"Why weird?"

"Putting the president's house on your money. I can't imagine Canada putting a picture of 24 Suss.e.x Drive on a twenty-dollar bill, can you?"

"What is on a Canadian twenty?"

"I have no idea. Good grief," she says, "why do we know more about American money than our own?"

"And what's with that strange pyramid with the all-seeing eye hovering over it on the one-dollar bill? Was the country founded by a group of Masons?"

"Did you know," says Merilyn, not willing to be upstaged, "that there are people in the States who track dollar bills online by registering the serial numbers?"

"No," I say, "they don't."

"They do," she says triumphantly. "It's called 'Where's George?'"

"As in George Bush?"

"No, silly, as in George Washington."

"Ah," I say, "I guess it's a Republican thing."

This conversation gets us through most of downtown Sacramento, until I park in front of the only grocery story in town that is open on this Christmas Eve Sunday. Will be open, I should say. People dressed in parkas-parkas! don't they know this is California?-are lined up outside the door. We join them, stamping our feet and exchanging shrugs and grins with the others until the doors swing wide and we whoosh inside on a tide of moms and dads here to pick up the turkeys they thoughtfully ordered weeks ago.

"Nice to think the El Tovar is going to do all that for us," Merilyn says, though she doesn't sound all that pleased.

When we regain the I-5, our small cooler replenished, we continue south. I find myself doing Grade Five mental arithmetic as we drive. It is a curse and I hate it, but I can't stop myself. Every time I see a road sign with a distance marked on it, I have to figure out how long it will take us to get there. The first sign we see, for example, is Stockton, 85 miles. We are driving fifty-five miles an hour. It is 12:45. What time should we arrive at Stockton? Click, click, whir, whir: 2:07. According to the next sign, Stockton is now twenty-two miles away. We are still travelling fifty-five miles an hour. It is now 1:43. What time will we arrive? Click, click, grind, grind: 2:17. What? We've lost ten minutes already? Has the town moved? Did we pa.s.s through a time-s.p.a.ce anomaly?

We arrive in Stockton at 2:15, close enough to my calculations to debunk my theory that we've been abducted by aliens and returned to the Echo with tiny burn marks and no memory of how they got there. Stockton is due east of San Francis...o...b..y, where the Sacramento River from the north and the San Joaquin River from the south meet and empty. From here on, we're in the San Joaquin part of California's Central Valley, pa.s.sing through one of the richest food-producing regions in the world. There is hardly a fresh vegetable consumed in North America that doesn't come from this valley, most likely from its southern portion, which produces more than two hundred kinds of fruits, nuts, and vegetables. From the I-5, we can see acres of packing sheds and rows of canneries lining the side roads and railway lines. Even now, in late December, the landscape is quilted in shades of living green.

It appears to us as a vast, luscious Eden, but in fact, the San Joaquin Valley is more like a film set-the product of large-scale human engineering at the expense of natural habitat. When Pedro f.a.ges, the Spanish governor of Alta California, first laid eyes on the San Joaquin River in 1774, he found its banks a verdant oasis in a vast, seemingly sterile desert. A hundred years later, a series of dams and ca.n.a.ls had drained the river's wetlands, pulled water down from the Sacramento River into the San Joaquin, and redirected it into the desert to create arable farmland. By 1931, so much water was being siphoned out of the San Joaquin that the river was reduced to a trickle, but the valley itself was a fertile fruit belt controlled by a handful of agribusinesses.

Joan Didion, in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, writes that the small towns between Sacramento and Bakersfield "seem so flat, so impoverished as to drain the imagination. They hint at evenings hanging around the gas station and suicide pacts sealed in drive-ins. An implacable insularity is their mark." Even the guidebook warns us of the area's "lack of visual appeal." But Merilyn and I are country people; we like hanging around gas stations and, to a certain extent, we are comfortable with insularity, which does not lead to suicide pacts all that often. If you want to count suicides, you'll have better luck in the cities.

