BOOK 3: The Enchanted El Camino Saves the Town – Chapter 6: Adam and the El Camino Save Santa Fe

It appeared that the El Camino didn’t attract lightning as Adam first feared because, although there were some bolts which passed very close, nothing hit them. They were rocked back and forth by the strength of the thunder though. Instead of being able to count seconds and miles to estimate their distance from the lightning, Adam and the El Camino were inside of it.  The sound was deafening, and powerful enough to shake the car and boy like a toy.

Luckily, they passed over the level of the storm clouds very quickly, and were able to get out of the onslaught. It was amazingly calm and quiet in the air above the clouds. The magnificent cloud heads of the individual thunderstorms were joined by the lower surrounding clouds to create a three dimensional landscape of vast proportions. It looked solid enough to land on. The only thing that concerned them was the fact that for miles and miles all around all they could see were the tops of storm clouds. This meant it would be raining hard for a considerable amount of time. Adam knew they had to find the newly formed dam and lake below all those clouds, and he wasn’t sure how to do that.

“El Camino, how can we find the lake? Can you tell where we are from up here?” Adam asked the air in front of him.

“…listen to the sound of…” “…I’m talkin’ to you…,” was the car’s reply.

“Okay…,” was all Adam said as he took the wheel while listening for clues from the radio.

After a few minutes the radio emitted, “…gotta go right, right to the spot…,” from some random rock and roll station.

Adam of course turned right, knowing that the car had a better shot than he did at knowing which way to go. After flying for another ten minutes he heard the car say, “…take me down, down, down, down…,” from an old blues song.

Adam hit the brake pedal and the car began a steady descent. Once they entered the clouds again they were rocked about and assailed by the horrible sounds. But Adam had grown more confident that they would survive since they had flown through it before, so he didn’t feel quite as much fear. It was still a very strange and helpless feeling to be flying in a car through a blinding bank of storm clouds, while you are tossed up and down, left and right, and back and forth by savage lightning and winds.

Adam was very relieved when he could see land again through the downpour. He saw the newly formed lake, but he was shocked to see how big it had become. It was filled with mud colored water that was very close to overflowing the low area that he had seen when he explored a couple of days earlier. It was mind blowing to imagine how much water it took to fill the area like that. He felt a new jolt of fear that moved up and then back down his spine this time.

It was getting dark since it was now evening. What sun there would have been was obscured by the rain clouds. Adam wanted to land while he still could, so he started to look for the place he had landed previously. He saw the small meadow and tried to turn in that direction.

His fear was suddenly quadrupled when he tried to move the wheel of the car only to realize that it wouldn’t move, no matter how hard he tried. His first reaction was to hit the brakes to try to control the car, but that also had no effect. It was as if the pedal was welded in place. And to make matters worse, the car was now without a doubt positioning itself for a landing right in the middle of the lake!

“What the…what are you doing, you crazy car?! We can’t land on a lake. Are you trying to kill me?” Adam was seriously freaking out by this point.

The only response he got was, “…you gotta trust…” “…you gotta trust…”

“I gotta trust, huh?” Adam shouted above the noise of the storm at the opinionated car. “Well, I’ve trusted a car to fly, and to take me out on a night like tonight, so you can’t give me a hard time about trust. But this is crazy!”

“…you gotta trust…” “…you gotta trust…,” the car repeated like a chant, while performing the difficult maneuver of landing in the lake.

The surprising thing was that, contrary to all logic, and most of the laws of physics, the car didn’t sink once it hit the water. In fact, Adam heard a sound like the seams at the doors, and all over the car’s chassis, tightening up. It was like the skin of the car had an involuntary reaction to the water, and it closed all openings to keep the water out. The end result was that Adam found himself floating bone dry in his car, in the middle of a mud colored lake that was about to overrun its newly formed banks and flood his home and city.

“Okay, El Camino, you seem to know what you are doing. What do we do now?” Adam put his hand on the dashboard as he spoke in an attempt to communicate more effectively.

“…by releasing tension…” “…the build up of…” “…daily stress without relief…”

Adam couldn’t tell if the yoga program the car was quoting was for his own stress management, or if there was another message in the words.

“…daily release avoids a critical and dangerous build up of stress…” the car continued its message.

“Do you mean that we need to relieve some of the stress of the dam before it collapses? Is that the message you are trying to give me?” Adam finally saw a point to the hippy yoga messages the car was channeling. Adam had a couple of cousins living on a hippy commune in Northern New Mexico, so he had heard a lot of that type of philosophy. This was the first time he heard it applied to geological formations, though. But it worked as an analogy, so Adam decided to act on it. Especially since the car beeped its horn a couple of times in response to his question.

Before he gave it any thought he turned the steering wheel. This time it turned with ease in his hands, so he hit the accelerator pedal. This was also unstuck, so he headed towards the natural dam. He figured that if he could remove a couple of tree trunks or other debris, he could release enough water to keep the whole thing from collapsing. He took the fact that the El Camino was quiet to mean that they were in agreement.

Once he had steered the car to the dam, Adam attempted to get out and walk over the top of it to free one of the easier to dislodge tree trunks. He was able to get out of the car after guiding it right beside the dam. He climbed the three feet that remained between the rising water and the top of the dam. To the left he could see the low area was already being breached by the water. The worst thing was that he could see how the dirt would quickly give way there, and the water would manage to carve a huge breach in seconds once things got going. He had to move fast.

He tried moving the first tree trunk that he came to. But, no matter how hard he tried, he could rock it but he couldn’t dislodge it. He tried others near it, but it was the same story. He just wasn’t strong enough, and he couldn’t get into a good position for better leverage on top of the dam. He wouldn’t be able to dismantle the dam without help.

He scrambled back over to the El Camino and got back in. Desperate for a solution to the dilemma, he asked the car, “El Camino, what do I do now? Should we fly back to town for help?”

“…let me be…” “…I push, just push…” “…all my strength…” The car was almost babbling. It seemed to understand the need to beat the water before it took out the breach completely.

