Arizona day of the donkeys

You know you’re having adventure when you’re not having any fun, we always say. So we knew better than to set out for adventure in the morning, but we did it anyway. 

“You have to go to Oatman and see the burros!” our cousin said. The town of Oatman was an old mine, and when the miners left they abandoned their donkeys. The donkeys survived and took over the ghost town, until years later people figured out they were still up there, going in and out of the saloon like they were tending bar, and shopkeepers set up as people came to visit and feed the wild donkeys. Now it’s a shabby little donkey town with tourist shops and a live gun show at high noon.

There are two ways to get to Oatman; a little stretch of uphill highway from Laughlin, or a tightly winding up-and-down cliffside road with no guardrails on the Kingman side. Guess which side we came from?

When we lived on the reservation, the trip to the grocery store in Chinle was along an unpaved cliffside road, and when the road crumbled in bad weather around blind curves, the wheels of our truck gripped the edge of the precipice in a way that gave us nightmares for the rest of our lives. And there it was. The nightmare is in Oatman, with full vistas of distant purple mountains just beyond your wheels, surprise donkeys around the blind corners and the bones of a hundred dead motorists below. There are signs all along the way warning motorcyclists that the road is not banked and they should try not to fly off the cliff.

“Fuck this,” my mom said, hiding her face.

“Holy shit, if our cousin hates us, she could just say so.”

Luckily, I trained on the cliffs of Maui for 5 years, and I kept the car smoothly on the road, with only a few moments of blind panicky terror that my mother did not detect until I parked safely in front of the saloon and then screamed a little bit.

We consoled ourselves by feeding donkeys, buying way too much leather and silver, eating a pulled pork sandwich at the old hotel, and then we added an hour to our trip home by escaping out the back way to Laughlin. It’s a good thing, too, because if we had to go back the way we came we’d still be up there, painting donkeys and living in Oatman for the rest of our days.

All these people snuck in through the safe side of the mountain, because there was not another soul on the side with murder cliffs 

Some classy shit in the souvenir shops

One of these donkeys is the mayor

My new hat, the best hat

I assume the guy who approved that road is in here

The restaurant in Oatman is decorated in dollar bills, proving outlaws are not doing their job in the Wild West

Getting a handle on the gouache, finally 

Back at the house for dinner, Drunk Wife made a flippant comment about how she wouldn’t need to pay for an urn for grandpa because he’d come in a cardboard box, and my mother very nearly picked her up and launched her like a shot put.

We had to dunk ourselves in my aunt’s hotel pool to extinguish the flames shooting out of my mother’s ears. The stars came out, I swam on the bottom of the pool in the silent yellow underwater light, and it is time to go home.