We pa.s.s miles and miles of feedlots, fenced compounds in which mud-coloured cattle stand idly around like prisoners on smoke break. These are factory farms or, more properly, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), and they're enough to turn one off milk. It isn't simply a matter of visual appeal; animals in CAFOs are confined and given hormone injections to promote growth and productivity, pumped full of antibiotics and vaccines to prevent the spread of diseases, and then we eat the super-dosed meat. Back home, we buy our meat from local farmers or a small butcher, but here on the road, we can't avoid ma.s.s-produced beef, pork, and chicken, either outside our windows or on our plates. Ninety-nine per cent of the meat produced in North America is produced on factory farms.

"I miss our chickens," Merilyn says, looking forlornly at the feedlots.

Each year we raise two dozen chickens for meat and a dozen more for eggs. We buy them as day-old chicks, pamper them to maturity, let them roam freely about the gardens and grounds, house them at night in a dry, airy coop, collect their eggs, and, when the time comes, kill and dress them ourselves on a big wooden table we set up in the orchard. Not so long ago, that was normal for most people living in the country; now when we tell friends about our chickens they look at us as though we've just stepped out of a wormhole from the nineteenth century. Small-time farmers are fast disappearing. In 1967, there were still one million family pig farms in America; now there are a little over a hundred thousand, a measure of the extent to which factory farming has taken over the family farm.

After the feedlots come row after row of fruit trees, some of the orchards identified by signs near the road: peaches, oranges, plums. But not all are neatly labelled. After spending some time with a puzzled look on her face, Merilyn finally exclaims, "Almonds! These must be almond trees! Oh, let's stop!"

We get off the interstate at the Lost Hills exit, gas up, buy some fruit at a canvas-covered stand beside the station. No almonds, but the two women manning the stall tell us that we'll pa.s.s some nut orchards if we take Route 46 toward Wasco. When we see the sign-Wasco:Home of the Long White Potato-we are on a straight highway between vast, amazingly tidy almond orchards. We pull off onto a narrow lane leading into the trees. I park about a hundred feet in, and we eat our lunch-bread and cheese and wine for me, fruit and water for Merilyn. Sitting in the car with the doors open, among the almond trees, she is ecstatic. Unable to drink cow's milk, she often subst.i.tutes a milk-like product made from almonds, so this place is, for her, what the Willamette Valley was for me, a kind of spiritual motherlode.

The almonds were harvested at least two months ago. Before the harvest, the orchard grounds would have been swept clean of ground litter, and mechanical tree shakers would then have moved down the rows, shaking the ripe fruit from the branches. The nuts were left on the ground to dry for a while and then sucked up, again mechanically, and augered into trucks.

By now, the orchard has been fastidiously cleaned of nuts, but the leaves have since fallen and there is a familiar autumnal mustiness in the air. Flocks of birds make their way through, heading noisily north, and we take out our binoculars. There are Brewer's blackbirds and a great many yellow-rumped warblers and white-crowned sparrows. When we finish our lunch, we get out of the car and walk farther up the lane, looking into the treetops for more birds, breathing in what to us is the springlike air. Suddenly Merilyn points excitedly to the ground: a sweep of almonds, apparently spilled from an overloaded truck, lies alongside the road. We gather handfuls, take them back to the car, and eat them, a little furtively. They are fresh and sweet and go well with the chocolate we bought in Sacramento.

We are not far from Bakersfield, on what Jack Kerouac, in On the Road, called "the floor of California, green and wondrous." That was in 1947, when he was approaching it from the east, having picked up an Okie hitchhiker in Tucson, Arizona, who said he was a "moosician" who'd had his guitar stolen and was on his way home to Bakersfield to collect money from his brother, some of which he would give to Kerouac. Kerouac's companion in the novel, Dean Moriarty (Neal Cas-sady in life), had lived in Bakersfield and "wanted to tell us everything he knew about Bakersfield as we reached the city limits." Moriarty shows them a succession of pool halls, railroad hotels, diners, rooming houses, Mexican and Chinese restaurants, even park benches where he had picked up girls. "Dean's California," Kerouac writes, was "wild, sweaty, important, the land of lonely and exiled and eccentric lovers come to foregather like birds . . ."

Merilyn and I are perhaps a little exiled but not the least bit lonely as we sit here in the orchard, munching on almonds and serenaded by foregathering birds.

