AMANDA OF ARABIA

Wow, I just got in from the most bizarre night of my life. After Nick and Chris went home, Kyle and Michael and I decided we’d drive to Reddington to see how far the narrow winding dirt road goes. After about an hour on the road, at about 11:30 pm, Michael drove us into a mud bank and got the car stuck. Then came the task of accepting the fact that we were stranded, with a stuck car, and no cell phone service, 16 miles from San Manuel, and a good 25 miles from Tucson. We dug and spun the tires fast and everything and finally decided to sit in the car until light came and walk to San Manuel.

It got pretty suicidal pretty fast: I think we were all sure we’d die or kill ourselves. It was pitch black, very scary. We started talking about people we missed and it seemed like the world was very dismal–Michael told his story and I got into the oft-neglected details of the assault on one’s self-worth one receives by getting dumped for another girl and how it wages war on one’s soul. Michael thought he was going to vomit, so he stepped outside and decided we should walk a little ways down a different road. We got freaked out and decided to walk to San Manuel in the dark instead of waiting suicidally in the car for first light. It was a 16 mile trek we were starting on, flip-flop clad moronic college students we are, with no visible moon and no chance of getting the car out.

So we started walking. We assumed we could do the 16 miles in say two and a half hours? Twenty minutes out we were getting pretty scared, far from the car and far from anything else we could see. Then a car! A miraculous car. Felix, the kind old man driving it, was heading to the Hilton resort where he works. We climbed into the back of his tiny sedan at 3:01. He drove us the twenty minutes to the 24-hour Chevron in San Manuel and we thanked the cosmic spirits we didn’t have to walk it. We called a 24-hour towing service in the gas station and chatted it up with the employee. We started getting the car out from the embankment at around 4, and we were on our way by 5. We drove through San Manuel to Oracle to Catalina to Tucson.

I think my narrative of the events, which inevitably when I read it again after sleeping will sound as though a 6-year-old penned it, really misses the profound fear we had when we were stranded in the middle of nowhere. Generally I think that starting on a 16 mile hike through the mountains with no water and no light is a bad idea, and we were in the kind of situation where it became completely plausible. I can only imagine if Felix hadn’t come. We’d still be walking! Or DEAD!