A real Huck (Finn)
Alternate history and a possible time-traveler, just down the road
Every song from the new-old radio seemed right. I patted Cat — my ever-faithful, objectified ’65 Buick — on the dash and said out loud,
“I missed you. It’s been too long.”
I missed this feeling. 8 months ago, we tore through that last 1000 miles on our way “home” to New Mexico. This was my reboot of the Roadtrip Americana. I need not scour thousands of miles to find history and people that compel me. In the first exploration of next-door unknowns, I simply set course East and then South from Albuquerque, NM — though mountain curves and along the smooth green valley roads I had never really explored.
Cat’s WildCat V8 pulled easily up to highway speed. I forgot how easy she ran and passed younger cars with ease.The first hour, the first 30 or 60 or 80 miles depending on my restlessness — I remembered them now. Any given morning, starting out — it’s all rush and big, dumb smiles at thrill of freedom and escape. The place you were is still nice, fresh, unsoured. The road ahead is pure possibility.
All this — and I was only in the next-door mountains of New Mexico.
The road is like a “90% natural” drug from burning High On Life tree leaves. The leaves didn’t fall off by themselves. They certainly didn’t set themselves on fire. That happened from the sparks shooting out as your piece of moving metal hits the open road.
At first release, you feel the rush. This is the first phase of hitting the ever-burning Road. The second phase of awe and curiosity takes over after the rush falls off.
The third phase comes when it all seems too good to be true. Some simple, scared part of your mind hates this wandering. It needs purpose and security. It finds a reason to worry, to create a crisis.
Cool spring air poured in and then out through the smoker’s windows. My thoughts followed the crisp wind out as my first phase rush wore off, replaced by the curiosity of the second.
Each dirt road, each valley between the ridges. Who and what did they hold?
All those stories rusting patiently beside countless 60s Cadillacs and 70-something Lincolns, parked and saved for better days. Work trucks wore their decades of service. They waited like old dogs by the entrances, ready to push and haul and dive through the mountains.
When I saw the orange light on the dash, I felt the fear. “GEN” means battery, or alternator, or “something’s wrong with your electricity.” Sure enough, the Buick barely turned over after the first shutoff and restart outside of “Ray’s One-Stop” market and “Ray’s Woodpile” in some in-between town of a few hundred. The starter clicked and groaned, only barely firing up after a rest.
I felt myself descend into the third phase.
The worried, protective, simple part of me seemed to have won: There would be no stops down random trails this trip, lest I lose the safety of a running engine.
As the Buick idled, an old man hobbled slowly by with a walking stick. We spoke of “Ray” and all his local fame. He said I should test the alternator with a ‘scope to “see if it’s alternating” as he grinned and carried on.
He cursed the bad advice he just took to “dry out” his campsite ‘round the bend; I silently cursed the audio shop who I trusted to hook up the radio (I had credit from returned speakers). They caused this short, this fear, this new restraint on my road. That simple voice needed someone to blame.
We tore around some curves in the crisp mountain air and passed signs for towns and land grants I, somehow, had never before seen. I left her running at an old wind mill that caught my eye. As the ,metal fins turned in the breeze, it pumped dutifully — clear water into a watering pool.
No cows or horses in sight, I ran my hand through the cool water and then shook it off as I walked through the old gazebo. Endless hills held a long-faded sign in the distance — black paint spelling “Keep Out” near an old barn and homestead. I thought of the contradictions of American country life…and then remembered the Buick was still running.
At a city park in Mountainair, I decided to try shutting her off. This would be my stop. Someone must have a jump for me if she didn’t turn over — right?
The silly indulgence of a lunch prepared for a site of my choosing — it reaches back to self-made picnics and the simple thrill of a child eating outdoors. A few decades on, I’m still the boy pining to eat anywhere else but under the strict rules of a family’s or restaurant’s (or mother’s) table. It is an escapist pleasure of many layers I do not have the patience to unravel, so I’ll just enjoy it.
I finished with some dark-as-hell chocolate (up to 90% cacao+ now, which always gives me a rush of words). As the chocolate melted in my mouth, sending caffeine and theobromine screaming into my brain, I read American short stories. I wrote the thoughts that make up this story in a simple notebook.
From the stone-slab picnic table, I could see a house with life. Cars were lined up outside, next to an abandoned house that may have held some other bustling family in older days. This house buzzed with family focused on the present.