MY face is turned east, at last. It feels right, as though we're finally heading home, but oddly wrong, too. This transcontinental journey is most often told east to west, following the actual course of American history. Simone de Beauvoir, Vita Sackville-West, all the visiting Victorian ladies, the explorers, the pioneers, set off from the Atlantic into the setting sun, and now we're driving toward them all, meeting their ghosts.

At Bakersfield, we put the Pacific at our backs and set our sights on the eastern seaboard. We're on Highway 58, part of what used to be called the National Old Trails Road, a loose connection of Indian tracks and wagon trails that led from Maryland through middle America and the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona to California. Around the time the Lincoln Highway was conceived, someone had the idea of turning these trails into the Ocean-to-Ocean Highway, but by 1927, only eight hundred miles had been paved. Surprisingly, the stretch we are coming to, the road that crosses the Mojave, was among the best.

The Old Trails Road fell apart, literally, when Highway 66 was built in its place. But just as the Boy Scouts weren't willing to see the old Lincoln Highway disappear, the Old Trails had its saviour, too: a Missouri woman named Arlene B. Nichols Moss, who decided to mark the Trail with statues of pioneering women.

I am in awe of this American penchant for the monumental. This is a republic that carves presidents into mountainsides, a country that builds a Grecian temple to house a thirty-foot-tall Republican, a nation at war for most of its history that erects a ten-foot-high, 275-foot-long granite wall to honour soldiers who fought in the one it lost. The cause doesn't seem to matter: they love to wear their hearts on their sleeve.

Arlene Moss was a Daughter of the American Revolution, a member of a peculiarly American and pa.s.sionately patriotic group of women, each of whom could "prove lineal bloodline descent from an ancestor who aided in achieving United States independence." It was the DAR that, in 1939, refused to allow Marian Anderson, the black contralto, to sing in its concert hall, prompting Eleanor Roosevelt to arrange a live performance on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial where, twenty-five years later, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I have a dream" speech.

We have no Daughters of the Repatriated Const.i.tution in Canada. My mother belonged to the church auxiliary and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Women of my day joined feminist collectives.

That's not to say the DAR hasn't done good work. Arlene Moss, for instance, not only rescued the Old Trails from complete extinction but honoured women pioneers by mounting a statue called the Madonna of the Trail in each of the twelve states the old road pa.s.sed through. Interestingly, Arlene's inspiration came from a monument raised to Sacajawea, the Shoshone woman who helped get Lewis and Clark through the Rocky Mountains. She was also the first woman to register a vote in North America and the first American woman to be honoured with a larger-than-life public portrait, which in the monument-p.r.o.ne United States is high honour indeed.

"How would you feel about taking a detour down to Upland?" I ask tentatively. "It's only about seventy-five miles."

I want to see the Madonna of the Trail for myself. The ten-foot-tall pioneer mother clasps a baby in her left arm while clutching a rifle in her right; her young son clings to her skirts, which trail through the prairie cactus and sage, sc.r.a.ping past arrowheads, barely missing a rattlesnake coiled in the gra.s.s. From the pictures, it's not a pretty portrait, all jutting angles and desperation. These square-jawed baggy-eyed women have their hands full, their skirts hobbled as they trudge grimly forward. They don't look valiant so much as put-upon.

Wayne is staring blankly ahead. I wait.

"That's an hour and a half," he says finally. "Probably more with traffic. Each way. At that rate, we'll never get far enough tonight to make it to the Grand Canyon in time for Christmas dinner."

Maybe we can stop and visit the one in Springerville, Arizona, or in Albuquerque, New Mexico. All the way home, I'll be staring into the faces of these women, driving against the hard wave of their determination.

I wonder what kind of monument Canadians would raise to their pioneer mothers, were they inclined to public displays of sculptural affection. We have few statues to women, and the ones we have seem domesticated by comparison. The five who fought to have Canadian women recognized as "persons"-Emily Murphy, Irene Parlby, Nellie McClung, Louise McKinney, and Henrietta Edwards-are gathered at a tea party. Laura Secord, though famous for her desperate midnight hike through the woods to warn the British that the Americans were invading, stands demurely near a bridge over the Ottawa River.

