After a (lackluster, dammit) breakfast at Carl's Jr. (which we ate in the parking lot of the town's jail,) Jaime and I set off again, with our sights on Oatman, AZ.
Oatman is a famous tourist town high in the mountains near the border of Arizona and California. Those mountains were popular with the silver miners back in the day, and apparently, the Oatman family, party of 5, was manifesting destiny and migrating westward on the foundation that would eventually become 66 when they were attacked by Natives. The Natives murdered Ma and Pa Oatman, bludgeoned their teenage son and left him for dead, but took the 3 year-old and 7 year old daughter, Olive, with them.
The son recovered and went for help, but it was years before they could track the girls down, and by then, the younger one had died from disease and the older one, now 13, had her chin entirely tattooed with blue markings, as she had been traded around to various tribes as a slave.
The U.S. Government at that time had no qualms dealing with terrorists, so they gave the current owners 2 white horses and some blankets and beads in exchange for Olive.
Olive went on to lead a happy life, and she and her descendants started the town of Oatman near where she was recued, and named it after her family. Oatman is still around today, nestled amongst the ruins of abandoned Silver mines.
To get there, you drive about a bajillion flat straight miles on the last tail end of Route 66, then you go up, up, up some of the curviest windiest mountain terrain I've ever been through. The grade of the incline is so steep that before fuel pumps were invented, cars would have to be driven backwards up the road so that the gasoline tank would still drain into the engine properly. These roads are so narrow and the twists and turns are so steep, motorists used to hire locals to drive their cars (backwards) through the pass. All throughout the gorges, you can see cars that didn't fare so well, crushed and sometimes burned at the bottom. Not cool.
At the tippy-top of all this is Sitsgraeves Pass, which is an extremely beautiful place to park and stare at the rest of the world. Bizarrely enough, perhaps because of the name, or maybe a continued tradition from the covered wagon days when people didn't survive the roadtrip, Sitsgraves is populated by crosses. Tons of different "graves" adorn the mountainside- some for people like Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa, and others with photographs and glass-encased serviceman flags. Strange. There was also a TV monitor thrown away up there and a gila monster, which was neither dead or discarded, just awesome.
Meghan Moroney had given me an incredibly special gift before I left- we both got rolfed (torture) and then had a girl lunch at Sweet Tomatoes before her audition at Mad Cow. During lunch, she surprised me with a shiny emerald-colored box.
Inside, nestled amongst lilac-colored Easter Grass, was a WishBone. And not just any WishBone- a WishBone from a Universal Turkey!
"Make sure you and Jay both focus and with for the same thing, and then pull," she said, basically guaranteeing a wish come true.
This was quite possibly one of the coolest gifts I've ever received, and I kept it in the car with me the entire trip, waiting for the perfect moment.
Looking out at the world, from the top, in a place of memory and sacredness, I felt like it might be a good opportunity to pull it and make the wish.
We walked back to the car and retrieved it, (noticed the gila monster and TV set) and returned to the edge of the mountain.
And promptly chickened out.
I wanted to do it at a positive place, and as "charged" as Sitsgraves is energy-wise, it is a place for honoring the past. I needed a place that represented the future, because that is what the Wish is focused on. So, after holding it for a while and thinking about the past that we were leaving behind, we pressed on into the future- which happened to be Oatman.
Oatman is now sort of like Old Town- full of biker paraphernalia and post cards, but it is also special for another reason: the Burros!
When the mines closed down, the Burros had no more work, and since Jim Timon couldn't offer them any part-time hours, they were set loose to wander and forage for food. They also happen to be adorable, and so people in Oatman fed them.
Their descendants still live up near the mines, but they wander down to the town every day, and you can feed them apples or carrots. I'd kept an apple from the lobby of the New Mexican Econo-Lodge specifically for that purpose, and now carried it with me when we got out of the car to look for the burros.
Instead, we heard a cat walking towards us.
Now, cats are usually quiet and stealthy, but this cat was so large and... beefy, I guess, that we heard his footpads fall on the baked clay earth of the parking area. The cat sauntered into the nearest giftshop and hoped up on the counter. I scratched his neck and he began licking my hand incessantly. He was incredibly friendly. I asked the shopkeeper what his name was, and the owner said that he didn't belong to anyone, and that the people in town had seen him fighting with coyotes (and winning) so they named him John Wayne. John discovered that people would be kind to him if he was cool, so he consented to people petting and feeding him. He made me miss my cats fiercely.
We saw signs along the town requesting that you not feed the burros with carrot-stickers on their foreheads, and not to remove those stickers because they identified the burros with carrot allergies.
At long last, two beautiful burros approached us and I split my apple between the both of them. I get a huge kick out of feeding animals and petting them, so I enjoyed myself immensely. As for the Burros, they were fine being petted and adored, (much like John Wayne,) but either they'd been eating all day, or, the apple was, sadly, lackluster. Bahhh.
We washed the ass off our hands and hopped back into the car, leaving Oatman in our dust. However, on the way back down the mountain, we saw many more burros of all sorts of colors- it felt like going from Kansas to Oz, burro-wise. The pretty gray ones in town were beautiful enough, but these were burros from horses of a different color! Palomino-burros, or as I liked to call them, "burro-minos," in orange, yellow, milk-white and soft brown. Absolutely amazingly cool. I saw this beautiful one with a big fat pregnant belly that reminded me of Summer when she did the Wal-Mart video.
We pulled over to the side of the road to gape, and a burro approached Jay's open window and basically tried to nuzzle him to death, so we skedaddled.
The mountain's other side is a little more gentle slope, and eventually, we were back at sea-level (ish) and about to enter Needles.
Needles, for those of you keeping score, is a town in the beautiful state of Cali-forn-i-ay!
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