The story behind "The mountains and the road"

The title story in the March 5, 2010 post "Wordzzle 102 - The mountains and the road" was based on something that actually happened. However, it happened long ago, back in the 1960-65 area, and my father was driving, not me. I was just a child, and the whole family was traveling across the desert somewhere in the American Southwest. I don't remember now why we were making the trip, or what state we were in at the time. We made a lot of trips in those years.

My father had been driving for a long time, since before dawn I think. Perhaps we had even been driving all night, with my mother doing part of the driving. This may also have been the time when he was driving into the morning sun, and had the sun shades down on the windshield and partly unfolded maps and whatever else he could find stuffed in along the upper part of the windshield, trying to block the sun's rays. I'm not sure, though.

In any case, we drove along a road through the desert. The road was very straight and mostly flat, with minor dips. In the far distance in front of us were mountains, low and indistinct and gray, and probably partly beyond the horizon. We drove toward them for a long time. Hours passed, slowly.

Sometimes we could see mirages on the road ahead of us, in the distance, looking like dark wet places, but they always melted away as we got closer. We talked about the mirages. My parents pointed them out to us, at least at first, and explained that they weren't real. Traffic was light, but I think it picked up some as it got later in the morning. I think the road was just two lanes, and people occasionally passed other people, including us.

The mountains slowly got larger and closer, very, very slowly. It seemed to be taking a very long time. I gradually began to be able to see some features on them, though they remained purplish and hazy looking. As time wore on they got larger and larger, and I could see a lot of things on them, a lot of details, though the mountains still retained the purplish hazy look. I started to wonder what would happen when we reached them. The road didn't seem to reach the mountains, it seemed to just abruptly end before it reached them. I think I could faintly see in some places on some of the mountains the faint trails of roads, but none of them led to this road. And still we kept getting closer, and still the road just seemed to end at some place before the mountains were reached.

Then finally, we got close enough that I was able to see that the road abruptly turned to the right. I could see cars traveling along that section, some heading toward us and some going the way we were, though they were at right angles to us since they were on the part of the road that had turned. I even saw them reach the turning point, and turn and start to come our way, though that part was initially hidden, either because it was a little lower or because a slight rise was in the ground between us and it.

We finally reached the turn, sometime in the early or mid afternoon I think, and drove along beside the mountains. I watched them go past us and gradually recede. Eventually we reached a point where they started to taper off, and I saw a place that had a big separation between the mountains, with a road that wound through the flat section there, coming from the mostly flat desert beyond, scattered with what I guess were numerous but widely separated little bushes. I watched cars traveling on that road, small and far away, as we came to that area and gradually went past it. The mountains continued on for a little bit past that area, but with smaller isolated mountains rising up out of the desert.

We continued on, to wherever it was we were going, as the afternoon got later. We probably had another day or more of traveling to do. It was a very long trip.

Dream - The uniform woman's birthday and then zombies

Around February 17, 2008, I had a dream in which I was at the radiator shop with my mother and a woman who supplied the uniforms (who looked like Mr. Monk's wife, from the TV show). We were all sitting at a small table, talking. The woman's birthday was today.

Finally it was time to pay her and my mother started looking through her purse for her checkbook, but couldn't find it, and it seemed she might have left it at home. I said that I could go home and get it. I wondered, though, in my mind, if the woman would be able to wait while I did this because she had other stops to make. Nobody responded to my suggestion. My mother continued to look through her purse. The woman was softly crying. I repeated my suggestion but was again ignored.

I came to a feeling that the woman didn't know that I didn't have a checkbook and couldn't pay her either, and that she felt that although my mother normally paid her, that I could make an exception and pay her myself this time, and that I was unwilling to bend the "rules" and do this, even though it was her birthday, it was her birthday and now she wasn't even going to get paid.

The woman drove off in her uniform van crying, with me running beside her for a little while, trying to comfort her, but she drove away. The shop had a large dirt area all around it, with no other buildings nearby. The van had been parked sideways at the front and she drove around the side and around the back, driving off pointed toward the south, with me finally standing there watching her go, unable to keep up with the van any more. It was dark now, though earlier in the dream it was before noon.

I went back into the shop, either through the front or through the back and ending up toward the front. Some people were driving up and coming in. I went toward where the office was in real life, but in the dream the shop extended past the office (which might not have been there at this point in the dream) and into a largish room where various parts were stored, many sealed with plastic to cardboard backs and hanging from hooks. I was going to point out the parts to someone and suggest that they look through them and see if what they wanted was there (and I think I did this).

There were two large glass doors, actually thick plastic, to the side near the parts area, and someone came in, perhaps through them, and warned that something bad was coming. I don't remember how it was worded, but some kind of evil people were coming. I went toward the clear plastic doors, which were each perhaps six feet wide. The doors sometimes had small metal frames and sometimes they didn't have any. They came together without any post or door frame between them, joining to each other. I went out through them and some people, perhaps five or six, were starting to gather, coming from different directions.

I went back in and got a battery-powered electric drill that had a huge drill bit on it and threatened one of them, pointing the drill at the person's chest. The end of the drill was still a foot or two away from the person. He smiled and looked amused, saying, "You don't really think you're going to stop me with that." I came to realize that they were all dead, like some kind of zombies.

I went back inside and closed the doors, but all they had to lock with was a short (perhaps a quarter inch long) rod that stuck out of a small bar that swung over and went into a slot or opening attached to the door on the left, the rod/bar thing was heavy duty metal, perhaps cast bronze, but it was too small and as the people outside started to come against the doors, mindlessly but increasingly insistently bumping against them, the doors shifted up and down and the rod kept coming out of the slot.

I was pushing against the doors with my shoulder, going along the length of the seam between the doors trying to find other places to join them together. The person who came to warn me was at the other door, helping hold it closed. I found toward the bottom where two metal tabs with openings were attached, one on each door, where something could be stuck through them, and higher up I found where two eye-screws were attached, one on each door, and also set so something could be put through them. One was on top of the other, but they were not quite in a vertical arrangement. I found a drill key in the parts section somewhere and stuck it through the screw eyes.

The pushing and bumping from the other side kept getting worse, and I had also been hearing a kind of muffled grumbling, almost groaning sound from them that was growing more insistent. I kept telling the other person to get some padlocks. I knew there were some hanging in the parts room to the side of us, hanging in the their plastic-sealed cardboard (I don't think I actually said much about where the padlocks were, just to get them). At least some of them. I knew, had loops thin enough to go through the openings. The person wasn't bringing me the padlocks, though, and I kept asking for them, as I desperately continued trying to keep the doors from opening.