Essay by Joe Franco

Four Hour Drive from Any Paved Road

After thirty hours of non-stop driving, and a disgusting amount of fast food, we finally arrived at the visitor’s center of Big Bend National Park in southern Texas. It was one pm on Friday, March 13th and two friends and I were at the very beginning of a much-awaited road trip out west. Our emotions varied from a mixture of excitement, exhaustion, and over-confidence. I was six months into my gap year and after successfully navigating traveling throughout Europe and Central America, I felt like I could do anything, especially in my own country. We strode up to the remote camping registration office and sat down with a weary, elderly man who clearly did not want to be at work.

“What kinda car ya driving boys?” he asked without introducing himself.

“A 2007 Acura RDX, sir”

“I’m afraid today ain’t your day” the clerk replied, “I only have one campsite left and I don’t think you can make it in a city car like ya got, the road is bumpy”

Justin, being a bit of a car-head himself, and as overconfident as the rest of us said, “I think we will be fine, we’ll just drive slow”

After thirty hours of non-stop driving, and a disgusting amount of fast food, we finally arrived at the visitor’s center of Big Bend National Park in southern Texas.

It was a hot day—just like almost every day in Big Bend—and the sun was high in the sky. The further and further that we drove down the path, the more and more concerned we got about how we were going to get back. Nevertheless, we trudged forward, checking our map intermittently, figuring we were only a couple miles away from our campsite. Justin gave the wheel to our friend Trevor and within the next 30 seconds, our lives changed drastically. First, he misjudged the height of a huge mound of dirt and rocks in the middle of the road. The horrid sound of metal painfully scraping and grinding against the stone penetrated our eardrums. As he struggled to remove the car out from the mound, he must have hit a sharp rock because the tire pressure alert went off. We jumped out of the car and examined the damage. Sure enough, we watched pitifully as the driver’s side front tire slowly lost its air. At this point, our minds jumped to: “how are we going the drive out of here with a donut (the under-sized spare tire) on the front side of our car?” The situation was far worse than we imagined.

We pulled the car off to the side of the path and took out the jack, and the spare tire. As we went to unscrew the lug nuts, Justin was the first to notice that one of the lug nuts was different. The Acura RDX is a city car—it was my grandfather’s car that I was lucky enough to borrow for this road trip—and like most city cars, it has more security features. In this case, the manufacturers had created one lug nut that requires a special Acura Key to prevent people from stealing hubcaps and tires. Stress swept over us as we jumped up and began to madly search the car for the key. We looked everywhere, taking every single one of our belongings out of the car. Without this key we could not get the flat tire off, meaning we were stranded.

Stranded in the middle of Big Bend National Park, stranded 4 hours from any paved road. Stranded 150 miles from any town. Stranded. The key was nowhere to be seen.

most ominously, we were as far out in the wilderness as I have ever been or will ever go.

We spent the next hour and a half desperately trying to get the lug nut off without the help of the key. We took turns using a variety of wrenches, screwdrivers, and random tools in our box to somehow get it off. We even tried to wear it down with the equivalent of sandpaper. No surprise, nothing worked in the slightest.

It took about thirty minutes for reality to truly sink in. I did a mental checklist of everything bad about our situation. We were without cell service. We had zero possibility of going anywhere without the key. The key itself is extremely rare, nobody is stupid enough to drive an Acura out here. We had a limited amount of food and water. It was 95 degrees Fahrenheit. There was not another soul for miles. And most ominously, we were as far out in the wilderness as I have ever been or will ever go.

The next step was to figure out how we would get out of this horrible situation. As we considered our options, our collective stress began to spread. We could stand by the path and hope that one of the few people to drive by would have the Acura key. We could send one or two of us off to hitchhike to the closest town (150 miles), which would be a multi-day trip. Or we could have somebody send word out to the park service to come and save us. However, we were so far out that there was no way we could be towed, and there was little chance that the park service even had the Acura key. This would mean abandoning my grandfather’s luxury car and flying home as a sad and expensive end to our trip. None of these options seemed good or viable. I realized that as much as I wanted to be fully independent, I was not quite there. I still needed somebody to come save me. I could not figure it out on my own. A part of me wanted to just call my parents; I needed help and support, but I did not have it. I was an adult now, nineteen years old, and I was completely helpless.

We decided to spend the rest of the day waving down cars. This plan proved to be very ineffective as not a single car passed by for the rest of the day. As the chilly desert night set in, we set up camp and bundled up in warm socks and two sweatshirts, as the temperatures plummeted to the lower forties. We spent the night exhausted yet awake, stressed, and clueless as to how we could possibly get out of this situation.

The next morning, we had a brief sense of freedom and bliss before we remembered how terrible everything was. By two pm we had flagged down about four cars, everybody was friendly but completely useless. We were beginning to discuss sending word onto the park service when we heard a soft rumble in the distance. Two large Toyota Tundra’s approached, driving at least forty miles an hour. We could immediately tell that these people meant business, they had come here for the entire purpose of going “off-roading”. The man in the first car was young and handsome, muscular with a deep Texas drawl. We quickly explained our situation and the man radioed to his friend in the car behind him about the problem. He said, “We’ll see what we can do” and the two drove up to our campsite and hopped out of their trucks. We had made sure to cover up our Bernie 2020 sticker on our roof rack.

Both of their trucks towered over us, they were lifted high off the ground with massive treaded tires. The man in the truck that we did not meet, clearly had power. He was older, probably mid-fifties, and plump with an equally thick southern accent. “First things first, let me just say, you bought an Acura”, he joked. “Now, let’s see what the problem is here”. The young man directed Justin to get in the car and to slowly roll the wheel as the old man carefully listened for where the leak was coming from. “There”, he exclaimed and marked the spot on the tire. Next, the young man took out a toolbox and extracted a plug and tweezers and patched the hole in the tire. Finally, the young man popped open the front hood of his car and revealed a fully functioning air compressor, built into the bumper. They filled the tire with air and waited to see if the patch would hold. Sure enough, it held on perfectly, and just like that we were ready to drive out of the desert. We expressed our enormous gratitude to the two generous and competent men for saving our butts. We asked what we could do to repay them, and they gave us stickers to put up for their off-road truck rigging business. We put those stickers up everywhere.

If I were religious, I would call those two men angels or a gift from god. Me, I call myself extraordinarily lucky. We ended up staying another night, but this time we could relax and enjoy ourselves, or as much as one could relax in 100-degree heat. The next day we packed up our camp and made the grueling four-hour drive back to the visitor’s center. Of course, problems had to arise, this time it was our roof rack. Every thirty minutes we would hear a clang as a part of our old rusted-out roof rack fell off the car, sending our belongings onto the ground. But this time we could fix it ourselves. We realized that my sleeping pad was the perfect wedge to put between the roof and the box, and that was where my pad stayed for the rest of the trip. Our next problem occurred as we were leaving Big Bend on our way to New Mexico. We had just had a celebratory swim in the Rio Grande, touched Mexico, and were feeling free as birds. It was still the very beginning of our trip and we had so much we wanted to do. All until I got cell service and got a call from my sister.
“Hey, do you remember that thing called Coronavirus?” she asked.

“Oh yeah, some weird disease that has killed some people in China,” I responded.

“I think you should come home Joe, it’s come here and it’s bad”.

Written for LANG120 (Abrams Locklear)
All photos by the author.