Can you give us a quick one about something interesting that might have happened out on the road?
Love,
Brother Jeremy Shaw
Dear Brother Jeremy,
Interesting? How about miraculous? One day in February, 2011, Brother Sam was in Nevada, Coyote Springs being the nearest human habitation, and it being many miles from the rutted truck track I (and Company) followed off the highway and across some of the barrenest desert anybody ever saw, through 6,000 year-old formations of rock, Mummy Mountain in the distance, the Unholy Roller bucking and shuddering like the fabled dog shitting a peach seed.
One thing about Brother Sam: I require copious and frequent infusions of liquid to do whatever it is that I appear to do. So there we were out in the burning desert. But more than burning, this was a bumpy desert. Oh, it was bumpy. And by and by Brother Sam got thirsty and got the jug of ice water from the cooler and drank therefrom. While we were stopped, a mile or so from the highway, way the hell off the road, I decided to use some of the water to freshen up a bit, so I poured some on my head. Temporarily blinded by the shock of ice-cold water on my heat parched punkin’, I groped the side of the Unholy Roller, finding the roof on which I sat the cursed jug of the water that afflicted me so mercilessly. I may have said “Goddamn” a time or two before resuming the passenger seat.
And Company drove the humping and bumping Unholy Roller (the peach seed having become a coconut) back across the cratered waste and onto the highway toward Las Vegas.
A few minutes later I was thirsty again. “The jug!” says I. And Company jumped on the brakes. From the roof, a solid thud. We pulled over and I bailed out. And about a hundred feet behind us, among the cactus and the other cactus, was the jug. Misshapen? To be sure. Battered? Goddamn. But still containing the self same water which had so cruelly afflicted Brother Sam. Only now the water was hot, being on the roof and in the desert and all. Somehow the jug had perched on the roof, not only for miles at highway speed, but across an expanse of topography so bumpy as to cause a band of 19th century Mormons to say, “Fuck it.”
Well, it wasn’t much to look at, our Miracle jug, but we couldn’t help seeing it as an object of wonder, a real life artifact of the limitless power of Brother Sam to forget shit.
Love,
Brother Sam
