During this morning’s commute, as I groggily propelled myself down the grey freeway under a leaden sky, I spied a battered hubcap on the side of the road. Seeing it triggered an old childhood memory.

I was a Boy Scout, and our troop was driving through the Mohave Desert, in the dead of night, on its way to the Colorado River. The trailer hauling our canoes broke down during our trek, so we camped by the side of the road for the night. In the morning, I found a whole bunch of broken, rusted stuff close to where our caravan had parked; broken dishes and crockery, rusted flatware, motor oil cans, sun-bleached scraps of fabric, a couple of rusted out rims, and the dessicated, brittle remains of a whitewall tire, half-buried in the gritty Mohave sands. Remains of some shattered attempt to move a household. Judging from the look of the debris (particularly the shards of china and the oil cans), I’d say it happened sometime in the 1950s.

I still wonder whose dreams and plans were derailed way out there in the middle of nowhere.