But Adam managed to understand what was coming out of the radio eventually. The El Camino wanted him to try to use the strength of the car to pull some of the tree limbs off the dam. Luckily, he had a chain behind the seats, since he had often helped tow people out of ditches during New Mexican winter storms. He always laughed at how many people from out of state, like his relatives from New York, would ask, “It snows in New Mexico?” when he told them about this. He always told them to go look at a map that shows the extents of the Rocky Mountains. Of course it snows in New Mexico, and Tesuque, to the North and higher up the foothills than Santa Fe, is about 1,500 feet higher then Denver, the “Mile High City”, at 6,759 feet above sea level.

Adam again scrambled out onto the dam. This time he attached the chain to the steel knob on the back of the El Camino’s rear fender. It was there for exactly this purpose, at least the towing part, if not the floating in a pond part. He wrapped the other end of the chain around the highest tree limb on the dam and got back in the car. He applied a small amount of pressure to the accelerator pedal, and he steered the car straight ahead. He wasn’t sure exactly how the tires managed it in the water, but the car built up a fair amount of forward momentum. But since the car was attached to the limb, which was still lodged in the dam, they quickly came to a stop. Adam continued to apply pressure to the pedal, though, and he heard the chain straining and cutting into the limb. Eventually something cracked and the limb came loose from the dam. The El Camino surged forward, towing the limb several yards out into the water in one quick motion.

The idea was working. Adam dumped off the dead limb on the side of the lake, in a spot where he could easily get out and drag the limb out of the water. He then turned the car around and headed back to the dam. When he started back to the dam again he looked over to the low spot to see how close it was to being breached for real. To his dismay, the water was continuing to leak out and had only become worse since he last looked. It was no wonder, since the rain continued to beat down on him and the thunderstorm seemed to have only gotten worse. The breach hadn’t collapsed into a flash flood yet, but they had to hurry.

They managed to make three trips back and forth from the dam to dump off the limbs on the bank, and back to the dam. During their return to the dam for the fourth time the breach suddenly made a sickening crunching sound. This was followed by a huge whooshing sound, as hundreds of thousands of gallons of water were suddenly released. The breach had overflowed. With all this water, it quickly grew to be wider than the arroyo had originally been. The water started to carve out a new passage that lead back to the original arroyo after a few hundred yards.

A few seconds after the initial breach, the El Camino was tugged in circles that dragged them quickly towards the new opening. It was all Adam could coax the car to do to fight the flow of the water, and slowly make their way back to the bank where they had dumped the limbs.

“Oh, no, what are we going to do now?” Adam beseeched his car’s dashboard.

“…you’ve got to fly…” “…got to fly…” The El Camino didn’t seem to be in a mood for wasting words.

Adam made his way through what had become very dark terrain, since the sun was down and night had fallen, to where there was enough room for a take off. He was helped every few seconds by flashes of stunningly bright lightning. They seemed to illuminate the world in an unnatural way that left a sharp, lingering afterimage. It was eerie, but it helped Adam see enough to quickly get the El Camino in the air.

While he was taking off the car radio again sprang to life. “…following the path of migration…” “…they were able to get ahead of the dangerous situation…” “…get down, get down, get down…” “…the world speed record was again shattered…” The car put together a hurried collage of news broadcasts, nature programs and popular songs.

But that was enough for Adam to understand that he needed to get downstream and beat the wall of water down the hills. He didn’t know what he would be able to do at that point, but he trusted the car to let him know.

He flew at a speed that he had never dared to try before. The rain and wind howled and whistled as he rushed past. The car was bounced by the winds, but the speed reduced this somehow. He remembered reading that astronauts said that they felt like they were sitting in a tin can on top of a bomb going off when they lift off in their rockets. And Adam understood the feeling quite well at that moment. At least his El Camino wasn’t a bomb, he hoped. The terrain rushed by below him, and he had to keep himself from looking down because it was making him dizzy and a little sick.

But the speed worked, and they managed to put a couple of minutes between themselves and the wall of water before they reached a point just above Tesuque. Adam had noticed that there was a narrow channel that the arroyo passed through at this spot. It wasn’t shored up by a tree or rock formation like the similar channel that had originally caused the dam, though. It was just an area where the colichè had been hard enough to resist on both sides, and had formed overhanging cliffs as the water carved out the softer dirt below. Adam had wondered what it would take for erosion to eventually cause the cliffs to collapse.

He had just seen the formation again when the car made it clear to Adam that he should land. Adam didn’t argue, and they were soon on the ground again, in front of one side of the overhanging cliff. Adam was glad to have made it, and to have two minutes of time, but he wasn’t sure what to do with the time. Could they make the cliffs collapse with a car somehow?

“…get back, get back…” “…back it on up…” “…full speed…” “…get back…” was the El Camino’s urgent advice.

“What? You want me to go back? Where?” Adam asked.

The car beeped its horn in a tone that obviously signaled a missed guess on Adam’s part. It tried again, “…back it on up…” “…full speed…” “…get back…”

“You want me to back up, in reverse?” Adam asked redundantly.

This time the car tooted its horn in a much more positive sounding manner. So Adam decided to try backing up. He didn’t have a lot of room, but there was enough to back up for about seventy five yards. He got in position at the beginning of the clear area and started backing up. He was careful not to go faster than he felt comfortable with, and they soon arrived at the end of the seventy five yards and had to stop at the cliff edge.

“Well, that didn’t do much,” Adam said, starting to feel panicked since they were quickly losing time.

“…full SPEED…” “…get BACK…” “…FULL SPEED…” The car emphasized certain words to get its meaning across.

“You want me to go full speed?” Adam asked. “But I won’t have time to stop, and it won’t do any good trying to fly backwards over the arroyo. What good would that do?”

The idea was scary enough to make Adam very nervous. Who would want to drive in reverse at full speed towards a narrow channel in an arroyo that is about to be devastated by a massive flash flood? But he knew the car hadn’t failed him yet, and that the whole city of Santa Fe and his village of Tesuque were at risk. He had to try what the car wanted.

He again maneuvered the car to the beginning of the clear pathway. He turned his head over his right shoulder and said, “Okay El Camino, I am putting our fate in your, uh, wheels.”

