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parked and protected right next to your room. It was as if both you and the car were given a place to stay and given a bed. By the time we left our carport and drove through Mesa the No Vacancy signs were turned on. All the rooms and cars spaces were taken. I always wanted to know what kind of vacation other people were talking as they pulled into the motor lodges. Were the children pulled out of their beds with pillows and stuffed in the car driven my a mother wrapped in self-destruction?

As we would all claim our spaces in the back seat our bodies would overlap. We tried to keep our spaces for sleeping. The beginning was the easy part of the trip. The highway along the desert was flat, giving us the security that we were safe. The saguaro cactus would be lit from the headlights and let us know they were there to guide our car and point the way. Highway 60 would start to climb and it was no longer a straight line. The turns started to pack us all up against each other. Any touching while awake resulted in hitting and kicking to regain the lost space. We became seals maintaining our fought after space on our rock, the back seat of the car. Now instead of seeing the desert I was aware that the asphalt dropped dangerously below. There were only a few guardrails. This road was to be driven in daylight on the way to a vacation, not at night in anger.

We were entering the Salt River Canyon. Whether we were awake or not we were all issued a warning that this was the first part of the dangerous drive. We were to be absolutely quiet and still. The little seals would have to find their place on the rock and stay. There were roadside shrines and crosses where other had died because they had not

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