Racing Away

Lisa K. Harris

I pressed the accelerator of our rental car. In the rearview mirror, a straight, empty, two-lane road unfurled. Ahead, blacktop shimmied in late afternoon sun. All around, reddish dirt, scattered spindly sagebrush and saltbush, tufts of grama and sacaton grasses. Darker red mesas jutted from the basin floor, rock ships of Shiprock, New Mexico.

Seventy miles per hour. Eighty.

Peter, then-boyfriend and later-husband, eyed the speedometer. Eyed me.

Eighty-five. Ninety.

We were flying. In the back seat, freedom: tent, sleeping bags, nested cookware, backpacks, extra boot laces. Last month’s paychecks, after deducting rent and utilities, spent at Chicago’s Erehwon Outfitters, which was “nowhere” spelled backwards.

Which was where we were.

City slickers on a November camping vacation, we had driven most of the prior three weeks. Instead of hiking we drove to drive, not to arrive, some days for ten hours.

In the back seat, too, were orange vests, bought at a hardware store on day two of our trip, at the same counter that sold deer tags, so we wouldn’t be shot while hiking. Only hunters hiked Thanksgiving week. A pair of city slickers hiked too, though we didn’t understand picture-perfect summertime campsites could be otherwise. Stream banks festooned with warm-weather fireweed, paintbrush, hyssop, and poppies were now littered with battered RVs, gutted deer strung from pinyon-juniper branches, their abdomens slit and entrails dripping plink-plink-plink into pails, shitloads of empty beer cans, boom-boom of target practice, and a dusting of snow in the night.

We bumped one hundred, but the car shook, so I eased off the accelerator. We were racing. Fleeing sixty-hour work weeks, corporate ladder-climbing, dress socks and pantyhose, blow-dried hair, dumb bosses.

The turnoff to Chaco Canyon should be next to clumpy sagebrushes. Look for a narrow dirt road, the guidebook said. I glanced in the rearview mirror to see if I’d missed it.

A sheriff rode our ass, roof lights flashing.

I pulled over and stopped. The officer sauntered with puffed-out chest to my rolled-down window. I handed him my Illinois license.

“Sweetheart, you know how fast you were goin'?”

“Ninety-five.”

He shoved mirrored sunglasses to the top of his head. I held his gaze. I couldn’t pretend I drove within the speed limit, whatever it was. I didn’t care about the ticket. I was young, in my twenties, invincible. Invincible in that way twentysomethings think nothing bad will happen.

The sheriff asked, “Why?”

“It felt good.”

From his nod, mine wasn’t the expected answer, but it was one he understood. With the slap of the top of the car, he dismissed me.

“I can’t believe we got away with it,” Peter said.

And neither could I. We locked eyes, Peter and I, and smiled at one another, a togetherness moment. I shoved the transmission into drive and pressed the accelerator. In no time we were flying just like before.

Before the baby came. Before sleepless nights. Before the night sweats. Before one teeny-tiny cell spread like tumbleweed in the wind. Before the hacking which never hacked up anything. Before the diagnosis. Before the flowers, the cards, the casseroles, the I’m sorrys. Before single parenting.

We were flying. Racing away from what would come. I had hoped never to arrive.

But if I never arrived, I would not have found my voice. I would not have birthed a second daughter. I would not have become an environmentalist saving us from ourselves. I would not have become the badass doe flicking her tail as she bounded over the hill. I would not have become who I became. I would have become different. Not better or worse, just different.

I pressed the accelerator and raced toward me.

Lisa K. Harris (she/her), a Pushcart Prize nominated author, has published in Orion Magazine, Passages North, Highlights for Children, Litro Magazine, and (M)othering (edited by Sorbie and Grogan, 2022), among others. Her work has been supported by Bread Loaf Environmental Writing Workshop. Migrating between Seattle and Tucson working as an environmental consultant, she has two daughters, six cats, two desert tortoises, and a terrier named Lola. @Harrislisakim; www.lisakharris.com.