A Plea for Amnesty (or How Dan Became "Brother Dan")

I’ve sat for a month or two trying to think of the next significant story for my blog.

I’ve worried that maybe I’ve disassociated some of my readers after suffering long bouts of mogigraphia (a fancy word for writer’s cramp). Now that I’m in my house I think I’m cured, but this will be a more accurate test than my recent efforts. For the few of you who remain, I hope you enjoy my work.

The most encouraging praise came from my brother Dan recently. He wrote me a note after reading “How Far?” a post from back in June.

Don't know why I hadn't read it till now, but I just walked away from reading this with a renewed sense of respect for your principles as regarding independence and adventure. Makes me wonder what I was doing then, and remember that you didn't talk about it much, but I know you told me the story of the day and recalled much of it. I was only 12 then, so I didn't quite get it.—Dan

That made me want to write again. To make people think about adventure and independence.

This story is dedicated to my brother Dan.

You’ll know why at the end…


When I was seventeen, my brother Dan and I got permission from my parents to go camping out in the desert. Even in the first sentence here, I notice something of significance that anybody that has heard me talk about my brother Dan would recognize.

Brother Dan.

It is an extreme rarity for me to call my brother Dan anything other than “Brother Dan.”

There was no specific day that I can remember starting to call him that. I’ve called him that for years. It isn’t derogatory, quite the opposite. I want people to associate him with me. I want them to recognize our relationship, our tie, our connection. He isn’t just some kid, some friend, some anybody. He’s my brother. It isn’t meant to be a “tag-along” title, and more than likely it probably started in college when the people I was meeting hadn’t met him or didn’t know who I was talking to if I just referred to him as Dan.

It didn’t take long for my friends to get to know him though. Since he accompanied me on nearly every significant trip and witnessed practically every important event of my life, I’d reference him in stories left and right.

Well, one day, we got permission to camp out for a quick overnighter in the desert. We’d been asking my parents for a while. It wasn’t hard to pack. We tossed a couple of armloads worth of stuff, the majority of which had something to do with water, into the back of the station wagon that was our ticket around town.

We drove north on I-17 for half an hour and turned east into the desert. We followed the Carefree Highway—which was a perfect street name for the day—for 10 miles, then turned north for 18 miles of graded dirt road to a free campground hidden down in a little depression. This little impression in the high desert plateau is something of an oasis amidst the arid high scrub and gravelly buttes in the vicinity.

I got my driver’s license when I was sixteen. Driving came naturally after years of riding my bike trying not to get squished between city buses or pan-caked by distracted drivers. I had gotten my permit six months earlier, hours before a family vacation when my parents thought I might be helpful as a third string driver. I was hooked. I loved to drive.

“My” car was a 1983 Grand Marquis station wagon. I thought it was especially meaningful that it was born the same year as I. It was awesome. Maybe it wasn’t the coolest car on the road—especially without air conditioning, but it met my needs with the perfect combination of attributes. It was big. I once took 14 people to a high school football game (12 of them were girls—bonus points for Eddy). There were seat belts for 12. The hood was like a queen size bed.

Usually though when you get a car that can ferry an abundance of passengers you lose gas mileage. Granted it wasn’t exceptional, but if I was conservative with my accelerator I could get the “Beast” into the 18-20 mile per gallon range. The other thing that usually suffers with passenger capacity is acceleration. Again the wagon was nothing extraordinary, but it could hold its head high with rear wheel drive and a 5.8-liter, small block V-8. The speedometer only went to 80 miles per hour, so I have no idea how fast it could really go, but I had it pegged a few times. Pegged at 80, the pedal was only a third of the way to the floor.

But if you have a fast car, you usually get a harsher ride. Not so with the wagon. That baby floated—speed bumps, no problem. It was so wide and heavy, even with the soft suspension, I could corner as fast as I wanted to.

On top of all of that it was old, so it was cheap to insure.

Fast, big, comfortable, reasonably fuel efficient and very safe—built like a tank in fact.

