by Tonee Mae Moll
1.
Fort Irwin Road was nothing.
Nearly every desert highway feels empty, but it wasn’t until I reached my early twenties that I first found one of those asphalt lines extending perfectly toward the horizon, a straight cut through a landscape of hot shrubland in every direction.
It was back when I was traveling on military orders from Reno on a drive that’s mostly desert, mostly through sagebrush-speckled hills and small towns and tribal nations. Then a rip through Las Vegas somewhere in the second half of the drive. Then desert, curves, hills, lines, cacti and Joshua trees, and just outside of Barstow, in California’s high desert, as I left the interstate, I found that empty road, the platonic ideal of a lonely highway. Fort Irwin Road started by curling briefly through desert foothills before streaking away from the edge of civilization across 35 miles of flatland. It was a straight stripe drawn from nowhere to nowhere, a study in perspective, like something sketched in a high school art class.
The black line was drawn to the horizon, and just beyond that, it terminated at a sad little base that hosted a desert training center for the U.S. Army and an old deep-space listening center. Someone later told me, sometime in the years that would come, that it is considered the most dangerous highway in America, but maybe everywhere has a story that the nearby highway is the most dangerous highway in America. Here, the threat was the lack of features. It was too easy to fall asleep, to get complacent, to believe the sprint down the stripe of road was commonplace and safe. When people wrote about the road, they wrote about the tiny white crosses that speckled the roadside, how there were more of those than there are miles.
There was no place along the strip that did not feel lonely. Like all such highways, it was an in-between space: absence in every direction. The location of the base was originally selected for this isolation: restricted airspace, plenty of room for war machines to maneuver, uncrowded radio space. During the day it was a landscape of flatland flecked with low brush. At night it wasn’t anything. There were no lights anywhere on the stretch. No billboards. No side roads. No guardrail. Miles of dark until one reaches the base’s outer perimeter, where there was no need for a fence to keep folks out, just a solitary sign that silently welcomes visitors.
2.
What we call “goose bumps” are the same sort of physiological reaction that causes dogs to raise their hackles. When animals with a fight-or-flight response experience extreme emotion, the sympathetic nervous system tightens the skin, causing fur (or hair) to stand on end. For an animal with thick fur, this makes them appear larger, intimidating would-be predators. In humans, piloerection is considered a vestigial reflex; our body hair no longer thick enough to create the illusion of growth, the evolutionary function of the reaction is no longer helpful. Goose bumps are a reaction to fear, and the dark is our oldest fear.
3.
I haven’t believed in ghosts in a long time, but out here, they almost feel inevitable. The base itself is an oasis of sorts, a small town of barracks and family homes sprouting up deep in the high desert. At night, the wind makes even the core of this desert base feel haunted. There’s something about the way it rolls in, from out in the darkness that we keep at bay with our little island of light, that reminds residents that this place belongs to something greater than humans.
One night, me and a couple of guys from the unit are doing our best to make it home, popping up camping chairs around a short Smokey Joe grill in front of the barracks, sipping from green bottles of domestic beer. A stillness lives here, especially tonight, upset only by the quiet crackling of coals burned down to grey and red.
“Did Jones tell you about what he saw last weekend?” Aarons interrupts the evening’s hum.
“Stop it.” Jones shakes his head. He’s older than me and Aarons by a few years and not interested in the sort of attention young soldiers seek when they tell stories. He’s usually the quiet type, not a partier, not a storyteller. He enjoys working his long hours as a military dog handler, coming home to grill some meat, and doing the same the next day. He’s serious, but not exactly somber, just not interested in what everyone else has going on. Back home he liked to hunt and fish. He likes inexpensive beer, and if he has company, he prefers them to be quiet. Even here past the outskirts of the state’s rhythm, he’s a man out of place in California.
Aarons nods toward him, pointing with the bottom of his bottle “He saw a ghost out at Goldstone.”
“I don’t know what I saw out there—who knows what they’ve got going on out that way.” He takes another sip, avoiding eye contact with either of us.
The Goldstone Deep Space Communication complex is a NASA site further still toward the heart of the Mojave. The site supports interplanetary observation missions, like Voyager, through the use of giant satellite dishes set up in a place empty of human development for miles and miles in any direction. It’s another half hour into the desert to get out there from here, via an offshoot of Irwin Road, and at night, there’s something about the drive that’s unnerving.
