We were far from home, somewhere near the California-Nevada state line, approaching Race Mile 235 with midnight coming on. Through a crack in the wheel well I could see the desert rushing by beneath us. I knew the endangered Mojave Desert tortoise favored darkness for getting about, and found myself dreading a bump and a crunch.
By now my race notes were torn to shreds, and I sat in the passenger seat of our 1969 Volkswagen bug helping John direct the car by feel. A staked pink course marker flashed in our light bar. The black arrow directed us away from the barbed wire fence ahead. It had been right around here, as the sun set on our previous lap, where the road forked, and we got lost.
“John,” I shouted over the radio, “We’re off to the right!”
“You sure?” he asked, the roar of the rear-mounted engine tapering as he eased off the accelerator.
“Yes,” I said, tugging against the helmet restraints as I tried to locate the road. “Turn.”
John wrenched the wheel. The car revved as we slammed into a sand hill. He shifted into Reverse. Our wheels spun, working like spades. With a puff, then a gurgle, our tailpipe slipped beneath the sand. “Fuck!” John yelled, banging his hands on the wheel.
We stared ahead into the desert as the engine idled. If we weren’t the last ones on the course of the Mint 400, out of a field of half a thousand, we were damn near close. As I had learned over the last couple of days, the J.F.F. philosophy dominated our class of the race—Just Fucking Finish. 65 miles. So close.
I flipped up the visor and unhooked the hose pumping filtered air into my helmet. My headset crackled as I pulled out the wire. The latch of the door gave, but the door stuck. My heart began to rev.
It had been a mental battle to even step into this race car. After all, my own father, who had left our house when I was seven and my sister four, could hardly work himself into a sleeping bag. He didn’t like tight spaces, and I blamed my claustrophobia on him.
John worked his phone, trying to get a signal to text his guys who had promised to tow us out of any trouble. I drove my shoulder against the door. A steady stream of sand began spilling in around the edges.
“You okay, man?” John asked, peering over.
I closed my eyes and tried to breathe. Despite the chill desert air, sweat broke out across my brow. I unzipped the neck of my flame-retardant race suit. Brendan, you have no one but yourself to blame for being out here, stuck in the middle of the desert in a sinking Volkswagen.
That wasn’t entirely true. I could pin that one on my father as well.
In the winter of 1972, Dick Thomas, my father’s editor at the Rocky Mountain News, sent him into the mountains to interview Darcy Brown, the patriarch of the Aspen Skiing Corporation. Not long after he reached the ski town, a commuter plane crashed, and he found himself walking among seats poleaxed into the snow with the bodies still strapped in.
To decompress after filing his piece on the incident, he retreated to Aspen’s Hotel Jerome, sidling up to the famous J-Bar. And there in the corner, wearing aviator glasses and pulling on his signature cigarette holder, was Hunter S. Thompson.
Over a steady flow of Chivas, the two men discussed Thompson’s unsuccessful run for Sheriff of Pitkin County two years before, the extreme violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and the Mint 400—the famous off-road desert race that Hunter wrote about for Rolling Stone, which eventually led to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
A few months later Thompson traveled to Denver to have the ears of his two Doberman Pinscher pups cropped. He looked my father up, and the two ended up at the bar of the venerable Denver Press Club. Hunter drank a bourbon, while my father sipped Michelob. Over boiled hot dogs Hunter “rattled on madly,” eventually suggesting “finding whores,” as my father recalls. At which point my father, sharing a ranch house with my soon-to-be-mother, said he needed to be getting home.
Fast-forward half a century to Sitka, Alaska. June 2021. My friend John Maxey and I were washing dishes at the house where I live with my wife Rachel, and our three daughters. He handed me a mixing bowl. “You have any interest in helping me out with the Mint 400? Maybe even co-driving?”
It was an offhand ask, one that required a visual sweep to see if Rachel was around before answering. John, with his preternatural awareness of the world around him, lowered his voice. We’d be racing in early December, when the desert wasn’t too hot, he told me—and, as I’d later learn, when the Mojave Desert tortoise wouldn’t be breeding. To clinch the deal he told me that this year’s 400 would in fact be a race of 300 miles—three laps along an undisclosed course with untested terrain.