Then he pushed in the accelerator pedal. And when he got to the end of its arc, he pushed it in one more notch.

Much to his surprise, the car didn’t angle up into the sky backwards. Instead it did something completely unexpected; it opened up its back tailgate, lowered itself on its rear axle while rising up the front end, and it started to dig. It was like the tailgate was a kind of back hoe that moved quickly enough to eject the soil out of the hole it was making, and allowed the car to descend into it.  Adam found himself in a tunnel in a matter of seconds.

Adam fought against his instincts to release the accelerator when the car again chanted to him, “…get back…” “…FULL speed…”

Adam wasn’t sure where he was digging to at this point, but he did what the car told him to do. After a couple of seconds he realized that the steering wheel was taking control of itself again. All he could do was push on the pedal, and try to see in the light from his car’s tail lights and the sparks that flew off the tailgate, as it rapidly cut through the solid earth. He had to put his trust in the car, knowing it hadn’t failed him yet, but it took a real fight to calm down his claustrophobia.

All of a sudden the El Camino changed directions. Adam felt the steering wheel turn on its own, and the whole car started arcing to the left. They continued in that direction for a short distance, when the car took another ninety degree turn to the left. This put them back headed towards the direction they had started in, all the while digging backwards through solid ground. If Adam hadn’t already been through so much, he would have been completely panicked by this point. It was a horror inducing situation, and the going backwards part of it made it even more awkward and terrifying.

Once they had made their subterranean u-turn, Adam noticed the car was angling back up towards the surface. Apparently the El Camino felt it had accomplished what it wanted, and was headed back to the air. Adam was happy to realize this. He imagined the tunnel they had just carved. It was a big U shaped loop under the dirt that isolated a huge amount of the ground above the narrow area in the arroyo bed. He realized what the El Camino intended to do, but he still wasn’t sure how exactly.

“You want to somehow get all that dirt to fall into the arroyo, huh? We carved out a big chunk of earth, that just needs to be pushed one bit further to create an avalanche that will fall into the arroyo, right? But, what do we need to do to push it over the edge?” Adam was all questions as they broke free to the surface.

“…you’ve gotta hop…” “…hopping by the bunny trail…” “…hippity hoppity…” The El Camino found some children’s songs to help convey its meaning.

Adam understood immediately this time. The car wanted him to hop up and down on the area above the tunnel to loosen the last link that all the dirt had to the side of the cliff wall. But he had never hopped in the car before, or even tried.

In the end he did what made the most sense to him. He started the car flying for just a second by hitting the accelerator pedal past its special notch. But he followed this a second later by hitting the brake pedal hard. This did exactly what he was hoping for. The El Camino took air then plodded back to the surface. After a few tries he was able to make it hop up and down like this in a continuous manner. He couldn’t hop in place, but he was able to hop along the line of the seam holding back the carved out earth.

He had made two passes back and forth like this when he heard a rumbling sound that again put deep fear in his heart. The flash flood that was crashing down the arroyo was getting very close. He could even see the advancing wall of dust and mist that the front edge of the flood was kicking up. They had only been ahead by a couple of minutes when they arrived there. It had seemed to Adam like they had been there for a lifetime already, but in reality it had been only a matter of a a minute and a half before he started hopping. But the time was up now. Adam had to make this avalanche happen.

He decided to go for broke. He took the El Camino higher into the air than before. He made sure he would be right above that remaining dirt seam before he descended.

“I am sorry for what I am about to do, El Camino. This is not going to be fun for either of us. But, it is now or never,” he said right before his hit the brake pedal as hard as he could.

“…Geronimo!” was what the car found to play on the radio as all of a sudden they plunged from the sky. It was paying tribute to what World War II paratroopers would yell for luck as they jumped out of airplanes.

They were only about fifteen feet high, but a fall like that carries a lot of momentum. The shock of it drove the El Camino’s tires deeply into the soil. It jarred Adam to the bone. Luckily, the car seat seemed to become stiffer and almost hug him right at the moment of impact. So what could have been broken bones wound up being bruises.

The ground below them didn’t budge at first. Then Adam heard a deep groaning sound, and he found himself abruptly sliding as a huge portion of the bank started to avalanche into the arroyo. Adam hit the accelerator pedal with all he had, so they were just getting airborne when the main part of the avalanche plunged hundreds of metric tons of dirt and rock into the arroyo. Looking back he saw that it effectively sealed the entire channel like a stopper in a bathtub.

Seconds later Adam witnessed the flash flood wall of water strike into this newly created obstacle. The splash the impact created flew high enough into the air to catch the El Camino broadside and rock it back and forth. It was such a tremendous collision that Adam was sure the water would win the battle and continue on down to the village and city below. But they had chosen the spot well. It was nestled between two larger foothills, which created a huge barrier once the arroyo had been sealed. There was enough area behind the hills for the reserve of water to again form a lake, only this time there was no lower area to breach.

The best thing about this configuration was that it allowed a stream of water to continue to flow over the arroyo infill they had created. The new dirt and stone dam was low enough that it allowed a safety valve stream of water to continue down the arroyo. But, the two hills easily held back the remaining huge amount of water from being released, which would have created a situation like the one they had just averted. Since the new dam was built out of such a large amount of stone and dirt, it wasn’t in danger of being easily eroded away either. It was obvious that during normal conditions without a huge storm the water would just remain in the new lake, rising and lowering depending on the amount of rain and snowfall. In short, they had just created a land feature that would be enjoyed by people and animals in the area for centuries.

But they had to take care of things on a much more short term basis at that moment. Adam was worried that his parents might have discovered that he wasn’t at home by then. If so, they would be furious at him. And he was soaking wet, which would give them even more reason to tell him how stupid he had been. It was understandable that they would be mad. A big part of their anger would come from the fear they would have about Adam being outside in the dangerous storm, and driving around on top of it.

