Lisa Jones’s first book, Broken: A Love Story, the story of her friendship with quadriplegic Northern Arapaho horse gentler and traditional healer Stanford Addison, was published by Scribner in May 2009. She has written for High Country News, Smithsonian, Tin House, the New York Times Magazine, the Summit County Journal, the Burlington Free Press, and the Tico Times of San Jose, Costa Rica. She lives in Colorado with her husband and cat. Her website is www.lisajoneswrites.com.

Excerpt:

Dev and I were sitting on a concrete bench in front of the supermarket in
Needles, California, working our way through six avocados, a jar of salsa,
and a loaf of bread. We chewed silently and stared at the sun-blasted parking
lot. An old man emerged slowly from a battleship gray, old-model sedan.
He unfolded a walker and carefully made his way past a gleaming row of
Winnebagos. Eventually, he reached the square of shade that covered our
bench. He set his walker aside and sat down. He looked well over eighty.
He wheezed. His eyeglasses sat at an awkward angle on his face. He started,
softly, to hum. We ate. He hummed. The recreational vehicles came and
went. The sun brightened a notch, and I felt the contraction in my eyes as
my pupils set themselves on minimum aperture.
“Hi,” said Dev.
“Hi,” said the man, introducing himself as Vern.
Would he like a sandwich? asked Dev. Nope, Vern said. What he would
like is a way out of this town. This state. Goddamn drug addicts everywhere.
Thieves. Mexicans. Bad doctors. Opticians. Hippies. Liars.
Vern’s eye doctor back home in Gulfport, Mississippi, had sent him to
another eye doctor in Needles. To have his cataracts removed. Two months
ago. He was legally blind.
But he had a car?
Yep. He met people who needed rides. They drove his car, with him in
it, where he needed to go. And now it was time to go home. Back to Gulfport.
But he hadn’t had his operation?
Right. The doctor kept putting me back, putting me back.
Why?
Because he’s a goddamn liar, and I’m fed up.
Dev and I were full of many things. We were full of cold water and ripe
avocados, which, after a week camping in the desert washes of the Chemehuevi
Mountains Wilderness, made us feel optimistic. We were full of triumph
at having sprung ourselves from our desk jobs to hitchhike south and
be hobos for the winter. We were full of a feeling of rightness that we would
burn no fuel for the next two months, easily meeting our needs via the
excesses of our countrymen. We had started with only $20 in our pockets—
no credit cards—figuring with our shared Presbyterian frame on the world
that we could get odd jobs when we needed more money. We had already
spent one evening bussing tables at a restaurant in Needles.
We thought about Vern’s idea. If we drove him 100 miles down the road
to Quartzsite, Arizona, he would at least be on Interstate 10, albeit 1,700
miles east of home. There was a truck stop in Quartzsite, and maybe he
could find a driver there to take him on to Gulfport. In return for us taking
him there, he’d buy us a hotel room for the night. We badly needed a
shower. We’d hitchhiked here from Colorado two weeks ago, spending our
first night on a snow-streaked mound of dirt behind a gas station in Saint
George, Utah, where the nighttime low reached seventeen degrees. We’d
spent the next night somewhere south of Las Vegas underneath a mile-long
tunnel of barbed wire that had been used for training troops during World
War II. For the last eight days, we’d been in Trampas Wash, in the company
of edgy wild burros and phainopepla birds, which looked like they
were made of black velvet and sang sweet piping melodies suggestive of wet,
green, medieval Europe, not the ageless, bony, empty New World. We’d survived
on rice and beans and drunk from a tank holding water for mountain
sheep that were being reintroduced to the area by the government.
The deal was struck. We would drive Vern to Arizona. My heart flared
with hope. Dev was an environmental saint. He had built a cabin out of
recycled materials for less than $900. He cut wood and hauled water. I had
rented out the house I owned in town and moved in with him earlier that
month. He was tall and wise. I wanted to be more like him—despite my
supposed credibility as an environmental journalist, I still occasionally
drove away from the cabin to the gym twenty-five miles down the road to
work out. I wanted to be better, more self-sacrificing, more helpful, less consumptive,
more Dev-like. This trip, I figured, would help me be better. The
old man was a godsend.