs in the back of the Tahoe in their beds and climbed into Hammy in mine. Twenty minutes later I was awakened by the raucous noise of some town kids out looking for trouble roaming the streets. I listened intently, fearing they would walk over and tag Hammy’s fresh aluminum sides with black spray paint or something, but they went the other way.
I fell into a fitful sleep and promptly at 5 am was awakened by Jack and Bella barking. The guy across the street had come out onto his back patio and turned on the lights. He sat down to have his morning coffee and enjoy a small part of the day before the oppressive heat came again like I’m sure it did everyday in this NV town out in the middle of nowhere (again, WHY do people live in these towns? It boggles the imagination).
Jack and Bella wouldn’t settle back down, so I knew I was up for the day. I climbed wearily back into the driver’s seat and found a local park where they could take care of business. After checking the map, I headed out. I actually got to see the sunrise, a phenomenon I witness only a few times a year, being the night owl that I am. It was nice, but not enough to get up for every day like all of you morning people make such a big deal out of.
Around 7:30 or 8:00 am I came to the intersection of Rt. 93 & 318, where the ET Highway begins. It consisted of nothing more than some trash barrels at the fork and the ET highway sign. I pulled over briefly to get a shot of the sign then I set out. Coming to a sign that read, “No gas next 99 miles” I glanced down at my gas gauge; I had 3/4 of a tank, PLENTY to go 99 miles until I got to Tonapah, the next town with gas. OK, here we go, I thought. Indeed.
Let me preface my drive down this highway by saying that I wholeheartedly at this point take back all the things I have ever said about Kansas and Texas being the worst places to ever have to drive through. Until you drive the ET highway, you have NO fucking idea my friend. THIS HIGHWAY takes top honors in my book. It is literally like you are driving on Mars. Desolate and scary beyond compare, it gets even creepier when you KNOW you are being watched.
That’s right. Watched. I’m just driving along, trying to get into the groove, I’m just waking up, I could have used 8 more hrs. of sleep, okay shake it off now, we’ve got 99 miles to drive and then you can have breakfast, I told myself, as myself knows I like the reward system. No problem, piece of cake, we got this, lock and load, let’s DO this thing! So I’m driving, looking around, and the first thing I notice are these white rocks along the road. Now the landscape out here is brown and all other shades of dark, so it strikes me that either these rocks were painted white (although they don’t appear to be), or they came here from somewhere else. I try to slough it off, but I keep noticing them, as if the road has been marked as some sort of a runway or something. Hmmm. The next thing I start wondering in my random thoughts is WHY exactly our military chose this spot as a "research station" way out here in the middle of nowhere. Suddenly something man-made catches my eye faaaarrrr off to my left up on top of a mesa so far away that it must have taken a whole day just to drive up there. It is a large black box of a building with antennas and dishes and what not on top of it. I wave as I go by, imagining that there are 2 Air Force hotties watching me up close on satellite image drinking their morning cuppas. I want to give them their morning kick as well as let them know that I’m no dummy, I KNOW what’s going on here, ok? NO ONE pulls one over on me, you hear? I KNOW “The Man” is keeping secrets from the public regarding aliens, I rant in my head and giggle. So far, so good.
Eventually I come to the tiny burg of Rachel; really just a compilation of mobile homes clustered together, along with the “world famous” Alie-Inn (get it) motel. Everything looks deserted and it was not like I was planning on stopping anyway. I continue “gettin’ on down the road”. Shortly beyond Rachel I suddenly see an official looking new SUV tearing down a road off to my left coming in my direction. It enters the highway a short distance ahead of me, leaving a huge cloud of dust in his wake, I mean this guy is just FLYING. He must have seen me coming and wanted to get in front of me, I surmised. Why else would he need to go so fast so early in the morning with no one else around? When the dust clears I naturally look up the road. The vehicle has disappeared. Completely. Now, visibility out here is about 50 miles in any direction so where the fuck did that truck go? Hmmmm #2. Things are starting to get a little weird, I think to myself.