On the dirt road run into the camp ground I drove aggressively. Too much gas in the corners, fishtailing on the dirt having fun. I was too cheap to wear out my tires on asphalt and afraid of getting tickets anyways so the dirt roads were where I let loose.

We got there in one piece. We set up our meager camp, built a fire, ate a few hot dogs and way too may marshmellows as the sun went down painting a firestorm of pinks, red, oranges, purples, and blues across the cloudless sky.

We sat in our lawn chairs late into the night with the fire hissing and popping. Coyotes howled in the distance. The desert cools drastically in the night, and the warmth of the fire illuminated our ruddy, boyish faces as we laughed, debated, and teased our way through the typical conundrums of youth.

We slept.

In the morning we woke up. After a simple breakfast we packed our gear back into the wagon. We made our lunch and then drove a few miles back towards Phoenix to the jumping off point for our hike.

The solitude of the desert is immense.

"...In sublimity - the superlative degree of beauty - what land can equal the desert with its wide plains, its grim mountains, and its expanding canopy of sky! You shall never see elsewhere as here the dome, the pinnacle, the minaret fretted with golden fire at sunrise and sunset; you shall never see elsewhere as here the sunset valleys swimming in a pink and lilac haze, the great mesas and plateaus fading into blue distance, the gorges and canyons banked full of purple shadow. Never again shall you see such light and air and color; never such opaline mirage, such rosy dawn, such fiery twilight. And wherever you go, by land or by sea, you shall not forget that which you saw not but rather felt - the desolation and the silence of the desert..." — John C. Van Dyke, 1898, The Desert

We hiked for an hour up a narrow canyon, ate our lunch, and hiked an hour back.

What happened next irreversibly tied me to my brother Dan—interminably made him brother Dan.

I decided to continue with my foolishly aggressive driving. No one was in danger other than the two of us. I took the twists and turns, rises and drops inspired by rally racing videos I’d seen. I’d brake hard into a corner putting the car sideways, drifting my way into position to accelerate hard on the exit.

I went up a short hill semi-blinded by the slope, turned right at the top, and dropped down continuing to the right. We were on the flank of a mountain. At the bottom of the quick descent was a left hand bend. To the right of us was the mountain, to the left a hundred foot expanse as the slope fell away from the unprotected side of the road.

The left hand bend was my undoing. I drifted too much. As the back of the wagon slid through behind me, it pointed the hood of the Beast towards the gulch. I was skidding out of control, heading for sure extermination.

Growing up in Minnesota long before I’d gotten my turn behind the wheel, over and over I heard coaching that to regain control you’ve got to turn your tires in the direction of the skid. The problem with that advice was that to steer my tires in that direction was to steer to certain destruction.

Somehow my muscles overcame my fear and for the briefest moment I whipped the wheel to the left, toward the edge, gained a fraction of traction, then wrenched the wheel back to the right.

My overcorrection, drove the car into the side of the mountain.

The impact was lessened by the pile of loose dirt that accumulates on the side of graded dirt roads. When we hit that berm, it lifted the right front corner of the car into the air and the car was promptly high-centered on an 18-inch pile of scree.

The engine was killed by the impact.

Dazed and scared, but completely unhurt we sat in the car. I broke the silence first, but unfortunately even with my memory for story telling I can’t remember what was said.

I tried to open my door but it wouldn’t. The car was at such an angle that the door was pressed into the ground. Dan pushed his door open and climbed out and I followed, climbing up and out across the front bench of seats.

After surveying the damage we set to work. The mound of dirt ran between the front two wheels and exited the side of the car between the front and back right tires. The back left corner of the bumper was resting on the ground supporting the car. Both of the right side tires were suspended in the air, most importantly the right rear which was the driving wheel.

Dan started scooping out the dirt and I pulled out the jack. Fortunately it wasn’t one of the new small jacks that stows away under the hood of the car—it was an old-school jack for an old-school car.

Around this point the first car drove by. The driver rolled down the window of his Subaru and asked us if we needed help. We certainly did, but refused. We’d only been there for 10 minutes at most and weren’t ready to throw in the towel yet. Plus I was scared that he’d call the cops, my parents, or a tow truck and I’d be stuck explaining my stupidity.