The most heroic statue of a woman that I can think of is mounted on a quiet, residential corner in our national capital. It depicts an American scene: a Vietnamese woman running with a child in her arms. You can almost smell the napalm, hear the rolling thunder of the American fighter-bombers. It honours civilians, not soldiers: "In memory of those who have lost their lives in their quest for freedom."

THERE'S NOT much to see out the window. This desert used to be strung with small towns, crossroad villages like Bagdad of the film Bagdad Cafe, in which a man and a woman, driving across America, have an argument and the woman leaves her husband and stays to work at the cafe. But those places are gone, pulverized by heat and indifference. It's a lonely stretch of road. Not much out there but scrub turning to desert and lava fields so scorched-looking they make the desert seem lush by comparison. In the distance, a bank of windmills, like spa.r.s.e daisies, stand planted on a ridge.

I'm reading the map, on the lookout for the National Old Trails Road. Most of it is gone, buried under other highways, straightened and groomed out of existence. A lot of it survives only as ATV tracks and abandoned trails. But in some parts of the country, bits have been returned to the old designation. I see a gentle loop that starts at Daggett and continues to Ess.e.x, which is just a spit away from Needles, where we hope to spend the night. If there's time and Wayne seems in the mood, I'll suggest a detour. It won't take us as far out of our way as Upland would have. It starts near the Pisgah Crater, named for the mountain that G.o.d commanded Moses to climb so that he could see the Promised Land. This Pisgah is a fairly young volcano, as volcanoes go: its cone rises only a few hundred feet above the desert.

Whoever named it must have been an unredeemable optimist. I can hear his grim-faced pioneer wife muttering in the background: Some mountain! Some promised land!

WHEN people are asked to name a famous American highway, chances are they'll say Route 66. I first heard of it in the 1960s, on the television series Route 66, starring George Maharis and Martin Milner as two young boyos travelling around America in a Corvette. Before that, the road was immortalized by John Steinbeck in the 1930s, by Nat King Cole in the '40s, and by Jack Kerouac in the '50s. The long, meandering highway was begun in 1925 to forge a continuously paved link between Chicago, Illinois, and Barstow, California, joining hundreds of hitherto disconnected small towns and dirt back roads, following river and even creek beds, heeding its own serendipitous logic as it sifted down through Arkansas and Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle before finally swinging west through New Mexico and Arizona. It was finished in 1934, just in time for the exodus of Oklahoma farmers heading to California in search of a new beginning. "The mother road," John Steinbeck called it. "The road of flight."

At Barstow we leave Highway 58 and get on the I-40, which has obliterated the Mother Road across much of America. Although the I-40 bears little resemblance to that mythical highway of the 1930s, it's still a prepossessing ribbon of daylight, threading the Mojave Desert, lined with cactus and mesquite. Not a place to run out of gas, get a flat tire, or have an argument with your wife. As I recall, there are no knock-down, drag-out fights between the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath. Driving through country like this gives you a firm grasp on what's important.

It certainly did for Steinbeck. The vast, westward migration of some 250,000 dest.i.tute farm workers became his life's subject. In 1936, he was hired by the San Francisco News to write a seven-part feature about the ma.s.sive influx of American migrant workers into the Central Valley. He called the series "The Harvest Gypsies," and although it began as an objective report on the plight of the homeless and the helpless, it quickly became a polemic against the industrialized agricultural system that flourished as a result of engineered water and economies of scale, a system that reaped huge profits for owners but paid migrant workers starvation wages and brutally punished anyone who even thought about forming a farm workers' union (which Cesar Chavez finally achieved in 1966).

"It is difficult to believe," Steinbeck wrote in that series, "what one large speculative farmer has said, that the success of California agriculture requires that we create and maintain a peon cla.s.s. For if this is true, then California must depart from the semblance of democratic government that remains here."

In Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck often steps outside the fictional world of the Joad family to present detailed descriptions of Highway 66, as well as first-person chapters by used-car salesmen or truck-stop waitresses. These realistic riffs were Steinbeck's way of bringing his readers to the understanding that what they were reading was not fiction invented out of thin air by an abstract artist, but a true account of a serious crisis in American history. By putting a face on the working cla.s.s, he paved the way for the eventual success of Chavez and the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee in their struggle for human rights. It is fitting that when Chavez went on a hunger strike to protest migrant workers' living conditions in 1968, he received a letter of support from Martin Luther King, Jr. Among King's last public words before his a.s.sa.s.sination was the verse "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord," with its implied next line: "He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored."

When the Joads crossed the Colorado River in their overloaded Hudson truck, they looked down on the section of California through which we're now travelling. They saw little but "broken, rotten rock winding and twisting through dead country, burned white and grey, and no life in it." The landscape hasn't changed. I wouldn't say there is no life in it, but it is certainly diminished life, toehold life, life the Joads must have understood.

Near the Pisgah Crater, we turn into what looks like an abandoned quarry or an open-pit salt mine, with a dirt track running down into a hole carved through an exposure of reddish-brown stone. Thick thorn bushes cover most of the ground. We get out and pick our way through them to the top of the quarry to look southwest, toward the setting sun. The sand still holds some heat from the day, and although a cool breeze is coming at us over the desert, we are not cold. We can hear birds, tiny peeps and quiet, cricket-like flock calls, a small family group making its way through the low shrubs and gra.s.ses, but we cannot see them.

Merilyn and I separate for a while, the first time we've been out of each other's sight for days, and I find a small cup-nest set deep in a leafless Anderson thornbush that must be that of a cactus wren, a wren the size of a robin (most wrens are not much bigger than chickadees) that I would very much like to see. But there is no sign that the nest has been used lately. I call Merilyn over, and she reaches delicately into the thornbush, extracts a dun-coloured feather, and hands it to me, a gift. It is, after all, Christmas Eve.

MUCH about this parched interior landscape seems familiar. I've never been here before, but staring through the windshield at the empty desert, I realize I've been seeing it all my adult life, in the photographs of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Robert Frank.

I reach back into the rubble of the back seat and lift out the camera.

"Want me to stop?" Wayne asks.

"No," I say. "I'll just roll down my window."

In the latter half of the Thirties, the Farm Security Administration hired some of the best photographers of the day-Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee, Walker Evans-to roam the country, doc.u.menting the devastation wrought by the drought. The photographers were sent out with detailed shooting scripts: "Crowded cars going out on the open road. Gas station attendant filling tank of open touring and convertible cars." The kind of pictures I like to take.

Walker Evans had already compiled his own list of picture categories, which rivals Jefferson's directive to Lewis and Clark in ambition and scope. It's a useful list for any traveller out to understand a country: People, all cla.s.ses, surrounded by bunches of the new down-and-out Automobiles and the automobile landscape Architecture, American urban taste, commerce, small scale, large scale, clubs, the city atmosphere, the street smell, the hateful stuff, women's clubs, fake culture, bad education, religion in decay The movies Evidence of what people of the city read, eat, see for amus.e.m.e.nt, do for relaxation and not get it s.e.x Advertising A lot else, you see what I mean.

But Dorothea Lange is the photographer I a.s.sociate with this dry corner of America. It wasn't far from where we turned east off the I-5 that Lange took her iconic portrait, "Migrant Mother." It's 1936. A woman sits surrounded by her children, one in her arms, one leaning against her shoulder, another huddled at her back. She is thirty-two, a mother of seven, one of the dest.i.tute pea pickers who flocked to the Central Valley after the land they worked in the Midwest simply blew away.

In Lange's photographs of the pea pickers, the cotton pickers, and the rest of the environmental refugees flooding west, the people are all but indistinguishable from the land: their skin is just as creased and parched. In "Jobless on Edge of Pea Field, Imperial Valley, California," a man crouches on his haunches, bone-thin and desperate, though his eyes are still sharp, his chin jutting into the breeze. Hope has vanished altogether from "Man Beside Wheelbarrow." He buries his head in his hands, his back against a brick wall that fills the frame, as if it goes on forever.