I set the bowl in the cupboard and closed the door. Thinking of how I might put the ask to Rachel. Knowing her, she’d want to give me the kids and race in the Mint herself.
“Sure,” I said flatly. “So long as I can write about it.”
John paused. He did not like to be written about. “I could co-drive,” I said.
That evening he sent me a video of his charcoal black 1969 Volkswagen, which was known on the circuit as La Tortuga. Not, I thought, the most promising name for a race car. But one that would certainly be at home in the Mojave with its wild brethren.
As the days began to contract in Alaska, I researched Class 11, the section of the race we’d be competing in, which only had one straightforward requirement: be a “Type 1” stock Volkswagen, with the original drum brakes, stock 1600 cc engine, and transmission. The roll cage, five-point safety harness, and fire-suppression system—thankfully, these could all be modern.
Still, Class 11 cars were the distinct antonym to the trophy trucks we’d be sharing the course with. The larger, unrestricted vehicles boasted the power of over 1,000 horses, and had helicopters radioing obstacles ahead. The idea that we were sharing the course with state-of-the-art vehicles built for the desert astounded me.
“I mean, you’re basically out there driving your grandfather’s car in a super-competitive, high-speed desert race,” Mint owner Josh Martelli said when I asked him about it. (This conversation was also how I learned about the reproductive patterns of the desert tortoise.) “And that takes balls.”
In my case, it wasn’t my grandfather’s car—but my father’s.
In addition to his checkered past with Hunter, William Cecil Jones speaks wistfully of his days in Southeast Asia, where he landed after getting kicked out of the Peace Corps for his inability to work under authority. He taught literature at a university in Thailand, where his overseer found him “insufficiently subordinate” and his contract was not renewed. He then took a job for a whacked-out Chicagoan with one glass eye who ran the Bangkok office of an international car dealership, and after six weeks transferred to their Saigon outpost, where the company was selling Volkswagen bugs to servicemen and diplomats. He wanted to go into war reporting, but with his 1-A status and the draft breathing down his neck, he returned to the house where he grew up in West Philly. First, though, he put in an order for his own 1965 VW Beetle 1300.
More than once I’ve heard him speak of the sun-splashed day in the summer of 1967 when he hailed a taxi to the Philly docks and watched as the cargo ship made fast. He picked out his gleaming bug, lashed to the bow. The frame settled lightly over the chassis as the car touched down in the New World.
Like my father, I immediately took to the punchy, blue-collar ethos of the Beetle—and, by extension, Class 11. The bug, synonymous with grit and ingenuity, was the car that gave “the people” the chance to build a monster in their garage using stock parts dug out of car graveyards.
The same year my father met his Beetle in Philly, a Volkswagen factory in Puebla, Mexico, opened its doors, and the first of 21 million vochos—“bugs,” as the Mexicans renamed the car—rolled off the line. Just shy of a year later, a Las Vegas real estate developer named Del Webb, a friend of Howard Hughes and a Sin City visionary, started a 400-mile desert rally, creatively named “The Mint 400 Del Webb Desert Rally.” On the third of April, 1968, at 1:20 pm, 101 dune buggies, motorcycles, Volkswagens, and trucks blasted off from Del Webb’s Mint Casino and Hotel on Fremont Street, in downtown Vegas. The racers crushed through the Mojave for the better part of 400 miles—depending on how many times they got lost on their way to the town of Beatty—before completing the loop and returning to the hotel. The motorcycle team of Gunnar Lindstrom and J.N. Roberts came in first, finishing at 12:27 that morning.
While Lindstrom and Roberts celebrated, a writer named Hunter Thompson was preparing to go to Chicago to cover the Democratic Convention. He had already made a name for himself publishing an account of his two years riding with the Hell’s Angels, the notorious motorcycle gang that ended up “stomping” him. Perhaps recognizing the congruity of Thompson’s crazed first-person style of journalism and the Mint, in 1971 an editor at Sports Illustrated called on the writer to pen a 250-word photograph caption for the race.
