The distance between Phoenix and Wickenburg is doubtless fixed more clearly in the minds of Wickenburgians making regular pilgrimages to the big city than those of us who find more occasional motivations for venturing out to ranchers’ country. For myself, I tend to remember it as “about an hour” away from my own casa poco in la pradera, and leaned on that supposition far too long in planning my recent journey northwest for a Saturday morning funeral.
At the last minute, confirming details on my map app, I learned that the funeral starting in an hour was, in fact, an hour and 25 minutes away.
In between was a lot of wide-open desert highway on which to make up time. But, since my spiritual gifts include the ability to hit every red light at every intersection on God’s increasingly asphalt-covered earth, I knew I was going to be lucky to reach Wickenburg before the cemetery workers smoothed the last clods of dirt on the coffin.
The fates, indeed, were stacked against me. “Stacked,” hardly describes it. The fates looked like the New York City skyline from a manhole cover on Madison Avenue.
A lot of perfectly sane people, on a beautiful, sunny Saturday, nudged along by soft desert winds, were simply in no hurry whatsoever. A truly determined turtle could have passed most of the laid-back drivers I was hurtling up on – but only an eel on a starvation diet could have edged past the 200-yard-long semis straddling several of those endless arid stretches side by side, comparing windshield washer blades or truck stop stories or doing whatever else keeps truckers locked in parallel positions for long miles at a time.
Came the Wickenburg roundabout, and I’d gained all of one minute on my deficit, with eight minutes to the funeral and a lot of miles still to go. I wound my way through the downtown promenade – it, too, crowded with cowboys in no particular rush to find lunch or commence the weekend shopping. I finally reached what seemed the lazy outskirts of town and gunned the engine, my mind racing on to the coming embarrassments of slipping into an almost-over service.
Gradually, dimly, vaguely, I became aware that the commotion in my rearview mirror involved a set of blue lights, flashing, and a patrol car, gaining on me.
I looked urgently for a wide side-of-the-road spot to stop upon, feeling that particular pressure that comes with wanting neither to irritate the man with a ticket book nor to be cited in full view of one’s passing peers. (Not that I was likely to know anyone flying by me out here, but we are all brothers in the universal Church of the Caught Lead-Footed. And we all know how much brothers delight in seeing brothers in Dutch.)
I found a side road and swerved onto it as gently as I could. I turned off the engine and listened to the suddenly awesome silence … broken, finally, by the closing of the driver’s door behind me, and the soft tread of the officer’s boots in the gravel.
My first impulse was to put both hands on top of the wheel. A friend once told me how he – in this same situation, and hurrying to retrieve his paperwork from the glove compartment – suddenly found a gun upside his head, and a nervous cop wondering what he was grabbing for. I have made it my life’s work never, ever, to get myself into that position.
It had been a few years since I sat gazing up into the shiny sunglasses of a local constabulary. I hardly remembered how to start the conversation. He saved me the trouble.
“Sir, are you involved in some kind of medical emergency?”
What a generous suggestion, I thought, wishing earnestly that I was. If only my wife was on the backseat, giving birth in loud agony.
“No, sir,” I confessed, “just late for a funeral.”
That actually sounded like a setup for a punchline, should the officer be in the mood. He was not.
“Where’s the funeral?” he asked.
I told him, in truth, that I didn’t know. Just “Wickenburg cemetery.” He frowned, enlightening me that there was no cemetery in the direction I was rocketing, at least for the next 30 miles or so. Realizing that could not possibly help my case, I fumbled with my cellphone, trying to show him where the helpful map app was leading me.
He took the phone, posing the usual queries, none of which I knew the answer to. “Do you know how long I was following you?” “Do you know how fast you were going?” “How far back did you notice my lights in your rearview mirror?” “Do you use your rearview mirror?”
He seemed to have me pegged for a Jim Rockford wanna-be, blazing my way across the Southwest en route to a The Fast and the Furious reunion … and yet all the while he kept working on my phone, trying to figure out how the condescending Siri might be leading me so far astray. (She pronounces it “Wi-KEN-burg,” which should have told us something.)
After a moment, he handed back the phone, a more likely location now plugged in. He patiently explained a little local geography, then pointed me back in the direction exactly opposite of the one I was going. A pause. I was about to express my appreciation for the friendly service, when he spoke those three icy words: “License and registration.”
H’boy. I fished in my wallet and the glove box, found what he needed and handed them over. He strode back to his car, and we sat – he computicating, me waiting for the long arm of the law to drop like an anvil on my insurance rates. After a while, I heard the crunching gravel again.
“I’m going to let you off with a verbal warning,” he said, which, in the pantheon of most beloved phrases in the English language, is right up there with your intended saying, “Yes,” and your mom saying, “We’re having chocolate pudding for dessert.”
He again recounted to me my speed, his tone very like the one my high school algebra teacher used in pointing out my homework errors. He suggested I might actually consider glancing into the rearview mirror, now and then, just to see what might be gaining on me.
I thanked him, made a U-turn, and fell dutifully in behind the guy in the little Datsun going five miles under the speed limit. In seven minutes, I arrived at the funeral, slipping in among the mourners – incredibly – just as the service started. A miraculous beneficiary of what’s called “the circuitous route.”
We are increasingly urged to believe that every cop not portrayed on Blue Bloods is a stalking bully waiting to flex his bigotry and grind his knee into the nearest neck.
But I met one, the other day, far from home, on a lonely gravel road where there was no one to impress or intimidate but me. I found him kind, clear, helpful, and dutiful. Gracious, even, when my negligence completely justified his flexing his policeman prerogatives.
They’re probably not all like that, even in Wickenburg. But driving home a while later – one eye on my speedometer, another on my rearview mirror – I felt keenly grateful that one of them is.
And that most of them are.
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