Adam considered his options as he drove home carefully through the storm. Amazingly, the weather was starting to calm down a bit already. One of the characteristics of monsoon thunderstorms like this in New Mexico is that no matter how intense they are, if the wind blows them away from your location, the sky can open and the air can become clean and clear thirty minutes later. This storm would take longer than that to clear, but the worst was clearly over.

Adam figured he had three options. He could; a) tell his parents the truth about the El Camino and see what happens, b) tell them he had been really curious about the storm so he had driven the top of a hill to watch, not mentioning the car’s abilities, or c) try to sneak in without them seeing, and quickly jump into a shower to give himself an excuse for being wet and changing clothes. He opted for ‘c’. He was too worried that if he told his parents about the car, they would feel obligated to tell the authorities. The authorities were sure to take the car away from Adam to study it. He wasn’t sure the car would survive their studies, and they might never let him see the car again. The problem with option ‘b’ was that he didn’t feel like getting in trouble for going outside, especially since he had actually done something that made him a bit of a hero. He also knew that it was going to be awfully hard to keep his mouth shut about what he had just seen and done.

As luck would have it, nobody even noticed when he came home and sneaked into the shower. His mom and dad had made dinner but Craig ate in his room, and Tony and Helene had the luxury of a nice candle lit dinner in front of the window watching the storm. Adam was just about to get out of the shower when his mom knocked on the door.

“There you are. I called you before, but I guess you were in the shower. Anyway, get yourself something to eat. You can eat wherever you want because your dad and I are eating just the two of us, without you and your brother tonight,” his mom told him. Things had worked according to his plan ‘c’.

BOOK 3: The Enchanted El Camino Saves the Town – Chapter 5: The Sky Turns Pink

Soccer practice started up at the end of August, and school followed shortly thereafter. Adam didn’t have as much time for early morning “A-2” reconnaissance flights. He still took trips in the air, but just for short jaunts.

He and Robin spent a lot of time together at school, and had at least two dates a week. Usually that meant doing homework together after soccer practice, and then having dinner at one of their family’s homes. But they did have their romantic Saturday night dates, and it was a happy time for both of them.

Adam was thinking about exactly that subject the second Friday evening in September. He drove home right after soccer practice, knowing that he better get some homework done that afternoon. Then he would work at the garage the next morning for six hours or so. That would give him time to get home, take a shower, and be ready to go to the movies and probably Carrows with Robin that Saturday evening.

He noticed something in the weather as he drove home that reminded him of a few years back, and that gave him an uneasy feeling in his stomach. The sky was overcast, and it looked like they would have a late monsoon season style thunder storm that evening. It reminded him of how on an evening a few years back, when Adam was eight, they had a flash flood  that had filled their whole home with two feet of mud. Pictures of their house in the aftermath had even been in the newspapers. And they had lived with their aunt and uncle for a month while the house was repaired. The whole neighborhood had spent a day helping to clean out the mud, although they discovered a couple of items missing at the end of the day. They found out later through the gossip mill that they had been taken as unauthorized payment for helping. This was an unfortunate, but probably necessary, lesson in human behavior for Adam and Craig.

One of Adam’s most remarkable memories of that flood had been the color of the sky before the rains started. Adam, Craig and Ernest, a neighbor friend, had been outside playing in the arroyo when the clouds came in. All of a sudden an unusual coloration of the clouds caused the entire earth to turn an eerie shade of pink. It gave them a very unnatural feeling, since none of them had ever seen the sky turn that ominous color. Then the sky unleashed a downpour of rain and lightning that created flash floods throughout the region for hours.

Adam saw exactly that same color in the sky and on the hills and mountains as he drove home that afternoon. It left him with a shaky feeling in his body. He heard on the radio that a storm was expected, which made him laugh, since all you had to do was look out the window to make that prediction.

He was sitting at his desk trying to concentrate on homework when he heard the first raindrops. The lightning and thunder had been approaching for forty five minutes already. He habitually counted the time in between seeing the flash of lightning and hearing the deep bass rumble of the thunder that followed. He had been taught that by counting the seconds in between you could estimate the number of miles the storm was from you. This evening he had started at seven seconds, but he was down to less than two in half an hour.

The sound of raindrops on the roof started randomly. They were almost like popcorn starting to pop. But within a minute the drops became an angry roar as gallons and gallons of water were hurled down on the landscape. It was exactly like the last time the sky had turned pink. It started to rain so hard that you couldn’t tell if the sky was composed predominantly of gas, or if it actually consisted more of solid water. Luckily they had built a relief system into the wall that surrounded their house after the last flood, and a stone retaining wall between the house and the river. If any excess water made it into their yard, it would run out a couple of louvered openings that had been cut into the walls to keep any build up of water from occurring.

Adam watched out the window as the Little Tesuque River quickly filled and overran its normal banks. It had widened to two or three times its usual maximum width in some places. It looked like you could launch a boat on the often dry river by then, and maybe make it all the way to the Rio Grande River, where all the arroyos on the west side of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains eventually wound up. But since people had taken precautions against the water since the last flood, it looked like there wouldn’t be any where near the same amount of damage.

Still it was an awe inspiring sight. Adam was lost in the reverie of it when he thought he heard a familiar horn honk. He was very surprised and a little unnerved to hear that sound. He hadn’t heard the El Camino honk on its own since the day he had put out the fire in the garage. It was not a welcome memory, and Adam felt a jolt of fear shoot down his spine into his stomach. He ran to the garage, and sat in the driver’s seat. He turned the key to activate the electrical system, and he turned on the radio.

“…danger of flash flooding throughout Northern New Mexico…” “…extremely dangerous rainfall in the mountains just above Santa Fe…” “…warning residents to stay away from all arroyos in case a natural obstacle or dam fails, releasing dangerous amounts…” The car presented a medley of news broadcasts about the weather situation.

“Yeah, El Camino, I know all about that. I can see and hear the rain. Everybody is inside, and we are safe.” Adam felt like they had done the right thing, and like the radio said, they needed to just sit tight and weather out the storm.

“…warning residents to stay away from all arroyos in case a natural obstacle or dam fails, releasing dangerous amounts…” “…warning residents to stay away from all arroyos in case a natural obstacle or dam fails, releasing dangerous amounts…” This was the first time the car had managed to record something and repeat it.

