by Adam Creighton

I hadn't eaten anything but wheat thins for 11 hours, and my last drink had been gas station coffee spiked with near-rancid milk from a Nevada desert truck stop. Finally we pulled into a Subway parking lot north of Salt Lake City. For the last 12 hours I'd been reading “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” while riding shotgun in a white, early ‘90s Toyota Corolla. Like Hunter Thompson, we were driving across Nevada on a quest.

We were on a quest for a dream. Not the American Dream, but a modest and personal dream. A week ago the Denver Zoo had called and offered to meet Kelsey, my girlfriend Nicole's best friend, for an interview in April. It would have been impossible for Kelsey. The zoo settled for a telephone interview, but reminded Kelsey that they prefer to meet applicants in person. When Kelsey told us the story we asked her, “Why not go there for spring break? Call them back and ask if you can meet them next week.” After brief deliberation, Kelsey called them back and the date was set. We were driving to Denver the following Tuesday.

The enthusiasm of adventure was killed by the Nevada barrens. Not even Hunter Thompson's description could have prepared me for the desolation of the Nevada desert. On the side of the road around mile 208, I saw a skeleton shack that looked like it had died of thirst and been picked clean by scavengers. By the eighth hour of this, my nerves were on edge. I was fidgety in my seat. I read “Fear and Loathing” and empathized with his nervous paranoia. We passed a half-dozen dust-whirlwinds that danced and funneled out in the wasteland to either side of the car. They looked like steam vents, or hypnotically swirling geysers. I wanted to drive through one, but no such luck.

When Nicole tired of driving, we stopped in a town filled with portable homes and gassed up. I bought greasy coffee and milk-substance and took the wheel. I fished my big, clunky silver spoon-ring out of my bag. I put it on my finger. I figured if it ever pinched my finger it would be another way to stay awake.

The ring holds a special, magical significance to me. My father made it out of a silver spoon handle, and it was the first ring he had given my mother. When I was 17 they gave it to me and I nicknamed it Love. I saw all sorts of symbolism in it. I once loaned it to a friend when his girlfriend broke up with him, and he gave it back to me when my father died. Another time, a mystical woman named Peggy, my aikido sensei, picked it up when I left it behind after class and she almost dropped it. “The energy almost burned me,” she said, handing it back to me the next week. That was the third time I had lost it. I lost the ring four times since, and every time it came back to me by fate and good fortune – by magic.

Four hours of driving later we reached Salt Lake City , seeing a sign advertising Subway. We all agreed: Subway sandwiches sounded good. It was nighttime. We were tired, hungry, and needed to stretch the road-trip stiffness out. A friend in Wyoming had offered to let us stay the night at her house in Rawling, but we still had four more hours of driving to go.

I went to the bathroom in Subway. When I flushed, there was no tension in the handle. I flushed again. Nothing. I opened the tank and looked in. The lift wire had broken from the trip lever. The handle wasn't attached to the flushing mechanism. I took off my ring and flushed the toilet manually, but didn't have the tools to fix it. I washed my hands and went out to the man at the cash register.

“Your toilet is broken,” I said. “It needs a new trip wire, but duct tape can fix it for now.”

Vacantly, he stared back at me and said, “Okay.” That's strange, in California I thought people said, “Thanks.”
I ordered my sandwich from the manager, a young woman with a scowl burned onto her face like the one my dad had warned my sister about. We took our sandwiches with us and left.

We navigated a network of highway exits and turnoffs which fed into a labyrinthine corridor of highway. I held the accelerator down. I needed rest and high speed brought that bed closer. We hugged tight turns going 80 miles per hour, passing up big trucks traveling at the speed limit. We drove alongside an immense valley for about half an hour before I tapped my hand against the steering wheel. It felt wrong. I looked at my hand.

I had left my ring in the bathroom.

We stopped at the next gas station where I thought to call Subway, to see if it had closed, and ask them to please get my ring and hold onto it for me. I opened up the Salt Lake phone book and cursed; there were 28 Subways in Salt Lake City. I tried vainly to remember the name of the road it was on by the names listed in the book. There was no Subway listed on “ Amelia Earhart Drive.” I called a random Subway on the list, hoping that fate would guide me. Remembering the name of the woman with the scowling face, I asked if she was in. She wasn't. I called and called, but none of the Subways were the right one. I cursed the indecision that had caused me to take such passive action. I had wasted enough time, but I felt even more terrible asking the girls to turn around now than I had asking them to stop and make the phone call. It was late at night and we were far from Wyoming. I felt pathetic. They consented to turning around.