When Thompson handed in 2,500 words, arguing that the “the Mint 400 is a far, far better thing than the Superbowl, the Kentucky Derby, and the lower Oakland roller derby finals all rolled into one,” the magazine, as the writer later put it, “aggressively rejected” the article. Thompson turned to Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone, who sent him back to Las Vegas to cover a police convention on illegal drugs. The account of both trips came out in Rolling Stone in two installments—and a couple years later as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Meanwhile, the Mint 400 continued to go strong until 1988, when Del Webb sold his Mint Hotel & Casino. After a twenty-year hiatus, the race kicked back into gear in 2008, using a different route from the original loop through the town of Beatty. Following a series of bills from the Bureau of Land Management, the race threatened to disappear altogether, before television producers Josh and Matt Martelli got involved, purchasing what Josh calls “a famous name” in 2012.
Josh, the younger of the two brothers, said that preserving the participation of the stock VWs was one of their top priorities. “In our eyes,” he said, “the Volkswagen guys are the real warriors.”
Race etiquette backs this up. I read how the Mint 400, along with the notorious Baja 1000, treats Class 11 cars—if not the drivers themselves—as a fascinating, endangered species. It is illegal to nerf a Class 11—“nerf” being the lingo for nudge in a race—just as it’s illegal to touch a Mojave Desert tortoise as it crawls across the sand.
“At the end of the day, Class 11 is really just a bunch of old-school back-alley brawlers trying to get across the desert safely and finish their race,” Josh told me. “It’s not like they’re breaking any records. They just want to survive.”
I emerged from the jetway at McCarran International in Las Vegas late and stood in front of a Wheel of Fortune slot machine, mesmerized by the lights. After a lack of compelling results when she Googled “Mint 400 death crash,” Rachel had agreed to watch the girls—with the caveat that I’d be on the hook the next time she wanted to drive for ten hours into the desert.
At the baggage carousel I sighted my friend Jordan Rosen. With his tall good looks, he resembled a guy who had just crossed Iceland in a souped-up Land Cruiser for Red Bull—which he had. We did the pound-shake, and I remarked on his creepy semblance to Lacerda, the Portuguese photographer in the movie version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
“Don’t start.”
Outside, trailered behind John’s F250 pickup, sat our race car, La Tortuga, the squat rear-end tattooed with sponsor and tech inspection stickers from ages ago. As I squared up to the front, its round headlights seemed to interrogate me right back. This was one badass terrapin.
I introduced Jordan to John, who immediately recalled Raoul Duke’s line: “You’re not Portuguese, man!”
We repaired to the Primm Valley Resort and Casino, about 40 miles south of Las Vegas. After a mild skirmish over air temperature, Jordan and I snuggled into our Queen bed. No sooner had we closed our eyes than the sun rose bright and glaring, illuminating the silhouettes of mountains to the east and west. At a gas station we coffeed up, and I purchased a fire-engine red sunhat of the type Hunter might have favored. Then we set out for Vegas, where we slipped into the Tortuga. John did his belt, but not me.
A police cruiser escorted us to Fremont Street, where photographers in orange vests clicked as we rumbled past. Bass thrummed as diesel exhaust mixed with the scent of ramen and fried chicken. Vendors peddled everything from hydraulic reservoirs for shocks to CBD balm—presumably to bring your body back to life after eight hours of pounding.
A guy with matted brown hair and mirrored shades leaned into the car, sloshing his beer. “Yo, are you the bros who drove their bug all the way from Massachusetts to race?”
“We’re not,” John said, with his easy-going smile.
At the Western Hotel we made a hard left toward the yellow inspection tents. A man with an impressive gray mustache leaned in and said, “This was my car.” John stopped as the man gave the roof a familiar pat. He told us that he had attempted the Baja 1000 three times.
