- You’re miles from anything even resembling a road or what might have ever been used as a road, but somehow there’s the body of a 1937 Chevrolet truck rusting away out here.
- It’s 4:15 in the afternoon, and the daily midsummer rain is making its way through your town. You open your window to smell the creosote.
- Barbed wire fences, railroad tie benches, and abandoned tractors overtaken by brush beside rotting barns.
- Cookie-cutter faux-adobe suburbs. Their “lawns” are just basalt rocks. Cast iron Kokopellis and roadrunners and ristras are everywhere. A woman tends to her cactus-and-rock garden.
- There are junkyards everywhere. This entire state is a junkyard. Your neighbor down the street regularly raids them, and his front yard is covered in his “sculptures”.
- An Apache woman sells her beadwork on the roadside. Her daughter sits on the cash box, scrolling through tumblr on her phone.
- You drive by another “THE THING?” billboard on I-10.
- You pass through a small railroad town. The roads haven’t been maintained in decades and the windows of the buildings are smashed or haphazardly boarded up; you almost want to call it a ghost town until you notice the Conoco-slash-Dairy Queen is open.
- There’s also a rock shop. It sells rocks. You wonder how the competition is with the rock shop you saw a few miles back.
- Someone asks about aliens. Everyone rolls their eyes.
- That’s the fifth dead dog you’ve seen on this reservation’s roadside.
- The only thing to do in town is go to the pueblo ruins and museum. The gift shop has creaky floorboards and has the sour (but not unpleasant) smell of old wood and books. R. Carlos Nakai plays in the background.
- You finally go down that dirt road overgrown by mesquite. At the end is an abandoned shanty town. Nobody has been here in years, but you somehow feel unwelcome.