We drove back to the restaurant in silence. When we arrived, the employees were just leaving, carrying bags of trash. Scowling girl was there. “Excuse me,” I approached her and explained the situation. With annoyance, she let me back into the restaurant to check the bathroom. It was not there. Had it been turned in?

It hadn't. Desperately I asked her if she had any ideas.

“I thought I might have heard something fall out when I emptied the bathroom trash can,” she said.

It wasn't much, but it was hope. I was riding a 7-0 streak with this ring, and I was confident that hope was all it would take.

Ten minutes later, I was standing up to my ankles in rotten food, surrounded by dumpster stink, and I could see the pools of trash juice between the bags. I looked to heaven and I prayed to God to help me find my ring. But God didn't hear me in Salt Lake City . I tore through bags. I felt the pulp of tomatoes squeeze between my fingers. I threw aside yesterday's wrappers and today's toilet paper, passionately ripping apart the waste, still thinking, “Seven times….seven
times….”

I knew my dad would disapprove. He'd tell me to take responsibility for my actions, which for him would have meant never losing the ring to begin with. But in my particular scenario I imagined him standing outside the dumpster asking in a stern tone, “What are you doing?”

“I'm looking for the ring you gave me,” I would tell him.

“Why would it be in the trash?”

“Because I lost it.”

“That was stupid,” he would say, and that would be that.
I guessed that if he were there he wouldn't want me tearing through a pile of filth for a twist of silver. He'd probably just make another one. But I didn't have another one. I only had that one. It was more than just a twist of metal to me, it was him. It was love. It was magic, and it always came back. But like my dad, it was gone.

I was silent for the rest of the night. Nicole respected my silence. She didn't try to make me talk. She just held my hand. The rest of the trip was stained by my loss, but I tried to hide it.

Wyoming was another long, empty stretch of desolation, boring until the whiteout. Our little white car became two isolated red lights as we drove into a hovering wall of hurricane force winds carrying snow, whipping across empty plains. The snow never landed, collecting in the air becoming denser and whiter. At one point, I saw a motor home on its side in the median strip, like a skier who'd lost her balance and flew off the slope. Then the snow picked up, and it faded from sight. It was nice to have an emergency to concentrate on. Nicole and Kelsey were sleeping. They didn't know about the motor home.

But on our return trip through Salt Lake , I was in the dumpster again, sorting through two more days' worth of trash. I hadn't learned a thing. I quit looking to go in and ask the people at the counter if anyone, by chance, had turned in my ring. Scowling girl was working.

“No,” she said. “It was definitely thrown away.”

That's when I got mad.

I let that word stew in my brain. “Definitely.” In two days she had become more certain that she had thrown away my priceless treasure, my dead father's heirloom, my magic ring. It wasn't just “something heavy.”

In my mind, I began to blame her. For not saying “definitely” that first night, when I might have spent more time if I had known with certainty where it was. I blamed her for her irresponsibility. I blamed her for losing my ring. I blamed her for scowling. But it hit me, it wasn't her fault. More than that, I realized how anxious I was to blame her, and if I wanted to, how justified I would be in blaming her for her part in throwing it away.

I realized then, as I told Nicole, standing in a cloud of exhaust by the trunk of the car, it was an expensive lesson to learn. I had to forgive the scowling girl for not taking the small responsibility of telling me the truth, but I had to take the big responsibility myself for losing it.
I'd learned my questing wisdom. It was time to go home.

We listened to a book on tape as we traveled across the salt flats of Utah , heading back by daytime along our homeward route. I was glad for the book on tape. The bleak, black night was at least mysterious. Just beyond your vision, something scary or mysterious could be happening, and the stars are like magic runes etched in the sky. But western Utah by day is a panorama of flat, empty plains, white like a snowfall, with salt. It isn't nourishing or vital like snow, it is a bare, lifeless white. This white will never melt. Its destiny is to suck up water, dry the land, keep plants from growing. You can water a desert and flowers bloom, but flowers will never grow in this forlorn, empty sea of waterless salt.

Soon I was back home, and my ring finger felt naked. I felt naked. I confronted my mom and told her about losing the ring. She forgave me. The words of forgiveness came so quickly from her lips, I was ashamed it took mine so long.

I lost my ring. I lost love in Salt Lake City, and it was a heavy price to pay to learn the value of forgiveness.

--the end