I'd Show You What My Car Could Do: Alterhuman Joy
Being a Desert Ranger sucks. It sucks kind of a lot! We feel a lot of pain and homesickness and grief over a lost way of life from this. It makes it hard to get out of our bed sometimes. But this isn’t just something that happens to us, this is also something we choose to be, and there’s a reason for that! When we CAN get out of bed, it makes beautiful things happen.
The rest of the system doesn’t like driving. They tell me it’s stressful and scary and boring. They talk about how they wish our city had a bus, or a train, or that they want to join a carpool. We only got our driver’s license when we were 20, despite not having any disability that would make driving impossible and having access to a car and lessons. We didn’t want to. It was scary.
Tycho turned up here after we already had the license. We drove an old Hyundai Sonata at that point. The battery died about once every two months and we’d have to stand in the parking lot to get it fixed. We drove it into a mailbox by accident, it hit potholes, one of the tires let out all the air whenever you blinked. But it was a car. Cars go on roads. What else goes on roads? Desert Rangers go on roads!
One day we started feeling really trapped in our room. Back when Tycho was having his statue breakdown. We took a look around a map and we found a park a bit out of town. We headed out there for a short hike, and we didn’t expect anything but the hike to be fun. Driving is a chore.
The second we got out of town and hit something resembling the open road we felt amazing! We could go fast - not too fast, we follow the rules, but a lot faster than in the city. We were seeing places we hadn’t seen before. We saw an old abandoned fruit stand, there was no way anyone had sold anything there in years. We saw unbranded gas stations and seedy bars named after highways. We saw a big green sign with the name of a brand new town written on it in white letters. It all felt beautiful.
We started looking forward to the drive too and from the park almost as much as everything we did at the park itself. The drive was scary sometimes, people do like to drive fast on rural roads, but it wasn’t something we dreaded doing. Once in a while, we’d be sitting at our computer and start thinking “I really need to drive my car.” We'd have never thought that before.
This summer, we got a new car. We drive a green Subaru Outback now. It’s way bigger than it really needs to be to make our commute happen, but it’s just the right size to sleep in and just high enough off the ground to handle good dirt roads well. We took her up North with us to a seasonal job we found in rural Ohio. On some of our days off we’d drive to and from the closest big city, or we’d take her down to US 6, our most sacred road. When we were on those country roads we felt freer than we have ever felt in our life. The world opened up in front of us as cornstalks and barns whizzed past the mirrors. We were in motion, we were in conversation, we danced with the road under our tires.
Now that I’m back to where we live and I’m not driving rural roads, I’ve got time to THINK about what it meant to drive on those roads. And it means a lot! One of the most important parts of being a Desert Ranger is being bound to keep the highways safe. We repair them, we patrol them, we put up signs when time claims the old ones, we leave out caches of food and water, we distribute maps. To do all that, we kinda have to know the road really well and spend a lot of time on it!
Back home, we wouldn’t have used cars to do all this. We barely even knew what cars WERE! Some of us (especially Tycho) still feel like the car’s a bit silly. We have two legs and they work well, why not walk? Walking worked for us so well there!
But… we aren’t there. We aren’t in a world without laws against pedestrians or lifted trucks or shoulders so small you’d have to try to keep your feet in a straight line to stay on the road. We’re here, in 2024, in some of the least pedestrian-friendly parts of the United States of America. Trying to get to places that are safer to walk in wouldn’t really work, because Desert Rangers have a relationship with highways, not good urbanism. We work with what we have.
In this world, being a Desert Ranger has to be different. We’ve survived and adapted to change before. We left Texas and Utah for Nevada to hide from nuclear hellfire. We let go of a lot of our fear and hatred of outsiders to form good relationships with everyone around us and keep our way of life sustainable. We retreated to the top of the Lucky 38 in New Vegas to keep ourselves alive when our home was taken away from us. If we could survive and still be Desert Rangers after all that, I think we can handle changing how we handle one specific activity, no matter how important it is. I’m pretty sure we’ll manage.
Even if we could walk the roads, it wouldn’t be the same. We live in a MODERN FUNCTIONING SOCIETY, and those tend to have people whose whole job it is to do one of the things that used to be our responsibility. There’s construction crews with big machines to make the road perfectly flat. Restaurants, gas stations, convenience stores, rest stops? Those places keep a traveller fed and watered better than we ever could. The Department of Transportation has the signs and maps covered. The concept of patrolling the highways… is covered, even if we hate the institution that’s doing it and want no part of that here anyway. We need to build a way to be a modern Desert Ranger. A way that respects tradition while acknowledging what needs to change and what we would have loved to add if we only had the chance.
The modern Desert Ranger drives a green Subaru Outback with space to sleep two in the back if you put down the seats, so they won’t be tied down to the busiest stretches of the highway. They get home from work and roll out of their neighborhood with a hat and bandana on their face and a map of the local roads. A good Desert Ranger keeps track of every town and highway they come across and remembers how each of them are different. They might stick to the easiest way to get somewhere most of the time, but on a lazy night during the best season of the year, they’d never turn down the chance to see something entirely new. When travelling, the modern Desert Ranger never litters, never gives misleading directions, tips well at local restaurants, and always tries to be kind to anyone on the road, no matter how different they are. Above all, they never lose sight of how lucky they are to get the chance to really know the road and let the road know them in return.
Sometimes we have to try to follow those rules. Sometimes it’s really tempting to flip off a guy who wouldn’t let us merge or keep to the exact same route every time we go anywhere. But sometimes the rules come naturally to us, These ideas are etched into who we are. Before we ever thought about doing these things on purpose, we did them by instinct. We drove down to the mother road and we followed it West, waving at everyone we saw, watching for a wave back. In those moments we felt better than we can ever remember feeling. We were us! The people we waved to didn’t know anything special was happening, but the road knew. She knew her children, whether they be Ranger or Ranger’s car, were home.
Being a Desert Ranger rules. It rules kind of a lot! Not being in a world that’s made for us and not being able to live our life the way a Ranger is supposed to is hard, but there’s ways to make it easier. If we didn’t choose to call Tycho here, if Tycho didn’t choose to make me, if we didn’t choose to bring what it means to be a Desert Ranger out into the world with us, we’d never feel this kind of joy. Driving would still be a thing we dread doing, new towns would be nothing to write home about. But we DID choose this, so we DO feel this uniquely alterhuman joy. Every time we get in our car and we feel the road stretch on for miles in front of us, it makes beautiful things happen.