Here, now, is the second part of Wikipedia’s description of the E.T. Highway that drew my interest:
“Descending the summit, SR 375 nears the border of the Nellis Air Force Range. As the highway heads northwest through Tikaboo Valley, it meets Mail Box Road. Marked by a single postal drop known as the "black mailbox", the dirt access road leads to the restricted lands surrounding Area 51. The mailbox, which is no longer black, is commonly used as a gathering place for UFO seekers,[3] and two to three UFO sightings per week allegedly occur in the area.[4] SR 375 continues heading northwest from the mailbox, climbing in elevation again to reach the top of Coyote Summit at 5,591 feet”.
“Two to three UFO sightings PER WEEK, in this area”. All righty then. It was only later when reading this that I remembered it was shortly before this “mailbox road” that I had seen the first dead cow. It was shortly AFTER that I saw the next one.
Whenever you have open range, of course there is the possibility and likelihood that cows are going to get hit by trucks or cars. Except in this case, as I said before, visibility on this road goes forever. If you can’t see a cow in the road 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 miles ahead of you, then you have no business driving a vehicle. Plus, with this being one of the lesser traveled roads in all of the U.S., couple that with the odds of hitting a cow while you’re out here AT ALL - the odds have got to be in the cows’ favor dramatically. So maybe that is why THESE dead cows didn’t look like your usual “dead cows that got hit by a truck” dead cows.
The first cow, in a turnout, looked like it had had its insides completely vacuumed out. It was flat, dehydrated, but yet its skin was still somewhat fresh looking, like it hadn’t been there long. It also did not look completely ravaged by birds and coyotes, no bones sticking out, nothing like that. It was as if, like in Men In Black, something had unzipped it and stepped out. ‘Hmmmm #3, ok that’s weird’, I thought as I drove by.
The second cow was even more disturbing. It still had its insides and was fairly plump, however, all four of its legs were missing from the knees down. And the really weird thing was that they were all evenly symmetrical and rounded off at the knees, not jagged and broken like they would have been if they had been hit by a vehicle. It looked cauterized, surgical.
At this point I am ready for this drive to be over. NOW. I just want to get the FUCK off of this highway to hell, but I still have about 45 miles to go. It is at this point that I look down at my gas gauge - it has dropped to a quarter of a tank, still fine. When my eyes are drawn downward to it again about 10 minutes later, it had dropped drastically from there and was hovering on empty. Shit. I suddenly remembered that in having the Tahoe completely maintenanced before I left, I had specifically asked the auto tech WHY my gas gauge would drop off faster after reaching the 1/4 mark. Was there something wrong with the float in the gas tank perhaps? He stated that no, it wasn’t as simple as that (of course, is it ever?) and that in order to find the problem it would involve taking the whole gas tank out and checking the fuel pump, etc., at a cost of about $900. Having already spent $1100 on repairs, I told him I would just be aware of it and not let the Tahoe ever get down to a 1/4 of a tank again. Easy to say when you are in civilization every day and there is a gas station on every corner, but now here I was on Mars and in deep do-do.
For the next 35 miles, I gently talked to the Tahoe, begging with it, pleading, bargaining, apologizing for ever calling it a big piece of shit, even SINGING to it, anything to ensure that we made it to Tonopah. Whenever going down a hill I would shift into neutral to save every drop of gas I could. I even made up a song, “We Gotta Make It To Tonopah” and just sang that over and over to keep down my rising panic. By now the low fuel light had come on and I could not let my mind even go to the place of considering what I would do if I ran out of gas on this God forsaken road. ‘NO!’ I would shout in my head, “We’re going to make it!” I also spent many of those miles kicking myself in the ass for not having a gas can full of gas with me in spite of all of my other great planning. The Devil side of me was saying, “you’re a stupid idiot, you DESERVE to run out of gas out here”, while the Angel side of me would counter, “now you be quiet over there, we are going to make it and everything is going to be fine, you just wait and see”. That day, the Angel won.
Pulling at last into Tonopah, on fumes, I didn’t even bat an eye at the grossly overpriced gas that the Middle Eastern man was charging. Any other day I would have grumbled under my breath at the audacity to overcharge people just because you know you are one of the only gas stations in a hundred miles, but today I felt like hugging him.
I filled up and since there weren’t any other breakfast options, I grabbed a quick Croissanwich at the Burger King and continued on my way, shaky knees and all. I will not disparage poor Tonopah by describing its current rundown condition, nor its people for living there. After all, Tonopah saved my life this day.
Until next time, I am somewhere out here, living small and loving it largely.
Eli