Watching him, it occurred to me that if Hunter had actually completed his Sports Illustrated assignment, he might have taken a particular interest in Class 11, with its bespoke vehicles—rubber chickens lashed to the grill, teal shark fins, pool balls mortised out for gear shifts—not to mention the people who drove them. This man was a firefighter who had become obsessed with racing the stock VWs—a perfect example of what Hunter called the “special breed” that the Mint 400 attracted.
On the other hand, if Hunter had done what he was told, my father wouldn’t have run into him that afternoon at the Hotel Jerome. For that matter, if my father had listened to authority, he wouldn’t have been there either. No path is a straight one, as John and I were about to learn.
At the judge’s station, John dumped the contents of our duffel—helmets, race gloves, suits, fire-retardant shoes—in front of a purple-lipsticked woman.
“Head restraints?” the woman asked, as she picked up John’s kidney belt to examine it.
John cursed. Designed to keep our heads from flying off, these would seem to be critical items. He had forgotten them at the hotel.
She waved us on.
After trailering the car, we headed to registration to get our transponder, then to El Cortez Casino to pick up our free earthenware bottle of moonshine, which struck me as suspect merch for an off-road driving race, but who was I to judge.
Back at the parking lot, John and I played Tetris with a screw jack, a high-lift, plastic slats known as vehicle recovery boards, water bottles, and Jordan’s grandmother’s camera, which he insisted I take to get shots in the car. Across the lot sparks from a grinder showered onto the gravel. I wandered over, and found myself speaking with John Williams, a stocky Black man with a serious mien who led Warrior-Built, a team of wounded warriors and combat veterans. Their car, “The Machete,” had been diagnosed with missing welds.
“We’re out there in the desert, trying to get this right,” Williams said. “And when you put your phone down, and wrench on a vehicle, it helps.”
When I told him I was co-driving the Tortuga, Williams cocked his head and grinned. “You’ll see. It’s all about finessing rather than just hitting the skinny pedal. You push too hard, it breaks.”
The next morning, I zipped up my flame-retardant suit, cinched down my red hat, which had become—in my own head, clearly—the lightning rod for the Mint and Hunter and my father, along with a damn good protector from the desert sun. John stuffed gear into his duffel.
“Head restraints?” I asked.
“Head restraints,” he confirmed.
We crossed Interstate 15, and made for the pits. John said to keep an eye out for “Bugville.”
We seemed to be late to a city block party that had been going since dawn. Folks in jumpsuits emblazoned with sponsors spoke importantly to one another as they dashed in and out of spotless tool trailers. Not only did we not have a tool trailer for the Tortuga, or a pit crew—we didn’t have enough gas to make it through the race, as John coolly told me. “Lacerda’s going to have to come through and fill up our 5-gallon jugs.”
My pulse quickened as we caught sight of the Slug Shark, a notoriously customized turquoise and pink bug that had been dominating Class 11 for the past couple years. John hopped out, and a man I immediately recognized as Blake Wilkey appeared. “No problem, dude. Bring her in right here.”
I knew Blake from watching a few too many (read all) of his YouTube videos after getting the girls to bed. His blasé demeanor—in both looks and speech he was Spicoli in *Fast Times at Ridgemont High—*contrasted with his gearhead nature. He was known on the circuit for serving 45 days in jail after posting an “Urban Assault” video in which he rips through San Diego at insane speeds in his 700-horsepower bug. He apologized on local news and called jail time “a major drag.”
Power lines sizzled as we backed the bug off the trailer. Blake strolled by, eating a banana, strands of his fair hair shining in the sun. “You fired up, dude?”
“Fired up,” I confirmed, turning away as he opened the door of a truck and peed into the sand. It suddenly seemed as if men everywhere were peeing and eating bananas.
Bugville came to life, building to a roaring crescendo of the sort general in ’70s Mexico City, I imagined. John pressed the starter on the Tortuga. I plugged in my pumper, feeling its cold exhale against my cheek. John hooked up my wires and head restraints, and I could hear my own heavy breathing over the mic. The sun, high in the sky now—we were an hour past our 10 am start time—superheated our flame-retardant suits.