The name Archuleta was carved proudly into a painted piece of wood, hung above the front door. I imagined it happened soon after the house was first built, as a new branch of the family settled . Archuleta was one of those Spanish names and bloodlines I expected to hear everywhere in New Mexico — like Romero or Lujan or Silva. from the centuries of New Mexico before the Americans came.
A boy rode on the back of an ATV, his father or uncle driving slowly. The boy waved as I waved back, eager for connection with someone or something new. I imagined my self on the back of my dad’s motorcycle. They cut through grass and dirt trails before cruising out onto the street, grinning at the shortcut. The miracle of some much passing under our feet, with his balance of a 2-wheeled machine — it all seemed like some victory against physics, defiance of the structure of set roads and agendas.
When the man driving pointed to the dog outside the house, they stopped and the boy took over. The man spoke warnings as the boy slowly pulled the thing into the driveway, cautioning for non-existent traffic. I could feel the nervous excitement as he piloted the machine many times bigger than him into the back yard under the caredul eye of a man he desperately wanted to impress. They were both Archuletas. I knew this as they shuffled into the house, laughter spilling out of a side door, with the engine clinking and cooling behind them.
I was alone at the “city” park. The fear of a dead battery faded and melted under the sun, like my chocolate as I wrote. The family would help me, would restart us. The Buick turned over anyway when I tried, just barely again, and further south we drove with no radio and renewed confidence.
The Mountainair sheriff drove his same 60s cruiser down main street as I left — out of practicality I assumed. He wore reflective sunglasses and a ten-gallon hat. We waved as we passed. I simultaneously loved that I had not taken a photo — and cursed myself for not capturing the moving time capsule as the road carried us back out to the places in between.
By the time the sign for the Abo Ruins appeared, I was feeling downright bold. I could leave ‘er running while I saw those, right? We U-turned and wound back to the site, where a tremendously eager Park Ranger ran out to greet me, armed with a path guide and instant plan to “use what time you have.” She didn’t have any jumper cables. I made the discovery rich and fast as Cat idled patiently on the side of the road.
From the ruins, we turned onto Highway 60 where the long stretch seemed like a slightly greener and friendlier version of West Texas. I-25 offered an easy, fast portal back home. Too easy. We cut off north before we ever reached the comforting site of a blue and red Interstate sign, onto state road 304. The winding two lane highway hugged the Rio Grande on the east side, keeping the noise and simple, manic buzz of I-25 at full arm’s length.
In Las Nutrias, I saw farmland for sale, and imagined life near the river. Only a few dozen miles south, there was re-invention and escape. Travis the farmer, living on land fed by the only widely-known river west of the Mississippi — what would he be like?
I knew some farmers here actually. I should stop, get eggs, see if they have any grass-fed beef to sell. At DeSmet dairy farm, a raw milk customer loaded up her trunk with jugs from the self-serve, “honor system” stand near the farm entrance. We spoke of old cars when she saw mine. Her name was Laura and she shared her love of local things once she realized I was actually listening.
We had one of those hesitant-at-first conversations where you ask something like
“Hi there, do you know if they have any beef to sell?”
It’s easy to stop after you get an answer, something clear and final like
“I don’t know, but Erica will. Let me give you her number”
Now you have an action, an expectation to do something — someone else to talk to. So you both should stop talking. But we started past that point as she sealed off her cooler full of raw yogurt and milk jugs. She closed the trunk of her fancy black SUV and spoke of all its charm-less problems.
She told me of her dad’s old cars, her migration to New Mexico and seeing the same preserved classics in backyards. Cars don’t rust here. She wished for the old feeling of driving something closer to her age. The simple mechanics she could understand; the feel of some connection to a machine like Cat.
Laura asked where I had gone in the Buick. Perhaps to imagine where else she might go or remember where she had been. I held back on asking about her home, and what had changed, and all those old interview questions that came to mind from my formulaic approach to conversations like this from the roadtrip before — when I felt some purpose in asking the same things to vastly different Americans.
The sun was starting to fade. I reminded her of why my car was running, as that damn third phase of fear crept back. It was as if we had both passed through the three phases in a conversation.
“Send her a text — she’s usually real close. She’ll have jumper cables for sure.”
Within minutes, Erica was guiding me back through the farm proper. She promised to jump my dead battery when we stopped. We crawled passed the well-fed cows and old tractors and surprisingly well-kept trucks.
There was promise of frozen beef of all cuts, and some extra liver “I could just have, please”. And I did, filling up the passenger side footspace of Cat with all different cuts and organs from cows of the farm’s recent past and cycle of life.