If there was one thing Adam knew about the El Camino by then, it was that if it thought something was important enough to develop a new skill, it was best to pay attention. “Okay, so the arroyos are dangerous. What can we do about it?”

“…fly like an eagle…” “…to the sea…” “…fly…fly…fly…to the sea…” The car was now doing a kind of remix with the song in order to make Adam understand, even though sampling and remixing as they are known today weren’t invented yet, except for experimental art tape collages done in university art departments.

“What sea, El Camino? This is New Mexico, there isn’t any… Do you mean the lake we found the other day?” Adam finally started to follow the car’s train of thought.

The car tooted its horn just a tiny bit to show him that he was getting it.

“But what’s going to happen?” Adam asked. “Why do we have to go out into the violent rainstorm and do something, when the safest thing is to stay inside?”

“…warning residents to stay away from all ARROYOS in case a NATURAL obstacle or DAM FAILS, releasing dangerous amounts…” “…ARROYOS in case a NATURAL obstacle or DAM FAILS …” The El Camino raised the volume on the key words when he repeated this phrase to Adam, who now understood.

“Oh no, so this rain could make the new dam we discovered fail? And that would release a lake full of water at one time on Tesuque and Santa Fe?” Adam put the situation into his own words.

He didn’t even wait for the answer. He started up the car and pulled out of the garage. He was worried about his parents hearing the sound of the garage door opening, but he realized the noise from the storm would easily prevent that. But he kept his lights off, and turned left first so they couldn’t see him, in case they were watching the storm out the window.

The roof, hood and bed of the El Camino were immediately assailed by the buckets of rain that were crashing down every second. It was very hard to see there was so much water in the air. The headlights illuminated a wall of water falling down from the sky in ribbons. It was disorienting to try to drive looking at this display in the windshield, and the sound was deafening.

“…you’ve got to fly…” “…YOU’VE GOT TO FLY…” The car radio had to turn up all the way before Adam heard what it was trying to say.

“I’ll try, but this is going to really be awful in this weather,” Adam replied, knowing from the beginning that they were going to have to take to the air to do anything in time.

But he realized that nobody would be out driving except for emergency vehicles. He allowed himself a moment to hope that he wouldn’t be a reason for those types of vehicles to be required later this day. Instead of driving to a more private driveway, Adam decided to just go for it once they hit the main road. He turned west towards the straighter part of the road, and quickly pushed the accelerator pedal past its special notch to once again find himself angling towards the sky. Only this time it was a sky filled with the remnants of the pink color that characterized killer flash flood storms. It was a sky that sent crashing lightning bolts at the car and dumped torrents of rain all around him.

BOOK 3: The Enchanted El Camino Saves the Town – Chapter 4: Adam Maps the Terrain

Life was pretty good for Adam during this time. He had a car, and not just any car. He had a girlfriend, and far from not just any girlfriend. He was doing okay in school, although he would have been doing better if he managed to devote just a little bit of effort to doing all his homework on time. But he was lucky to be smart enough that his grades were pretty good, without having to lose too much of his free time. Free time which he already didn’t have much of between working at the garage, going to school, dating Robin as of late, maintaining the El Camino, and of course taking it out for early morning flights.

The summer months came and passed a little easier as far as free time goes, though. Adam and the El Camino started making their own maps of Tesuque, Pojoaque, Los Alamos, and of course Santa Fe. Adam had even gotten up at 3:30 AM a couple of days and flown as far as Colorado to the North, and Arizona to the West. Although they had some close calls with being spotted, apparently the El Camino was adept at stealth on top of everything else. They saw from above how the plants changed color as late spring turned into summer. The foothills became more beige than the light green and flowery yellow they had been during the spring thaw. The green of the pine forests grew darker as their early growth matured. It was pretty much the best summer Adam could have hoped for, although he did regret the fact that he couldn’t share his adventures with his car with anyone else.

In New Mexico the late summer is called the monsoon season. This seems like a strange name for a season in the high desert, but it is true that it rains pretty much every evening between 5:30 PM and 9:00 PM during the end of summer. The storms are typically short, often fifteen minutes or less, but they can be ferocious while they are happening. A night doesn’t go by during August that one doesn’t see the distant light of a thunder storm with bolts of intense lightning somewhere on the horizon. Once in a while these lightning storms occur right over head.

Sometimes the monsoon storms are intense enough to produce a huge amount rain in a short period of time. If this happens upstream, and if the storm follows the meandering of a normally dry arroyo for a few miles, the arroyos have been known to swell up to huge proportions. This is known as a flash flood. Until you have seen a solid ten foot high wall of muddy water filled with fallen trees and debris rushing towards you down a normally dry river bed, you can’t imagine the potential power these storms have.

Adam and the El Camino enjoyed witnessing the results of the previous evening’s storms during their early morning excursions. They saw the rapid changes the arroyos made when their banks swelled suddenly. New crumbling sandstone mini-cliffs would appear in the walls of the arroyos where the water had cut into the steep banks.

Adam knew these types of formations well. He, Craig, and friends from the neighborhood had given names to a couple of the local larger cliffs formed by erosion and earth movement. They spent their childhoods using the terrain as their playground. Games of Star Trek or Combat couldn’t have had a better setting.

One formation was called The Cliffs, which made sense since it was a several hundred foot high sandstone cliff that had been created when one whole side of one of the hills had fallen off after water erosion undercut it below.

The other formation was a similar cliff face they named The Caves because it had a few smallish caves carved out below the edges of the harder layers of sandstone. New Mexican soil is filled with layers of very hard compressed clay and limestone soils that form into what is called colichè.  When the less hard layers of soil above and below get washed away by water and wind erosion, the sides of these cliffs develop ledges formed by the colichè.

Adam had started calling his observation missions in the El Camino Aerial – Terrain Observation, or A-2, missions. It was during one of their A-2 outings that Adam noticed something strange. One of the major arroyos hadn’t changed at all during the night, even though there had been a major rain storm the night before. All the other tributary arroyos had water marks and chunks of river bed carved away. But once there weren’t any more minor arroyos feeding into it, a long section of the main arroyo looked as dry as during the other seasons. This caused Adam to become curious.