With increasing futility and mounting frustration we scraped at the roadside trying to get enough clearance to get our right rear tire back onto the ground.

Another car drove up, this time a truck. A young guy and his girlfriend were headed out into the desert to do some four wheeling. Again we turned down their help with a “We almost got it, but thanks.

After 45 minutes an old Ford Bronco pulled up. The loan passenger was a guy in his fifties, a week’s stubble on his chin and a filthy ball cap propped on his oily hair.

“You boys look to be in a heap o’ trouble.”

Dan, knowing the drill, nonchalantly said, “Nah, we almost got it…thanks though.”

The guy dropped his jacked up Bronco back into gear, and slowly pulled away. He made it 30 feet before he put it in reverse and came back to us.

"Ain’t no way ya almost got it. Lemme help ya.”

It wasn’t a question. He was telling us what he was going to do. Thankfully he knew just what needed to be done. He clambered down with a tow strap and looped through the tow hooks on the wagon. I climbed into the driver’s seat of the wagon and he gingerly applied the gas on his end of the line. Initially nothing happened, but slowly the Beast regained its proper place on the road.

Without getting out of his vehicle the guy took the strap from my uplifted hands, accepted my appreciation, and said, “I’ll bet you’ll never be that stupid again.” He dropped it into gear and this time didn’t come back.

Dan and I gave the car a perfunctory inspection. On the exterior everything seemed sound. Underneath the car a part was hanging down, sheered from its mounting bolts by the impact. It gently swayed, held in place by its wiring harness. We found a coat hanger in the back of the wagon and wired it back into place. Other than that nothing was conspicuously amiss. Dirt was packed into every imaginable crevice under the whole front of the car.

We climbed back in, refastened our seatbelts, and crept down the remaining five miles of dirt road. The vibration of the washboard road freed most of the dirt deposits and soon we were back onto the Carefree Highway—without such a carefree attitude this time.

We were supposed to be home by 4:00. We pulled into the driveway at 3:55 and unbelievably my parents weren’t home. I reexamined the car and miraculously our initial analysis held. Somehow the car sustained no significant damage.

At that point we made the choice not to tell my parents—another bad decision in a day full of them.

My brother Dan, that day, went from being my tag-a-long annoyance to full-fledged, acknowledged and accepted participant in the epic of my life. It wasn’t just him keeping his mouth shut, it was a bond that transcended tattletaling. We shared something.

We still share that something. He gets me, understands my passions, my pursuit of adventure, my strengths, weaknesses, victories, and failures. He understands why, though separated by age and distance, we can talk as though we have never been separated.

He is indeed my Brother Dan.

I tell this story now after all of these years with the hope for amnesty. This year my parents sold the Beast. The Beast with a mythical figure to us older kids in the family. We all learned to drive on it, enshrouded by the safety of its size. As time passed, the car approached 200,000 miles and became less and less reliable. Eventually my parents replaced it with a newer car for the young drivers of the family and the wagon was relegated to the last and lowliest position in the family driveway. It sat undriven for extended periods until finally it wasn’t driven at all. We worried that the car would die an anonymous death, crushed into a cube of steel, when my parents finally got rid of it. It wouldn’t be fair for a car with such a storied life to die such an obscure death.

Thankfully my parents wanted more for the car than the $150 per ton that the scrap yard was offering. They posted it on Craigslist. A man drove from a small town over an hour away and bought the car. When he finished putting it on his trailer with my youngest brother and sister in near tears observing from the porch, my mom asked him what he was going to do with it. Hesitantly, lest he offend, he told her that he would be entering it into his small county’s demolition derby later that summer.

My entire family attended (except me—work obligated).

The Beast didn’t win the derby, but she gave it everything she had. She lost due to immobilization, but after she was towed back to the pits, the man climbed back in and fired the engine back up, one last time, on the first try.

The wagon died that day—a legend in life and a legend in death. As a gladiator in the arena, she fought, she suffered, and she ultimately succumbed. Her greatest accomplishment, giving me a brother I can’t take for granted, lives.

Eddy Zakes
eazakes@juno.com