To me, though, the most desolate, the most hopeless of Lange's photographs is "The Road West." The top third of the picture is a strip of scoured sky bisected by the narrow end of a funnelling highway, the asphalt widening as it approaches the viewer until it takes up the entire bottom of the frame. I've made it sound as if the road were coming toward you, which it could be, but when confronted with the photograph, what you see is a road receding into an endless, pointless distance. There are no people. No cars. Nothing is coming. Or going. Beside the photograph in Lange's book An American Exodus is a quote from someone Lange met on the road: "Do you reckon I'd be out on the highway if I had it good at home?" This is Tom Joad's road west, "silent, looking into the distance ahead, along the road, along the white road that waved gently, like a ground swell."

It's the heat that turns a road into an undulating river. But in December, what lies before us is flat and grey as a roadkill snake.

Twenty years after Lange shot "The Road West," Robert Frank took a similar picture in the New Mexico desert between Taos and Santa Fe. It was 1955, and he and Walker Evans, funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship, were on a road trip to doc.u.ment America. They wanted to show how the nation had changed since Lange and Evans had photographed it in the Thirties, to doc.u.ment "the kind of civilization born here and spreading everywhere." As Geoff Dyer points out in The Ongoing Moment, a masterful extended riff on photography in the United States, "America was becoming a place to be seen from a car, a country that could be seen without stopping."

In Frank's road picture, the horizon is still flatlining, the road still swelling, but in the distance, a small black car approaches. The image no longer feels hopeless-someone is coming!-though the night is still empty and bleak. Kerouac mentions this picture in his introduction to Frank's book The Americans (which, wouldn't you know it, was released first in France): "Long shot of night road arrowing forlorn into immensities and flat of impossible-to-believe America."

Only twenty years separates those two pictures, yet they are a world apart. As Dyer notes, Lange's photo "is about distance, remoteness; Frank's is about covering ground." It's been fifty years since Frank was here. There's not one car on the horizon; there are hundreds. A wall-to-wall highway of cars. Covering ground is still what it's all about: getting there fast, and first.

Wayne and I have covered a lot of ground today. Hours ago, we spoke to a fireman at the Starbucks in Sacramento who told us the Grand Canyon was a good twelve-hour drive away.

"You can do it in a day," he said, "but it's a push."

We've been driving ever since. Now and then I lift the camera to the window, taking pictures of the wind turbines lazily turning on the hills above the desert, the sunset over the Mojave, signs that tell us how far we have yet to go. I stare down at the images, clicking through them, giving my eyes a rest from the endless desert, stalling our progress for a while. The soul walks, they say. I give it a bit of a breather.

We imagined we'd find a quaint and quirky place to stay in the desert, dreamed of getting up to do a little birdwatching on Christmas morning, but there are no towns, not even the ones named on the map. When Simone de Beauvoir went by bus from California to the Grand Canyon fifty years ago, she saw rustic shacks selling curios, wagon wheels propped against walls, ghost towns and diners and tourist inns. All traces of that past have been obliterated, the motels boarded up or knocked down when the interstate sucked the traffic through without stopping. Gone are the solitary ghost towns with their mouldy wooden shacks, their old theatres with faded posters. In the half century since de Beauvoir was here, another layer of history has crumbled to dust, asphalt laid like a gravestone in its place. Only the landscape never changes.

Bleak thoughts, and now we're travelling at a snail's pace. Construction on the I-40 has reduced it to one lane.

"How about getting off onto the National Old Trails Road for a while?" I suggest. Wayne must be tired of the interstate, too. I watch him spin through his mental mathematics.

"Okay," he says. "It can't be any slower than this."

We veer south onto the loop of narrow road. Here, surely, we'll stumble upon a cla.s.sic motel with a diner off one side selling hamburgers and cherry c.o.kes. But there is nothing. No cars. Not even a road sign. For a hundred miles in all directions, the map on my lap is alarmingly blank, save a few spa.r.s.e labels: Bristol Lake (Dry). Cadiz Lake (Dry). Danby Lake (Dry). Calico (Ghost Town). Soda Lake (Dry). Only desert, as far as the eye can see.