“…the incident warranted further investigation…” The El Camino used a news report to communicate its advice.

Adam decided to follow the river bed upstream to see if they could figure out what had caused this. They only had to go about a mile before it became clear to them. There was a narrow section at one of the bends that the arroyo had carved for itself over the centuries. Apparently a granite boulder restrained the erosion on one side while a couple of very old Ponderosa Pine trees had set the limits on the other side. But, the water rushing down the arroyo the night before had finally overcome the tree’s ability to grab the earth, and both trees had fallen across the path of the arroyo. They had collected all the debris that was in the rushing waters and this had formed a natural dam. Even though a large amount of water had come down from the foothills and mountains the night before, it hadn’t managed to breach the dam, so it had spread out to form a temporary lake. There weren’t any areas that were low enough for the water to have carved a new passage down the mountain, so the water was sitting there still, rapidly evaporating and being sucked into the arid New Mexican soil.

Adam found a nearby open meadow to land in, and he took advantage of the opportunity. He got out of the car to explore the dam and mini-lake that had formed. He first took a look around the structure of trees and debris that formed the barrier. It looked really solid, almost like it had been engineered. The amount of smaller brush and leaves which made the dam watertight was impressive.

As far as the lake went, it was kind of strange. There were trees sticking out of the water all around, but with all but their heads submerged. It was obvious that the water was very recent, and the vegetation would have to adapt. The submerged trees would die off in a year or so if the conditions didn’t change. But if the lake lasted a year, the magic of nature would bring new residents more suited for water life. There would certainly be frogs and water plants, insects and microbes all somehow having found there way to any standing water in the pine forest. The other animals would find the water quickly as well. They would be attracted to it as a source of drinking water. Their travel patterns and territorial borders would be changed by the new source of life.

These are the thoughts Adam had as he looked out over the new mini-lake. He also noticed that if the water rose another ten feet, it would find a breach between a couple of higher areas. If the lake ever filled high enough to get past that breach, it would find a new way down to the city of Santa Fe, since it looked like it would be able to carve a new channel through the soft dirt in that area. But that would take a ridiculous amount of water, and Adam couldn’t imagine that ever happening.

He walked back to the EL Camino, and got back up in the air.

“That was so cool. I’ve never seen a lake form before. It is like seeing geological history,” he remarked to the car.

“…history…” “…moves faster than the eye can see…,” was the El Camino’s perspective on the event.

BOOK 3: The Enchanted El Camino Saves the Town – Chapter 3: Adam and Robin go to the Dance

They decided that they would make an evening of it. Adam would chauffer in the El Camino. They would have dinner at La Loma Restaurant at 6:30 PM. They agreed to “go Dutch”, or to each pay for their meals. Neither of them had much money, so it made sense that nobody treat. They would go to the dance around 8:30 PM. It started at 8:00 PM, but only complete nerds would show up right on time.

Things could not have worked out better as a set up for Adam and Robin to enjoy themselves. Thanks to the timing of events, and the fact that he had a full four days to talk himself down from his excitement over his crush on Robin, he had managed to let her get to know the real him. And he had also managed to become comfortable around her, which was probably even more important. That kept him from acting like a poseur around her, since he could just relax. This all made for a very nice dinner.

Adam picked Robin up at her house, and went through the humiliating but traditional ritual of meeting her parents. He was a presentable young man, so it went well, but it wasn’t exactly a comfortable experience.

Then Adam drove her to La Loma in the El Camino. Adam had spoken to his car on the way to Robin’s house, giving it very specific instructions on the types of songs that Adam thought Robin would like.  The car hadn’t made a response, but it had also taken Adam’s instructions with a large grain of salt. Adam might have been a pretty smart kid, but just because someone is a girl doesn’t mean that they only like sentimental pop music. The El Camino began to plan its DJ song list for the evening on its own. This meant that Adam was a little surprised when the song mix the car chose included a juicy ZZ Top electric blues song, and a down low English version of African American soul by the Rolling Stones. But, since Robin seemed to like the music, Adam didn’t mind. Besides it wasn’t as if he could say anything to the car in front of her.

Robin did remark at one point, “What radio station is this? I have never heard such a good mix of songs all in a row without an ad!”

Adam was forced to think quickly and come up with a weak explanation that would have to suffice. “Uh, my radio has a special tuner. It, uh…scans for music stations and skips the ads. It usually doesn’t work as well as it is now, but since it is Saturday, maybe there is more music than usual…”

“That is so cool!” was all Robin said. She was on a first date after all, and she was clearly enjoying the music, so she didn’t worry about it too much.

They were chatting away about nothing and everything by the time they pulled into the parking lot at La Loma. They were one of only four occupied tables in the restaurant as they ate dinner. Adam was happy to see that no other couples from school had chosen this restaurant. It was more popular with adults than high school kids, even some of the more well to do ones in Adam’s school. In a few hours a band would start to play, and under 21 aged kids would have to leave as it transitioned into a bar. But it had very good New Mexican food, a Piñon log fed fire place, and nice dim candle lighting for a conversation on a first date.

New Mexicans are extremely proud of their food. It is a mix of Mexican, Native American and European cuisine, with the local chili flavors thrown in to make everything unique. One of the worst things a tourist could do was calling it Mexican food. It might be similar, but any New Mexican will tell you that there is no comparison.

Adam had his personal favorite; green chili chicken enchiladas. He would make this his life long test of Mexican and New Mexican restaurants. If they can get the enchiladas right then they knew how to cook in Adam’s estimation. Robin had another dish which often appears in New Mexican restaurant menus; chili relleños. These are battered large chili peppers stuffed with a cheese filling. Given the delicious taste of New Mexican chili, and the pride that restaurants put into this dish in Santa Fe, it was also a classic choice. And the jury declared that both of their dishes were absolutely delicious, ranking with some of Santa Fe’s best.