Jones has that Floridian libertarian streak in him, so he’s already suspicious of isolated government sites. Add the fact that the place is built near a number of Wild West ghost towns, and it becomes the sort of place around which folklore gathers.
“C’mon, man. No one’s gonna say anything.”
Jones hesitates, unsure at first, but eventually shifts forward in his folding chair, closer to the fire and toward each of us. He isn’t putting on the airs of storytelling; he’s painfully serious, anxious even. He puts his beer down next to the grill, briefly takes his mesh cap off and runs his other hand over the buzz cut before putting it back on.
“Alright, so—” Jones sighs as he begins. “It was an overnight shift. A Thursday, y’know, so pretty dead. I was just putting miles on the Jeep, trying to stay awake. I radioed the desk to tell them I was going to be out of range for a bit. And it’s dark out that way, and it’s quiet. None of the stations get picked up that far out, so I’ve got the window down, just letting it all in.”
He explains that his military working dog, Rocky, was in the back of his vehicle, his head out the window, panting. He is recalling carefully now as he tells us that, just as they rolled past an empty checkpoint out that way, he saw a light out in the distance, a dim one, like a light left on in a building. No one should be out there, not at that hour, and there shouldn’t be a light there. “So I put a little weight on the gas, not too much, but I’m curious now, and a few minutes in, I glance back, just for a second, just to check on the dog, and—”
“Tell her.”
“I’m not even sure—”
“C’mon,” Aarons insists, and looks at back at me again.
Jones starts again, slowly and self-consciously. “There was—when I turn my head back to the road—there’s this man standing right in the middle of it. I slam on the breaks, really throw my foot down. And everything falls forward: Rocky gets thrown into the back of my seat, and my clipboard and lunch get tossed on the floor, but,” He hesitates. Our eyes meet, and his drop quickly toward the coals, betraying that sort of embarrassment so many men try to keep hidden. “When we came to a stop, there was no one there.”
Aarons looks at me, wide eyes asking can you believe it? He can tell I’m skeptical, but he’s reading the empathy I have on my face for the working dog who had been tossed around in the backseat for the shadow of belief.
Maybe Jones gets the look though, because he tells us that the dog was quickly back on all fours, and is immediately at the window, paws on the center console, gazing out, like he saw something out there too. Rocky’s hackles were up, full alert, scrutinizing the darkness.
“What’d you do?” I interrupt, softly and for the first time.
“I just sat there for a moment, at first. Scanning in front of me, but there’s not anything out there— I don’t see the light anymore. There’re no lights anywhere, just the cone of our headlights in front of us. So I get out, and I’m not embarrassed to say that I pull the dog out with me, just in case, right? If there’s something out there, I’m going to be ready, but…” his sentence fades. He takes a brief sip from the sweating bottle, his eyes unfocused, resting somewhere just outside of our circle again. “Nothing. Just the wind out there; no light but our own.”
4.
Alone, apart, backwoods, beyond the black stump, confined, cutoff, deserted, detached, faraway, far-flung, far-out, forsaken, godforsaken, hard to find, hidden, jerkwater, lonely, inaccessible, incommunicado, in the backwoods, in the back of beyond, the backveld, the backblocks, the hinterlands, the middle of nowhere, the sticks, the tall timbers, lonesome, obscure, off the beaten track, off the map, outlying, out of the way, remote, secluded, sequestered, solitary, stranded, unfrequented, unreachable.
5.
It is quiet for a few minutes after Jones finishes his story. The three of us sit taking small drinks of our beers and staring into the fire. No one can tell if the moment should be broken with humor or earnest interest, so we sit in the quiet of the glowing charcoal’s pop and an occasional swish of liquid inside glass bottles. It’s like this for several hour-long minutes, until Aarons shifts forward in his seat and clears his throat.
“Did you hear what happened last night?” he asks, but answers before either of us have the chance to respond. “I laughed my ass off when I first heard about it, but the more I think about it, the more it sticks to me.”
Aarons tell us about how some guys we know in the military police had an AWOL soldier last night, one they picked up unnecessarily a few days ago, someone who left years ago but got snagged in the fly trap of the American justice system. He tells us how the guy is just some average SoCal bro now, just trying to get by, but a routine traffic stop down near L.A. last week ended with military troops whisking him away to this lonely base in the high desert. It ended up being a short stay though, he tells us. Despite all we’ve been told of how harshly the military treats those who walk away during war time, someone in some office somewhere has decided it’s more of a hassle to keep this guy shackled to the military, so, miraculously, they just dropped the whole thing. The guy is eligible for immediate release. It’s wild, but it’s a dollars-and-cents thing, we all agree.
