After they’ve got the surface on, while it’s still nice and soft, they give the signal to a drunk with a big disc harrow, who sets off at top speed along the fresh pavement, weaving artistically from side to side… Well, maybe it doesn’t happen that way, but I can think of no better explanation for the long, parallel, crooked furrows that decorate our southwestern blacktop roads. They aren’t conspicuous. You probably don’t even notice them in your softly sprung, balloon-tired Cadillac or Imperial, but in a truck with 6.00 x 16 tires inflated to thirty-five pounds it’s like driving along a set of insane streetcar tracks laid by a madman for the sole purpose of throwing your heap into the ditch. Along about dawn, I got tired of fighting the steering wheel and turned off onto a dirt road leading west across somebody’s ranch. I followed this for a mile or two, until the growing light showed me a kind of hollow to the left where the desert cedars grew more thickly than elsewhere.