This made for a very enjoyable meal, so they were feeling well fed and happy as they drove the short distance to the dance. The euphoric properties of New Mexican chilies were well in effect.

Robin commented, “I have to confess that the more I ride in your car, the more I feel comfortable in it. I guess they don’t make them like this any more. It feels like sitting in your living room on a comfy couch, just watching the landscape go by instead of TV. I feel safe.”

The El Camino did something that worried Adam then, though. It made the radio skip for just a moment from the song that was playing to a different station, which produced, “…I say thank you…” before skipping back to the song.

“Hey, what was that?” Robin asked. “It was almost like the radio thanked me,” she said laughing.

“Ha ha ha…Yeah, right. My car is a magic talking car with racing stripes,” Adam said, playing along with the just joking idea. But at the same time he knew that he was going to have a word in private with the car. There was no sense taking chances by playing games like that.

They arrived at their school shortly, and made their way from the parking lot to the auditorium joined by other kids who were also arriving. Adam had gone with his dad to the JC Penny’s department store the day before to buy his first official suit. It was just a green sports jacket with pressed tan pants, but he felt very fancy. Robin was wearing a dark blue dress that had a translucent fabric with a lacy design woven into it over a slightly darker solid blue fabric. It was cut in a classic way that made her look as sophisticated as a college girl in Adam’s eyes.

Adam was feeling pretty proud of the figure they cut when they entered the row of double doors at the auditorium entrance. He saw that there were quite a few people there already, and that the first brave couples were on the dance floor. He and Robin made the rounds by ambling from one group of friends to the next for the first 45 minutes. Adam loved dancing, but he wasn’t ready to unleash his moves until more people had filled up the dance floor. Besides, Robin seemed to be enjoying chatting and gossiping with her friends for the time being.

It wasn’t until the song Stayin’ Alive by the Bee Gees came on the sound system that they made their way into the middle of the room. Before he knew it, Adam was feeling the rhythm of the music and the poetry of the words, and he let his body do the rest. He started off closing his eyes and trying to relax. He needed to ignore the exterior world for long enough to pay attention to his own body, and start swinging to the music. But after half a song, he noticed that Robin was also feeling the music and dancing in an inspired way. He started to watch her dance and allow how she moved to affect what his body did. It wasn’t long before she realized what he was doing, and she started playing along too. Soon they were improvising moves with each other, at times having one act as the leader, and at times the other.

They laughed at the ridiculousness of having so much fun, but that didn’t keep them from spending most of the evening in this way. They only took breaks when they needed to cool down by going outside for air. And they only danced one dance with different partners. They were just having too much fun to share, and people watching them could tell, so they were left alone. In fact, more than one person in the room felt jealous of how happy they seemed to be making each other.

When the dance ended at 11:30 PM, they followed a bunch of friends to the Carrows restaurant that stayed open all night. There were not a lot of places for kids Adam and Robin’s age to socialize at in those days. Carrows, a restaurant chain open 24/7, wound up being quite popular for that reason. They all had different combinations of breakfast items, since those were the most food for your buck, and these kids needed to eat after using up all their energy dancing. They gossiped and laughed for over an hour while eating. But since they were still high school kids, eventually they all had to go to their homes to meet their respective curfews.

Adam drove Robin home feeling very uncertain about how to approach the next stage in their date. He was very uncomfortable with the whole good night kiss issue. Although there was nothing in the world he wanted to do more than kiss Robin, the sad fact was that he had never actually kissed a girl before, other than his girlfriend from kindergarten, and a couple of shy and chaste fake kisses while playing spin the bottle. He didn’t let anyone know that of course. He tried his best to talk a good game, just like his friends did, but it was all based on second hand information from books and movies. He actually felt quite inferior in this regard. It would be amusing to know just how much of his peer’s talk was also based on fantasy, but Adam assumed he was the only one who had to exaggerate. This left him unsure as to how to even approach kissing Robin.

Luckily, it turns out that both instinct and a certain El Camino were on Adam’s side. During the drive home, the car radio played some of the most romantic songs available at the time. Barry White had several hit songs that were particularly effective in inspiring romantic thoughts in women. The car chose a couple that were exactly Robin’s favorites. The car also made sure that the temperature was very comfortable in the car, which helped both of the young couple feel comfortable and relaxed. The El Camino even did its best to keep the interior light at a romantic level, once Adam parked in front of Robin’s driveway and they sat talking a bit more.

These circumstances inspired both Robin and Adam to lean towards each other bit by bit as they talked. When it felt comfortable to do so, Robin took a hold of Adam’s hand. When they had enjoyed that sensation for a few minutes, she put her head on Adam’s shoulder. Then, just as the first notes of Heart of Gold by Neal Young came on the radio, Adam felt enough calm courage to simply kiss Robin gently on the lips. Robin had kissed and been kissed before, so she continued to kiss back, once Adam let her know he was game.

To make a long story short, Adam left Robin about ten minutes later in just about as content a state as he had ever known. Sure he had rebuilt a flying, talking car all by himself. But it was having the courage to kiss a girl, and apparently do it well enough for her to thoroughly enjoy it, that made him feel truly proud of himself.

Adam was so ecstatic that he even allowed himself to take a little moonlight flight up in the foothills near his house. It was late enough that if someone saw him, they would probably ignore it as a post evening of drinking figment of their imagination. Once he was in the moonlit air, he started to rant to the EL Camino about what a great night he just had. He couldn’t believe his luck. Somehow the most beautiful girl in his class, one who was probably considered way out of his league by some people, actually liked him. And he had been enough of a lady’s man to go on a date with her, and dance all night with her, and even make out with her in the car!

Eventually the car had to insert some of its opinion into the discourse. “…then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like I love you…,” Frank Sinatra crooned from the radio.

“Yeah,” Adam said,” you’re right. I better keep my feelings a little bit private. We were getting along so well when I thought I had no chance. I better not start acting like an excited kid again!”

Apparently Adam had retained a bit of his life lesson despite his current state of ecstasy. He took the car down for a landing and drove home to make a futile attempt at a good night’s sleep.