It’s late, past midnight, when the unit decides to release him, Aarons tell us.
A pair of soldiers put him in a patrol vehicle, drive the man to edge of base, toward the invisible line where federal government land ends, a few miles outside of where the base is built up into something worth putting on a map.
The tires of their SUVs kick up a dust cloud as they stop, visible only in the headlights and a few small spotlamps whose glow is faded here on the back end of the welcome sign. From this direction, the marker is the last hint of civilization before the void. They pull the man out into the desert air, still warm, but cooled significantly at this hour. Standing in their harbor of light, one of the soldiers hands him a bottle of water and points out toward the 35 miles of emptiness before them. No people. No light, other than the stars. Only the wind whistling across a landscape freckled with shrub brush and veiled in night. Only desert, and even then, only what the mind can imagine somewhere in the black.
“Go.”
The cops nod outward into the darkness, their ugly smiles cast in harsh light, their bodies waiting only briefly before getting back into their vehicles, turning around, and leaving the cleared man by himself in the night.
6.
Like so many other Queer kids, I was a mythology kid. When I was a child, I could tell you all about the Norse, Roman and Greek pantheons, but the Greeks were my favorite. Like Hesiod, I could tell you all about who was the mother of whom, which entity ruled which part of our lives. I could tell you that before the gods, there were the titans. Before the titans, the primordial deities. The first was Chaos, and from Chaos sprang night and darkness, Nyx and Erebus. The two birthed Day and Heaven, but with other mates, Darkness gives birth to countless other progeny, including Oizys and Achlys, the goddesses most closely associated with loneliness.
7.
Later that night, I leave the circle of light because two cute punks who live out in Barstow—the nearest town, the truck-stop town built where Fort Irwin Road, the desert interstate, and Route 66 all meet—text me and ask what I’m doing. It’s late, and I know I am a booty call, but young, dumb and lonely, I relish in it. Besides, their shitty house in that shitty little town reminds me of home.
I’m almost sober, I tell myself, even at this hour, because it’s just Rolling Rock, so I brush my teeth and jump in the beat hatchback I bought back before I enlisted. The moment reminds me of that Dashboard Confessional song, so I flip through the journal-sized soft case of burnt CDs and find the one with the best songs of the first two albums.
You’re calling too late, too late to be gracious, the car’s tiny speakers tell me as I drive through the cantonment area and onto the highway. That was most of what I was listening to that year, popular emo tracks from depressed guys with guitars. I’m waiting for blood, to flow to my fingers, I’ll be alright when my hands get warm.
I miss home. Out here, I am the loneliest I have ever been.
It is few tracks later, a few miles past the Goldstone turnoff, a few minutes past the welcome sign, when it begins to feel like the car is a bullet fired through nothingness, I am overcome with an impulse to let the nowhere overtake me, just for a moment.
I know I shouldn’t, but who can name the myriad reasons that we behave the way we do when we are young, and lonely, and no one is looking.
Fort Irwin Road lies ahead as a span of nothing. I slap the radio off, and I pump down the windows of my rattling hatchback, letting the warm air push in and through the cabin. The night is everything. I feel it on my hands, on my face. I suck in the smell of dust and creosote. I know then that there is no lonelier smell. There is no one coming my way, no one behind me coming from base. I am alone here, and I want to feel it.
I cut the lights.
I let go of the wheel, only for a few seconds, just out of the pass, where the road straightens out.
I don’t think about anything, just breathe back and forth with the night.
Warm darkness slaps through the windows, and for the few seconds I can stand, seconds that stretch on forever, I am the desert wind uncurling through nowhere.
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Dr. Tonee Mae Moll is a queer & trans poet & essayist. She is the author of Out of Step: A Memoir, which won the Lambda Literary Award in bisexual nonfiction and the Non/Fiction Collection Prize. Her latest book, You Cannot Save Here, won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from WWPH. Their poetry has also received the Adele V. Holden award for creative excellence and the Bill Knott Poetry Prize, along with nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of Net. Tonee Mae holds an MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts from University of Baltimore and a Ph.D. in English from Morgan State University. She is a Gemini.
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