Some places in Utah and Nevada, you could drive really fast. There was
nothing bigger than a stunted juniper for a state trooper to hide
behind. The highway shot straight through empty valleys and looped over the
barren shoulders of foothills, and a vehicle ten miles away was easily
visible as a burning glimmer on the horizon. My mother had friends in
Delta, in the western Utah desert around where the Feds once imagined
they'd like to build a track-based nuclear missile system. That never
happened, and the drive down there was usually pretty quiet and
unhindered.
I was driving us back from Delta one time and went a little too fast
through Eureka, which happened to be a college friend's home town.
Eureka only had about 800 people, but it was the biggest thing in the Tintic
Valley. Donna had been a wildly unhappy
creative-writing and drama-club soul, drinker and party girl at Tintic
High. Her dad was an unemployed silver miner. One year they'd lived
entirely on rabbits and canned peaches.
There was very little happening in Eureka the day Mom and I came
hurtling through. At the city line I stepped on the gas and took the big car
up to 95 miles per hour, its heavy frame barely shivering. Before long
there was an array of colored lights winking cheerfully at me in the
rear-view mirror as it closed in on my tail. (No matter how far over the
speed limit I'd been driving, this always seemed to amaze me.) I
slowed and eventually pulled over on the crunchy gravel, savoring my last
moments of freedom before the lengthy prison term I had surely just
earned along with piling eternal shame on my mother.
The cop who strolled up and leaned over my window was a compact little
guy with a neat mustache and comb-over and the dark blue uniform of the
... Eureka Police Department? He WAS the Eureka Police Department, and
I was being ticketed for doing 45 in a 25-mph zone. He examined my
license and noticed my Hebrew middle name. That was new; in some parts of
Utah, people guessed I was part Indian -- hell, once someone thought
part Chinese -- because I wasn't a blue-eyed blonde, and they assumed
"Shoshana" was a version of "Shoshone." Mom was intrigued and struck up a
conversation, and Officer Vic turned out to be from her old
neighborhood in New York City. So perhaps in deference to the gods that had
caused two Greenwich Villagers to collide in the Utah desert, the entire
result of this incident was a discreet little fine mailed to the city
clerk, but not one point on my driving record.
I ran into Donna later and she couldn't believe I'd been enough of an
idiot to let Vic catch me. "He was right behind the billboard!" she
shrieked. "Duh! He's always right behind the only billboard in town!"