I was excited to turn the key in my orange, un-air-conditionned 1978 Toytota Celica and get started on my trip to grad school at UC–Berkeley. I was driving out there alone at age 24 with no cell phone, no credit cards, no tent, and very limited experience with checking the oil. But I had a couple hundred bucks in cash for gas and McDonald’s, a big paper Rand McNally road atlas with a page for every state (I was doing the southern route), a sleeping bag for most nights since I had little money for hotels, and permission to call home collect any time. What could possibly go wrong?

On the first night, I approached a state park in Pennsylvania and thought this would be a good place to sleep, so I drove in, tossed my sleeping bag on the ground and closed my eyes. I woke up in the middle of the night because of the rain. Fortunately there was a nearby picnic-table area with an open-sided roof, so I stumbled over, put my sleeping bag on the picnic table and went back to sleep. I woke up in the morning hearing the rain on the the roof and saw a park ranger looking at me in puzzlement.

This idea of sleeping on the ground next to my car wherever I happened to be seemed to work out OK as long as the weather was good, so after stopping for a night at a friend’s house, I did the same thing. Now I was officially in the Middle of Nowhere and it was very dark — no city lights or even a moon, but it was a nice warm night, so… whatever.

Again in the middle of the night my sleep was disturbed. There was a rumbling, roaring sound tha was getting louder and louder, like an avalanche coming my way. I jumped up in terror and saw a bright light moving toward me. I had much of my life ahead of me and definitely did not want to “go toward the light,” so instead I cowered on the other side of my car. A huge freight train thundered by about 10 feet from my sleeping bag on the other side of the at the edge of the pullover. It was so dark I hadn’t seen the railroad tracks when I arrived.

So far there had been a couple of harrowing evenings, but nothing I couldn’t handle. But now my car had started to make an ominous sound and I knew I needed to find a place to have it looked at. This was somewhere near the Kentucky/Tennessee border. I pulled off the highway into a medium-size town and asked someone where I could find a garage. The guy was friendly and started giving me directions to somewhere, but for the love of God I could not understand more than one word in ten. I’d never heard that kind of accent before, and it was very odd to be inside the borders of my own country and yet feel like a foreigner who had taken less than a year of the language back in high school.

Anyway, I made out enough to find the garage, so I drove over there and explained the sound I was hearing to the mechanic. The language barrier was still much in evidence when he said, “Whatcha got thar is a whale barn.” I blinked at the improbable mental image of a gigantic whale squeezed into a little red barn on one of the farms nearby. After running the answer through my head again, I realized the guy was saying “wheel bearing,” which I also barely understood, but at least it sounded like something to do with a car, so l knew I was on the right track. After a couple of hours, the whale barn was all fixed and I was on my way again.

On my last night on the road before arriving in San Bernardino to meet a friend, I was on I-40 near Flagstaff, Arizona, and I realized that the Grand Canyon wasn’t too far out of my way, so I decided to drive up there, go to sleep, and see the sights in the morning. I got up to the national park, which is quite large, and once again it was after dark and I had made no plans whatsoever, just figuring there would be a campground or something. I passed several but they all had signs saying “full,” so I gave up and did my usual thing, which was to find a spot to just pull over and sleep on the ground.

I wanted to get as close as I could to the South Rim so I pulled over when my headlights revealed a “scenic vista” sign. It was very VERY dark and I think by this point my flashlight batteries had died (more of my excellent preparations), but I didn’t let this stop me. I carefully walked toward where I thought the canyon rim ought to be until I sensed through some primitive echolocation that there was a huge open space in front of me. Even with my limited sense of personal safety, I decided not to go any closer and put down my sleeping bag.

This being the Southwest, it had been quite hot during the day, but I didn’t realize that the rim of the Grand Canyon is in a desert climate at an elevation of 7,000 feet, and even if I did, I was too stupid to know that this meant it was going to get cold at night. There I was in my pathetic sleeping bag (very high quality; it may or may not have had cartoon characters on it), freezing my ass off all night. But that was OK. Since I couldn’t sleep, I figured I would get to see the sun rise over the North Rim, so when I guessed it was soon to be sunrise, I stood up and waited for it to start getting light. I could smell the big fir and ponderosa pine trees, winch don’t smell anything like the white pines here in New England.

It was very dark and very quiet. Then the first thin ray of sunlight came over. It was just a sliver — not enough to reveal my surroundings, but then something unexpected broke the stillness. The air was suddenly filled with mechanical alien clicking noises such as might come from dozens of giant insects. I was almost literally frozen to the spot with terror.

In a moment it got a bit lighter, and I saw I wasn’t right at the edge of the canyon but a little ways above it, and below me was a platform with a railing overlooking the actual void. The sound came from a group of tourists who had been standing silently in the dark and suddenly started taking photos (using cameras with motor drives) as the first rays of sunlight shot over the rim. As with the railroad tracks, I’d had no idea they were there.

Lessons learned on this trip: America is huge, rural America is very dark at night, and sleeping outside without a tent is stupid. Also, always have extra flashlight batteries with you.

(Alice told this story at a MassMouth storytelling event in 2019.)