In a Land Where Donkeys Are King
And humans are their loyal subjects.
“Mind yer’ fingers,” the man said in an accent of twang and git. “They tend ta’ bite quick.”
I took the small paper sack from the old man, leaving him to his shaded wooden bench. The sack, much like the man, looked well-worn, wrinkled, and stained. Folded, waded, and reused so many times, the bag didn’t make a sound when I unrolled the top to peer inside. A handful of fresh out-the-earth carrots.
Dried wood of the boardwalk groaned from age and rattled from missing nails. Eventually, the path ended as did the shade, depositing me and my sack of carrots into the blistering Arizona sun. Boxed in by two covered walkways, the bleached white sand of the town’s only road forced me to squint and curse myself for leaving my sunglasses at the hotel the night before.
Heat radiated through the rubber of my sneakers while a hot wind blasted across my chin, not all that different from opening an oven to check on Thanksgiving dinner.
Taking the single-lane mountain path to Oatman, which sat straddling the state lines of Arizona, California, and Nevada, I wasn’t fully sure what to expect. Other than the bit of history I’d dug up on it. A former mining town, workers flocked elsewhere when the gold dried up, leaving all their prospecting…