A race organizer waved us forward. We pulled behind a robin-blue bug with a virtuoso slash of orange, Northeast Collective written in Catholic-school cursive along the side.
“Must be the dudes from Massachusetts,” John observed.
Two distinct staging lanes lurched across the hard-baked desert toward the starting gate. We came to a stop at the top of a hill between twin columns that purportedly shot flames. The racers beside us stared hard into the distance. In the stands spectators shouted, holding out their phones to catch video of the dueling bugs. I thought of unzipping Jordan’s grandmother’s camera from the fanny pack attached to the door.
“Good?” John asked, cupping the gearshift.
“Giddyup.”
The light switched from red to yellow. How many of these drivers didn’t have their drivers’ license? It wasn’t a requirement to enter the race. How many had chugged moonshine before slipping behind the wheel?
A man counted down fingers. Three, two, one—the light flashed green, and the flag dropped. John sent us down the hill toward the crowd-pleaser jump. A wash of dust came into the car as we went up, both of us gasping. I heard a ping over the radio as a pebble hit John’s helmet. We slammed back into earth, and he twisted the wheel hard to the left, the crowd disappearing behind a berm.
And there was the Northeast Collective, already broken down. I found out later that they got so boosted that their clutch cable tangled with the throttle cable on landing, meaning each time they tried to gear up, the engine revved uselessly.
We accelerated into a straightaway. Dust filled my eyes, and I dropped the face shield as I tried to unfold our race notes. After slowing to pass an electrical station, John opened it up over a lakebed, staying clear of the power poles, then veered toward the line of mountains.
“Baja truck in our six,” John said. This was my line—I needed to watch the band of mirrors above the windshield. Police sirens wailed. “Passing on our left,” I said, master of the obvious.
Yucca bushes clipped our front panel as John tried to make way. A cloud of dust swallowed us; somehow he stayed on the road.
“Danger in half a mile.” My notes were already mangled. “Hairpin turn.”
G’s crushed my shoulder while the restraints made sure my head stayed in place. “With age comes the cage,” John’s rescue buddies he’d met at the gas station the night before had told him, neatly summarizing the shift from motorcycle to car.
“We’re doing great,” I said, to no one in particular.
After a couple of expletives, John gently explained that it’s not helpful to the driver to yell ahh or oof when we hit a bump because it echoes in your partner’s helmet and doesn’t help the overall effort. “Three miles of whoopsies coming up,” I said, just as the car began to hobbyhorse through the rolls. There was silence, then the radio sputtered.
“Dude, they’re called ‘whoops.’ Not whoopsies.’”
This led to a brief but pithy conversation about birth control, and which of the five children between us were intended. John suggested the term might have derived from whoop-de-dos, and the world of Motocross.
Onlookers in lawn chairs lounged beneath tents, sipping beverages from stadium cups, waving love-horns with pinky and index fingers. A final whoops sent us airborne, the landing jostling lines from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke out of my brain: Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going.
Ahead, the new vista showed a rippling heat wave along the sand. As we neared the rim of the gulch the wave turned out to be a snake slithering toward a mesa. I read John the Dangers as best I could. We were good until I missed a 90-degree left, and signs screamed “Wrong Way.”
We ended up stuck at the base of a cholla cactus. Already my lumbar region ached and my neck on the right side had a crick. A Toyota lumbered toward us. Out stepped a lithe young woman who looked, for all the galaxies, like Princess Leia’s twin dressed in acid-washed jeans and a fluorescent green shirt tied at the waist. She gamely fastened a hook beneath our fender, hopped back into the truck, and pulled us loose. John glanced over, as if to check with me to see if that had really just happened.
We ascended into a jumble of hills, approaching Mile 40. The road worked across a series of buttes before the vista opened onto a ridge dotted with stationary vehicles.
“Shit,” said John. “They’re stuck.”
“Hill of death,” I observed.
“I’m gonna take a run at it.”
