The icing on the cake for this fun trip was this: The boys brought their guitars – KP and Brian “Scorpion Sting”. They started with their favorites, like Mellencamp, Petty, and Joel. Halfway through the seventh song, Buffet’s Why Don’t We Get Drunk, Brian stopped playing, then said, “To hell with it. Sorry for taking the train down a dirt road, guys. What do you want to hear?”
[Not a valid template]Another friend of mine, Allen, likes to say, “Okay! Now that we’ve found the good people, let’s find some bad roads!”
Here’s the thing about bad roads: you’ve got to take them slow. Bad roads are a good guide for the other stuff that makes up life. We’re going to take it slow tonight at Saguaro Lake. Drive some hard lines. Find a quiet beach. Cook some kabobs. Drink some light beer and smooth tequila (slowly!). Listen to some acoustic guitar songs over the fire. Watch the sun descend beyond the lake in front of the mountains, and light it up with gold, orange, red. All of this from a vantage point only accessed by dirt road, a “bad” one, too. Thick sand, steep hills, deep ruts in those steep hills – the stuff that makes up Brian’s metaphor when he doesn’t play a song well.
Like good desert rats, we didn’t come out until it started to get dark. Years ago I concocted this idea, and I thought it was original: Drive the “bad roads” near Saguaro Lake in the late afternoon, build a contained fire on the beach at a secluded cove, have all the fun we can until well after dark, the girls will go swimming, we’ll talk about the longer trips we want to do, and then we’ll drive out after dark. I learned that other guys just call it “night wheeling.”
This part was original: We found an isolated beach, grilled some food, listened to the boys play songs, and talked until 11:00 pm. This part was not original: night wheeling. Three groups of shirtless guys in pick-up trucks had the same idea of coming to Saguaro Lake this night – and perhaps it was luck that put them there well beyond twilight.
When we drove out, several of The Shirtless stood around in the dark watching a friend dig holes in a hill. I could hear one say, “Nah, man, yer all screwed up. You gotta be locked to do this hill.”