WINDOWS down, driving at night, I feel the desert cascade into the car, hitting us in all five senses at once: I am falling in love with the desert. The mineral scent of cooling sand; the play of stars above an intuited horizon; the roar of an unfathomed emptiness, as though we're following the lip of a bottomless canyon; hair beating against my ear, and the hydraulic hum of the tires on rough pavement; the cyanide taste of almonds.

It feels good to be off the I-40. "I hate how those interstates bulldoze through hills and fill hollows with gravel trucked in from as far away as economically possible," I say to Merilyn, "don't you?"

"Why are your thoughts always so negative?" Merilyn asks. "My mother used to say, 'When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.' But when you hear hoofbeats, you don't think horses or zebras, do you?"

She's right. Occam's razor: the law of parsimony. The most obvious answer is usually the right one. I don't seem to be able to think parsimoniously.

"You think the Four Hors.e.m.e.n of the Apocalypse, don't you?"

"I guess so," I say, using an Americanism. All Americans in British novels say "I guess so" and "You bet."

But I do respond to the parsimony of this desert. After the thoroughfares of the West Coast and the lush but artificial landscape of the Central Valley, this desert is my first taste of the real America, the unspoiled landscape I hadn't been prepared for, and I like it. It's so un-American. Deserts always surprise me, the way they look dead but are actually teeming with secret life. I have always loved them, the way their lack of clutter forces you into yourself, strips away inessentials like ego and even history. Deserts as antimatter. I once spent two months digging fossils in the Gobi Desert, and I remember lying awake at night looking out into the darkness, watching the desert surface ignite into a billion tiny explosions as grains of sand were bombarded against one another by the constant wind, like particles in a proton accelerator, and marvelling at the soft violence that surrounds all living things. It was the same in the High Arctic, another desert, where I would stare across the ice for hours, happily giving myself to its pure immensity. "The desert is a vast world," Edward Abbey wrote, "an oceanic world, as deep in its way and complex and various as the sea."

Nothing bad has happened. No one has bonked us on the head and stolen our hubcaps or shot at us. I knew a violinist from Nova Scotia who said she'd moved back home from California, where she'd played with the Los Angeles Symphony, because as she was coming out of a grocery store one day a bullet had bounced off the roof of her car. "I left that day," she said. "I still had the groceries in the car when I got to Cape Breton." Nothing like that has happened to us.

"Do you hear that?" asks Merilyn quietly.

"Yes," I say. "Coyotes."

Desert peoples refer to coyotes as G.o.d's dog, perhaps because the animals seem to have appeared out of nowhere. I pull over and we get out. From somewhere off in the darkness comes a faint, discordant yipping, a plaintive sound that carries no threat, like the sound of a train whistle diminishing in the night. I consider answering their call, but I don't, not wanting to identify myself as an interloper from a foreign pack. If I can't belong here, I can at least sneak through undetected.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?" Merilyn says, leaning against me, looking up into the sky.

"It's beautiful everywhere," I say, wanting to believe it, rea.s.sessing it all-the soaring Douglas-fir forest; the placid Pacific; the brotherly mountains and now the desert. "We've seen a lot in just four days. It will take us a while to a.s.similate it."

"By which time we'll have seen a lot more."

"We're really into it now, aren't we?"

"No going back," Merilyn says. "Shall we go on?"

"You bet."

She gets back into the car and I linger behind, beyond the glow of the tail lights. Let the coyotes smell my mark.

MY thrill on clear winter nights is to douse the headlights and drive down our road with only the moon on the snow to guide the way.

"Let's drive blind," I say now, and Wayne switches off the lights.

The sand glows like December drifts. Far to the south a pale light twinkles. If it's a car, it will take hours to reach us. But maybe it's a star.

Something glows on the road in front of us, too.

We're over it before we can see what it was, something painted on the road surface. Then another one. Wayne stops and turns on the lights.

"Route 66" is stencilled in white paint on the black asphalt, the numbers tucked inside their old, curvaceous, police-badge frame.

No statues here: they've branded the road itself, like a steer they're afraid will run away.

"People must steal the signs," Wayne says.

What people?

We get out, leaving the car parked in the middle of the highway, lights off. There's nothing coming, not from any direction. We stand under the dome of stars. I wonder if they're the same stars we'd see if we were at home.