Primm, Nevada

Unincorporated San Bernardino County meets the Nevada desert through a smattering of small, unlit shacks. Mostly abandoned, they could not have served as more than a weigh station or postal exchange, and not since the turn of the century. It’s through these lonesome guard-shacks that the duo in the pickup make their way toward Primm, just over the Nevada border. There, the shacks, no bigger than the ones left behind, are clustered closely together, with their front porches abutting the shoulder of the highway.

It’s sobering to see the artifacts of everyday life, the not-so-essentials, left in a clutter, as if their owners upped and fled without time to pack them up. There are the rusted outlines of washing tubs and car parts, but the objects that look the strangest left alone are those incidental to the adult world. A wooden tricycle, no doubt carved by someone’s grandpa before he completely lost his sight or surrendered the use of his hand to rheumatism, sits with its direction wheel askew, caught in mid-peddle. A grounded tire-swing, fortified with years’ worth of mud, now serves as home to a family of rattlesnakes, and there’s no telling how many scorpions the upturning of that deflated ball would yield.

The driver accelerates in the face of these remnants, staring him down from the silence of the roadside. Frozen in time, their everydayness is transformed into a threat, a testament. They each speak in their own tone, “you too, and all those things to which you never give thought, are just like us: hideous in our ordinariness.”

The hitchhiker displays a different reaction altogether. He half hangs out the window with a cigarette dangling from his lips in a -overly clichéd?- display of effrontery. His golden brown hair laps into his face and it seems to feel good. If he’s ever ruminated on man’s fate a day in his life, nobody would know it.

“Jess a bunch a crap,” he would say if pressed. “Why you all gettin’ sent-a-mental bout some throwaway garbage tha’nobody wants, no how?” Nobody’s asked him, so he remains content to smile, smoke, and take in the debris with the detached air of a king, or an executioner. The driver is unnerved by the hitchhiker’s ease, but knows better than to let on. He tries to cover up his concerns with a playful warning.