He accelerated out of the gulch, skidding and weaving between stuck cars. For a moment, as we bounced off root clusters, bushes exploding as if they were made of glass, I thought we were going to make it. The other racers, standing outside their vehicles, looked on.
Then the silt got us.
As we sat stuck on the hill, waiting our turn to be pulled, I had the idea to take out the recovery boards and use them to stairstep us up the hill. This didn’t get much traction with John. A pair of women in a stuck Baja truck danced to gain the tow vehicle’s attention. A dune buggy raged up the hill, roostering sand, barely in control as the driver juked between cars. Off to the side a yellow bug nonchalantly drove away from the hill over the ridge.
“Those fuckers are going around!” I said.
“What?”
“Yeah. They’re skipping it altogether.”
John backed us down the hill through the washout, then accelerated up the opposite incline—still in reverse. We followed the plume of dust around the hill into the flat clear valley below. Victory through non-contention for the win. Lao-Tse-style racing.
“So much for the hill of death,” John said.
The raked land eased into another dry lakebed, baked pumpkin-orange. About 100 yards off to the left sat a UTV missing a tire. The drivers placidly observed our progress. To our right, we saw a tire rolling lazily over the cracked crust, vapors of smoke rising off the rubber.
“Gnarly!” John whooped.
“Mad Max shit!” I agreed.
We climbed out of the Ivanpah Valley, into what appeared to be a kind of rogue garbage dump strewn with charred mattress springs and toppled shopping carts. John artfully gassed us to the top of the hills, dodging sharp rocks. My stomach dropped as we careened down the other side. A headache curled around my temples and nestled behind my ears. It felt like a campfire had started where my spine notched into my hips. If I shook a bag of potatoes like my organs were being shaken now, the spuds would probably come out mashed.
The land opened up once more. The Machete, pulled off to the side, waved us on. Back at the first lakebed, I watched a Baja truck let out a fantail of dust, slipping beneath a power pole and back out again.
“He went right under!” I said.
“No…”
The sun dipped behind the mountains. We seemed to float in third gear across the ancient lakebed. The peace of the moment evaporated at the pits, where various crews peered down at us with worried expressions.
“Tell us what you need.”
“Gas,” John croaked. “It’s in the bed of my truck, just over there—”
We found a five-gallon jug in the pickup, but that was all. Lacerda hadn’t filled the tanks. John cursed. Someone topped us off with another four gallons, brushing off John’s pledge to pay them back. Bottle after bottle of water came through the windshield until I started handing them back.
“You boys need to finish this race.”
John unstrapped and started out of the car.
“Where are you going, chief?”
“Piss,” John said.
“You don’t got a catheter? Jesus Christ. You boys need catheters.”
Then we were off, the pit crews slapping the Tortuga like we were jogging back onto the football field. We passed the electrical station, then the lakebed, working steadily across the desert. No wheeze of the engine, no flat tires, no signs of flagging. By now my race notes had been pulverized into a handful of flakes. Out of nowhere a Baja truck whizzed by, nerfing our back panel. John kept driving. A lemon-lavender band settled over the mountains. The car felt bolted together, the engine invincible.
Up in the hills we detoured onto a rocky road, continuing straight before I directed us back to the right. The correction proved to be a good one. As RM 42 approached we braced for the hill of death, then discovered that the wily race organizers had re-stuck the markers, re-routing cars around the hill.
Darkness fell. By now, the ruts in the racecourse were so deep that proud rocks scraped at the undercarriage as we sledded through turns. I could feel us go up on two wheels, the car fighting to stay attached to the earth.
After the junkyard we hit a traffic jam at a bend in the mountains—a Baja truck had rolled into the gulch. The headlamps of rescue workers flashed against the scrub pine. A few co-drivers scouted a way through the washout. I admired their zeal. The road cleared and we pushed through, completing our second lap in good time. John drove in the alley behind the main pits, searching for the F250, praying Jordan had filled the containers. He had not. Our lights attracted more bug aficionados.
“You guys still in the race?”
“Yeah, man.”
