Chapter One - The Lonely Planet: Texas
Consulting the crisp new pages of the “Lonely Planet: Texas” which she had carefully packed before leaving Boston, River tried in vain to work out where she was. As usual, her total lack of any sense of direction had scuppered her exuberance and enthusiasm, leaving her horribly lost. It was a familiar feeling. She had a very tenuous grasp on where she was in time and space in familiar places at the best of times and this was unfamiliar and unforgiving country. What’s more, the dodgy rental car she’d picked up earlier in the week was getting uncomfortably hot. The air conditioning unit had given up several miles back and she was starting to get a bad feeling about the day’s adventure.
Glancing down at her iPhone, she sighed as she confirmed once again the lack of Wi-Fi signal. Despite her intuition, she decided to continue along the dirt road a little further before giving up completely and heading back to the hotel which she guessed was still a good 6-hour drive away. At least driving with the windows down there was some movement of air through the open window, but it hardly provided respite from the relentless desert heat.
Her heart stopped momentarily as the car coughed and sputtered into life and then stalled. But on the second attempt, “Bessie” (the name with which she had christened the only heap of junk at the rental shop that she could afford on her student budget), sprang back to life and was off.
Despite her growing unease, she couldn’t help but be blown away by the surrounding landscape. It seemed like a different world compared with the sterile, air-conditioned corridors of Massachusetts General Hospital that had been her home for the last three months. She had been there on an intern elective placement, after completing almost allmost of her medical training at Christchurch medical school, in the land of the long white cloud. No white clouds here, long or otherwise, the sky was a deep azure blue as fair as the eye could see. Almost all her classmates had chosen to do the clichéd European tour. In fact, if she saw one more picture of a class mate pretending to support the leaning tower of Pisa with a single finger, she did not think she could be held responsible for her actions.
Europe just didn’t hold the same fascination for River as it seemed to hold for her classmates. By the time she had turned 10 years old she had traversed the globe no less than four times with her family on the sabbaticals that her Dad had arranged as part of his research collaboration with Harvard. America, though, had always fascinated her. As long as she could remember she had been fascinated by the idea of the Wild West, and she had promised herself that as soon as she could manage it, she would go on her very own Wild West adventure. She suspected that part of the allure of the country was because it was the birth place of her beloved appaloosa pony, her best friend through her teenage years and early twenties. She had been obsessively horse mad as long as anyone could remember.
River smiled as she recalled the happy weekends spent barrel racing Cricket at various gymkhanas at homein the region. Man alive, could that pony wriggle its way around a barrel in no time flat! She still joked with her dad about his genius in getting her Cricket for her twelfth birthday, coincidently, just as her hormones had started kicking in. She remembered how, one morning as she lay on her bed tears streaming down cheeks, her father had found her and asked what was wrong. “Oh, Daddy,” she had sobbed, throwing herself into his arms, “all I can do is read about ponies and dream about ponies! I want my own so badly it hurts!”
They had both pleaded with River’s Mum about it. Her Dad had carefully and thoroughly presented the case. Her Mum, who was possibly the most risk averse person River had ever known, just as thoroughly refused to entertain the idea. River had been heartbroken. Then on a Saturday morning two weeks before her 12th birthday her Dad had arranged for the two of them to go on a hike together. But they didn’t hike that morning., H instead her father had, instead, driven her to see a pony that had just been advertised for sale at a local farm.
River fell in love at first sight. She didn’t see the deep scars down both of Crickets front legs, the result of a horrific accident after the previous owner (drunk and out of control) had jumped her over a barbed wire fence instead of the wooden gate next to it. She didn’t hear Mrs. MacDonald explain that the reason the pony was being sold for next to nothing was that it was now terrified of jumping, and too severely marked to ever be any good as a show pony. All River knew was that every dream that she had ever had in her short life was coming true. They had handed over the $50 on the spot (tack included) and returned home. They had managed to keep up the deception for almost a month, sneaking away to the farm together at every opportunity. But finally, as all deceptions tend to be, theirs was discovered. Rivers mum had been incandescent with rage and hadn’t spoken to either of them for quite some time. But finally begrudgingly, she had at last grudgingly accepted the situation with the understanding that. Though she had vowed that she would not have a single thing to do with the pony or the hobby, and had stuck to her word.
Luckily for River her Dad had compensated for her Mum’s lack of interest, supporting her and getting her involved in eventing and pony club. O, and, over time, a marvellous thing happened. Pony and rider fell madly and deeply in love. Love, being the wonderful force that it is, triumphed and over time the mutual trust between pony and rider grew. River had never accepted that Cricket wouldn’t jump again and they learned together, first over logs on the ground then over progressively higher jumps, until she was ’New Zealand’s Young Rider of the Year’ and they were both one-day eventing champions, scars and all.