Enter Huck
What looked like an Amish man in slightly newer clothes strolled out with calm and a strong, simple confidence to jump-start the Buick with his ’68 Ford pickup. Erica pronounced he was her father-in-law. He had ideas on the cause, which I assumed was the alternator. With a simple voltage test, we confirmed it was not charging.
“It’s either the alternator or the regulator,” he proclaimed.
I suddenly remembered it still had the original voltage regulator, from 1965.
I thanked him for his help. When we shook hands and I introduced myself, he answered simply, “Huck.”
“Better get going before you lose the daylight, those headlights won’t last long on the jump you got.”
In full spite of the advice to “get on the road,” we talked cars. He moved faster now, pulling up the door on a long building to reveal He showed me all three of his 1915-ish Model T’s, one of which he “drove all across the country” in the 1950s.
Yeah, 1915 — these cars are over 100 years old. He still drives them.
Hucks’ Mack truck was all original. He used it to haul the steel down from Illinois to build the Bosque Farms rodeo stadium a few decades back. Or maybe he did it last week, you know, using an original time machine to get a better deal on American steel.
The car yard was like an idealized romance for me, speaking straight to what I saw as true Americana values: respecting, preserving, using old machines simply because they worked and you used them.
It was easy, natural, unforced kind of purpose for a man and his history, his experience. His kind was an original kind of recycler. Except they were better than a recycler. They never let it go to waste in the first place.
We walked the dirt beside the barn. His stories flowed out easily, almost from unknown times and places. The Model T’s, the old trucks and tractors he pointed to — it seemed like he was talking about now. It seemed like he was out of a different time, or an Amishman who decided his own, new spin on the culture: machines he could unbuild and rebuild were just fine for farming and for life.
He asked what I did for a living. Then, the inevitable “You married?”
“Not yet” I mustered, smiling and kicking the dirt under us. I was a traveler, on the move and unsure of where and with who to settle down. I felt a confidence in saying this. I could sense him nodding slightly as he related.
The first steps of trust were there between us. He implied a need for drivers, asking-without-asking if I would be willing to drive some of his Model T’s or John Deere tractors in the annual parade.
“Long as they keep the parade movin’ the model T’s won’t overheat, but if things stop, those radiators boil over easy.”
Huck was a character out of a slightly-modernized Mark Twain novel (to be contrived). He was Huck Finn, if Huck had skipped quite a few decades, and grown up in middle New Mexico on a farm of his own making. He was a neo-Amish rebel, a person unbelievable to any big city types. He was real, and raw, and…just was.
As it grew dark, the tug of worry came back.
I realized the Road’s 3 Phases — the ones I felt at the beginning of this day — had cycled again. Random people caused this: Laura getting milk, then Erica, and now (especially) Huck.
I had felt the rush, the first phase, come back in short spurts with each discovery. It hit hardest when I was given access to the farm, to their new world and history and stories— to an unknown.
Awe took over, the second stage, as the new scenes and culture settled in. It maintained through the offer to jumpstart, to help, to Huck rolling back the blankets from his Model T’s. The awe flowed on as he told select tales from an entire lifetime.
And now, I felt the need to remind him, to let myself be pulled into the practicality of some set agenda or schedule. The darkness was a sign and a trigger.
Hadn’t he told me I should get on the road before my battery died and headlights went out? To not risk it?
I also remembered a subtle hint of further hospitality and trust — that I might not want to drive back tonight. This warmth and new trust fought the worry and anxiety of the third phase.
What’s the worst that can happen? I spend the night here? I sleep with the cows? More adventure?
Thanks for everything, Huck. ‘preciate the jump start.
“Come on back anytime. Be careful heading back.” Huck said as we shook hands with the slower, relaxed grip and hold of new friends.
The Buick’s lights were dim when I finally switched them on in the pale twilight before turning onto I-25 — back to up to Albuquerque for the night. The frozen beef slid and resettled as I pull into traffic from other lives, other Saturdays, with people driving from and to somewhere other than the unknown.
I made it.
Of course I made it.
My mind already raced ahead to what else I should do this night and tomorrow morning. When and how and what — like some continuation and progression of that third phase, of the return to the known and its expectations.
Next time would be longer, farther, more open — like the South and the roadtrip last year. Like when I set out barefoot into the softwood tree forests of Pennsylvania in my youth. Callouses and some innate wisdom would guide and protect me.
Next time.
I felt Cat gain speed. We surged up from the valley into the lights of Albuquerque. Bright and blue and some of the old orange hue stood burning to save us from the darkness without headlights and all the music of the country night.