From nowhere came five gallons. I texted Jordan to find these people and please give them money. This time, as we pushed over the starting line hill, tongues of flame shot out from the pillars. John hit the jump so hard that I could count the seconds in the air.
“Goddamn, let’s finish this,” John said.
“Final lap.”
Along the whoops section campfires glowed. The racecourse had taken a demonic, post-apocalyptic turn. A caterwauling Baja truck charged up in our six, lightbars filling our mirrors like something out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Determined not to get lost or stuck, I watched for where Princess Leia had saved us. There it was—John hit the turn perfectly.
“I think we’re going to make it,” I said.
Now we just had to look out for that one rocky spot where we should have gone right.
After writhing over the gear shift and John’s seat, I pulled myself upright and tried to walk into calmness, inhaling the citrus scent of pinyon.
“You good?” John asked.
“Yeah.”
The Tortuga was buried so deep that John used the roof as a desk from which to text his mysterious rescue crew. I heard a buzz, and saw twin beams working against the mountainside. The UTV stuck to the line of the barbed wire fence, confirming my fuck-up.
“I guess we aren’t the last ones,” I said.
John didn’t respond.
The desert went quiet. It was getting cold.
Another set of lights appeared. A kid in a race shirt and glasses hopped out of a black 4Runner. As he unfurled his yellow tow-strap he told us we had timed out.
“We just want to finish,” John pleaded.
“I understand that. But the volunteers are headed home. Your race is over, fellas. Let’s get you off the course.”
We returned to the car, ignoring our harnesses, following the SUV. A grim mood enveloped the cockpit as the kid peeled off and we used GPS to find our way through the desert. We hit railroad tracks, squabbled about a concrete wall and whether we should drive into it, then ended up on an asphalt road that crumbled back into the desert. By the time we reached the pits they were almost empty. It was past eleven.
Jordan said he had tried to pay the guys for gas, with money, then beer, but they refused. I walked over to the RV to say thanks. A guy in a race suit said his bug had died on the course. He couldn’t turn his neck or bend his back. Only four Class 11s had finished, he said. Blake Wilkey and the Slug Shark had come in third.
That night, back at the hotel, I dropped into an attenuated sleep, laced with a dream of a blood-red road unfurling before me. Jordan woke at 5 am to take me to the airport, and graciously promised not to play Barenaked Ladies. As I walked across the parking lot, I set a hand on La Tortuga, knowing with absolute certainty that I would never see her again.
A couple weeks later, back in Alaska, I stood in our kitchen debriefing with Josh Martelli on the phone as Rach put the kids to sleep. I was determined to find out if he had been the one to pull the plug on us that night.
“It’s a rough scene, man,” he said. “All those volunteers in the cold.”
In other words, yes.
We shifted subjects to one of Martelli’s side projects, writing a history of the Mint. Then to my father, and how he had picked up his bug at the shipyard in Philly before heading west to Colorado, where he encountered Hunter.
Josh laughed. “Sounds like your dad was a cool guy. You go to the desert to find your demons. Hunter knew that. Sounds like your dad had demons too.”
His response knocked me into silence.
A couple days before, on December 17th, my father had emailed my sister and me to announce he was moving from Philly to Texas to live near his wife’s son and her two grandchildren. My sister had called in tears. She has three kids of her own, and couldn’t imagine not having him ten minutes away.
I heard one of my daughters wail upstairs, giving Rachel a run for her money. “He was a cool guy,” I agreed.
It was time to get off, but I wanted to say something else—along the lines of thank you. For giving me space to think of my father selling cars in Saigon, reporting for the Rocky Mountain News. To see him staring up into the sun as his bug came down at the shipyards that morning.
But mostly for allowing me to imagine, over and over as John and I hurtled across the desert in the Tortuga, that moment at the Denver Press Club when he looked at Hunter S. Thompson, and said no. Not tonight.
Because now it’s time for me to go back home.
Brendan Jones lives in Sitka, Alaska, and is the author of Whispering Alaska, recently published by Penguin/Random House.