Every weekend had been spent getting up at 5am and getting ready for a show, and every evening had been spent mucking out the stable or exercising with the other horses at the MacDonald’s farm. Those were happy days, in fact such happy days, that she had managed to get to medical school without ever having had a boyfriend. Boys had paled in comparison to the excitement of eventing. Apparently, there was method in her Dads madness after all!
Once she had started at Otago Medical School, it had been all work and no play. Come to think of it, that had been instigated by her father, too. She had wanted to stay at home and do a science degree, following in his footsteps, but unbeknownst to her, he had enrolled her in the “pre-med” program. After acing all of her first-year papers, a letter had arrived in the post; “pleased to confirm that River had been selected for the Otago Medical School training program.”
She was the first candidate ever to have made it into the medical training program from her small home town and everyone had been so thrilled for her. She simply couldn’t bear to disappoint those she loved by admitting that she fainted at the sight of blood and that the thought of speaking to a complete stranger about anything filled her with an icy cold dread. She had become somewhat of a local celebrity for a while, with newspaper articles and invitations to talk at her local high school. Her family was so proud of her. Her grandmother, who had gone deaf working in a cotton mill to help support her family during the war, hadn’t stopped crying tears of joy for a full week when she learned the news. The program started a mere two weeks after she had received her golden ticket and with no time to really consider whether it was what she really wanted to do with her life, she had packed her bags and left. With the weight of the expectations of her entire town and generations and generations of her ancestors on her shoulders, she had hugged her beloved pony good bye and left to be a doctor.
She had worked hard. Very hard. She simply couldn’t bear to let everybody down. So, she had steeled herself and met each challenge head on.
Her dyslexia made the massive volumes of rote learning that was expected of them extremely difficult. But she would not let anybody down, and had spent every free moment writing sentences from “Robbins Pathological Sciences” over and over again, sometimes a hundred times or more until they finally stuck in her stubborn brain. It had paid off. She had graduated top in her class in several subjects, including psychiatry and general surgery, but it was surgery that she really loved. So, when it had been time to organize her elective, and a place at the prestigious Boston University had become available opened up, she had leapt at the chance. Three months and two research papers, half a dozen case reports, and three departmental audits later and she was free to explore the country that had always held such a fascination for her. In the next few months she would need to start thinking about applying for residencies, but until then she was free.
Suddenly the dirt road she had been bumping along came to a washed outwashed-out arroyo filled with large boulders. There was no way “Bessie” was going any further. Ahead of her was desert as far as the eye could see. “Great!” She thought, “Good job River. Great start to your American adventure.” With no other options left she popped Bessie into reverse and prepared to turn back toward the hotel still hours away. As her foot pressed down on the accelerator, Bessie responded by sputtering a few times, uttering a rather underwhelming belch, and then producing a much more dramatic cloud of acrid black smoke that began to billow out from under Bessie’s seriously dented hood.
Panicking, River leaped out the car and ran for several meters before turning back just in time to see the flames jumping from around the hood. Within seconds Bessie was ablaze and all of her carefully packed kit, including water bottles, pup tent, iPhone, and Swiss Army knife were gone. Falling to her knees in the burning sand she started to giggle hysterically as she realized that the only thing she had grabbed before fleeing was the lonely planet guide and the drug company sponsored pen she had attached to its cover, ironically advertising a new fluid rehydration system. Abruptly her giggling turned to sobs and tears began to fall in earnest as her predicament, and the very real danger of her imminent demise, began to sink in.
Sitting in the dusty road, watching the car slowly burn down until it was nothing more than a black charred hunk of junk metal, River shivered. Surprisingly, it was now quite dark. The desert, bright, interesting and enticing by day, was now a dark, threatening oppressive presence surrounding her. Shivering, she was surprised at how cool the air had become. Wearing nothing but the thin blouse, shorts and sneakers, she wrapped her arms about herself and began to take stock of the situation.
“This is bad.” she thought. “I am miles from the paved road I left hours ago.” Just then, the lonely howl of a coyote in the distance broke and with a start she stood and looked around. Panic gripped her.
“Oh God! I have done some stupid things but this has to be the most idiotic. No one knows where I am or where I was going!” Her heart pounding, she turned to look back down the road, trying to see something in the darkness that would give her some hope. All she could see was blackness.
“Think. River, Think!”
“You can get out of this. You are smart, resourceful, and brave. All you need to do is THINK!”
Talking out loud to herself, she began to walk back along the road. Into the darkness she plodded. Soon she could no longer see the hulk of the burned out car behind her. Fortunately, the moon was almost full and in the clear desert air it was bright enough to see a few meters ahead.
