Chapter 89 The Call Finally Comes
Her time with Sonny, her favorite of Evelyn’s two barrel horses, was even sweeter that morning as she lingered in the stall, brushing him while he ate. Evelyn paced and seemed to keep herself busy doing nothing while she watched Alexandra, who was lost in her own world. She finally could stand it no longer. “Are you ready to go get some breakfast?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah. Sure,” Alexandra said, looking up. “Sorry, I was kind of in my own little world.”
“I don’t think that you were all alone there,” Evelyn grinned, knowingly. They left the arena and went back toward the motel. “Let’s just go to breakfast in the motel, that way you can get back to The Weather Channel.”
They were seated for breakfast and had just finished ordering when her cell phone rang. A thrill rushed through her as the caller ID revealed that it was Evan calling. The smile on her face lit the entire room, and the look she gave Evelyn was nothing short of divine. “Hi Baby,” she said, trying to stay calm, though every emotion in the world was scrambling around inside of her, and they had all come rushing in at once.
“Are you awake?” he asked. The tone of his voice was deep, and he pronounced the words slowly. She thought it was hilarious when he said it.
“I’ve been awake for hours,” she said. “Where are you?”
“I just ordered my breakfast at a little cafe here in Farmington,” he replied.
“That’s amazing! Evelyn and I just ordered breakfast here at the motel in Vegas,” she giggled. Everything is ironic when you’re in love. The thought that they were both sitting down to breakfast at the same time in two different places and had the same thing on their minds seemed almost unreal to her. She saw Evelyn roll her eyes and realized that she was being silly. She tried to make herself a little more serious. “How are the roads?”
“Snow packed and drifting in spots, but I think I’m getting out of the worst of it,” he answered. “I’ll probably have a little bit of snow all the way along to Vegas. It will probably take me a little longer to get there, but I’m not in any hurry. I’ve got all day.”
“No, you don’t,” she snapped. “I want you here right now!” She giggled after she said it. “I understand. You take your time and be safe.”
“The old man always said it’s better to be fifteen minutes late to school than seventy years early in hell.” He always thought it funny that his father referred to his dad as “the old man,” and now he did it himself.
When he was a kid, he wondered whether it was sort of a sign of disrespect, but as he got older, he realized that old men who became old men on a ranch in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado became that way through thousands of trials, and there was a heap of wisdom gained in the process. “Don’t fret over me, sweetheart. I’ve been driving in this stuff for a long time. What little bit there is left of this trip will be easy after what I’ve already been through.” He didn’t mean for it to sound as serious as it did.
“What? What have you been through?” she felt a sudden panic rising up in her.
“Nothing major,” he said. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. Just, there was a lot of snow getting to here, and it was some pretty slow going in parts.” He didn’t want to tell her about the slipping and sliding that he had done going over North Pass. Had he been an amateur in the snow, he would have been calling her from the side of the road instead of from the comfort of a booth in a cafe. He had made the proper corrections without panicking and had come through the scary situation unharmed. It had happened to him so many times in the past that it barely even got his blood pumping. It did, however, serve as a reminder that he needed to proceed with caution.
“Please be careful, Evan,” she pleaded. “Take your time and get here safe.”
“My breakfast is here and I’m anxious to get back out there,” he said. “I’ll call you when I get to Flagstaff. Okay?”
“Okay,” she said softly. “Be careful. I love you.”
“I love you too,” he replied. “I will. Bye.”
“Bye.”
The red sandstone mesa tops were even a more brilliant shade than he had remembered. The dark sky behind them and the white, snow-covered slopes below them added to their intensity. He was in Navajo country, between Teec Nos Pos and Keyenta. The beauty of that part of Arizona was one that only certain people could see. He, like the Navajo people, felt a certain sacred connection with those canyons and mesas. He could see why the Navajo people wanted to live there. He had several friends from the Navajo Nation that he had come to know through his seminars. He had spent some time with them riding in the canyons outside of Chinle, which was further south. He had felt an instant kinship with them that he did not have with most other people.
It came from being one with nature. One of his friends had shared a little bit of one of the songs of the Beauty Way with him. It wasn’t something that they would have done with just any white stranger, but because of his horse training method and that other “spiritual” something that existed among men of nature, he had been accepted on a different level. The Beauty Way chant called for the chanter to “walk with beauty beside him and all around him”. It was a healing chant for a soul that was in distress from the confusion of the world. Evan didn’t remember much of the words, but he did remember the concepts. They came back to him as he was taking his time on snow-packed US Highway 160.
Driving across that particular stretch of Arizona always seemed to help him connect to something deeper, and that had been part of the reason that he had decided to take the Southern route; that and he figured that once out of Farmington, there would be less snow and things would be a little easier traveling. The storm was moving Northwest, and it was beginning to clear up ahead of him.
He stopped to fill up with gas in Keyenta and asked some of the truckers he saw about the road conditions further west. The consensus seemed to be that the Saint George route was likely clearing up, but that by the time you got to the big hill going up into Flagstaff, the roads were just about dry. He considered all of the angles for a few minutes. There wasn’t much in the way of towns or civilization between Keyenta and Saint George. If he had any problems, he might be stranded for a long while before anyone came along.
“Hell, Evan,” he said to himself aloud. “Since when have you worried about being near civilization?” Some might consider it a little bit reckless to venture off on a probability when to the South there was a certainty. Men with less confidence in their abilities and less comfortable with nature and the wilderness would certainly always choose the safer bet, but that wasn’t the way that Evan lived.
“You might not be able to do this once you and Alexandra are married,” he told himself, smiling at the idea. As soon as the thought entered his mind, however, he knew that she would be likely to want to go right along with him on his adventure; on any adventure. That was one of the things that had drawn them together and one of the things that he loved most about her. Her free spirit had been latent within her until he had placed her on the back of a horse. It had been set free, and she would never be able to go back to the way that she had been. Grace had never been that way and never would be.