BOOK 3: The Enchanted El Camino Saves the Town – Chapter 2: Adam Learns a Lesson about Girls

At the age of sixteen pretty much every kid needs a lot of good advice and counseling. This was true for Adam as well. But unlike other sixteen year olds, he had more than his parents, peers and teachers for these needs. It turned out that through its unique way of communicating, the car gave Adam a lot of subtle help.

At Adam’s age there is nothing on some boy’s minds more than the charms of their female classmates. He knew that his brother Craig was the opposite way, and didn’t seem to even notice girls. But Adam had been somewhat obsessed with them as long as he could remember. Adam had never really had a girlfriend, at least not since he kissed a girl in the kindergarten playground when he was five. But he hoped desperately that would end soon.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t exactly smooth with the ladies at that point. He had always had friends who happened to be girls. He treated them exactly like his guy friends, and felt completely comfortable in their company. But the second he started having romantic feelings towards a girl, he became a blithering idiot. At least that is what he felt like. He would start putting on a show for them, and acting like a goofy kid. He didn’t have confidence in his abilities to attract, since he didn’t have any success stories to prove to himself that girls could like him. So, he would try to act like what his stereotypical image of a cool guy was. Since this was an image that kept changing in his imagination, he wound up acting like a phony. At least that is what his buddy’s cute cousin from Los Angeles said after spending an evening with Adam.

As was his habit, Adam would sometimes confess his frustration to the El Camino during their early morning flights. He tried not to talk to the car most of the time when they were on the ground. He felt like if anyone saw him, at best they would think he was talking to himself and crazy, at worst they might suspect there was something different about his car. But when they were out of sight up in the air, Adam felt free to sit speaking with the dashboard radio of the car, not worried at all about how weird it might look.

After the incident with the Los Angeles cousin, Adam was feeling especially low. He said to the car that he didn’t understand why he had to act like that. He knew that he was as worthy as any other sixteen year old boy. But some deep insecurity caused him to act fake.

“…there was nothing needed…” “…be all that you…” “…look inside yourself and see…” “…the confident game plan achieved the desired results…,” were snippets of music and news broadcasts that the El Camino tried to use to provide some advice.

Adam heard and understood what the car was saying that day. But he continued having a hard time not acting like a poseur in potentially romantic situations. He was feeling particularly low about this after he wound up sitting next to Robin Hilly at lunch one day at school. Since their small preparatory school didn’t have a cafeteria and offer lunch, everyone either brought a bag lunch, or the ones with cars were allowed to drive to the nearby fast food restaurants.

That particular day, Adam had a bag lunch with some leftover fried chicken. He sat on a log bench in the cozy quadrangle courtyard in the middle of the school buildings and started eating, when Robin asked if she could sit on the bench with him. This wasn’t an unusual occurrence since there were only a few benches so everyone shared. But this time Adam wound up taking a second look at Robin and noticed that she was looking very pretty that day.

He had known her for a couple of years, although they didn’t travel in the same group of friends. But all of a sudden he wanted to get to know her better. He decided to start up a conversation with her. “You know our basketball team is going to dominate this year, right? I’m going to be the captain.”

This was obviously bragging, and if Robin wasn’t interested she would have just said something like, “Awesome for you”, and gone back to ignoring him. But this time Adam was happy to discover that she seemed to want to talk to him, even if it was only about his awesome basketball skills.

Robin said, “Wow. That’s pretty cool. I watched you play last year, and you got better and better with each game.”

Adam was set up about as well as he could have been for charming her, but he felt himself retreating into his fake girl impressing personality.

“Yeah, I’m going to break all the scoring records, and be most valuable player. And then I can play college ball at the University of New Mexico, and hopefully go pro. I’m going to be rich and famous!” he started going on about his dreams, since Robin was apparently impressed by his basketball skills.

Adam was lucky that a couple of Robin’s friends came up and asked if they could sit with them before he could continue for too long, He didn’t have much of a chance to talk to Robin more, and act like more of an idiot. One thing was sure though, the seeds of a major crush had been planted, and at this rate a tree would soon sprout up.

As he drove home that night he asked his El Camino, “Can you play one of those romantic songs I like so much like Eric Clapton’s Bellbottom Blues, or The Yardbird’s Beck’s Bolero?”

There were a handful of songs that Adam considered his good luck songs. They were songs that maybe he had heard driving home late from a party on the car radio, or that some older kid had played for him on their record player. Everyone has songs that pluck their heart strings and touch their emotions. By now the El Camino was well aware of which ones were Adam’s.

“Oh, El Camino, I can hardly describe how beautiful she is,” he started telling the car, even though it was against his rule about talking to it when they weren’t flying. “She has this dark curly hair, a beautiful little button nose, freckles, and the most beautiful smile.”

Adam was too shy to talk about some of the more intimate details, but he told the El Camino about watching her walk in the quad during one of his biology classes a couple of days before. He had been particularly charmed by how she looked in the tight white jeans and button up shirt she had been wearing. Adam was still somewhat amazed at his good luck that a girl like Robin would even notice him.

“…stop, in the name of love…” “…communication is not recommended…,” the El Camino interrupted his radio play list after a few minutes of Adam’s gushing.

The car seemed concerned about being detected by other people with Adam ranting that way. And it seemed concerned about Adam getting all worked up about a girl again, and ironically, instead of acting like himself, becoming a bragging poseur who drove girls away.

Adam was smart enough to snap out of his self-absorbed trance after getting this warning, and at least keep his mouth shut for most of the drive. He did sing along with Layla by Derek and the Dominos at the top of his lungs, but that was more or less normal behavior for a sixteen year old boy in his first car.

When they had pulled into the garage, the El Camino gave Adam his last piece of advice, “…by employing their intellects, primitive people were able to rise above their animal instincts.” The car had found a very useful interview program on anthropology that happened to be playing at the right moment.

Adam had received a hardback book with blank pages for his birthday from his aunt in New York earlier that year. He decided it was time to start a journal. If he couldn’t tell anyone about what was going on in his life, at least he could tell himself. Maybe when he got old, his future self would enjoy remembering these tumultuous times. That evening he wrote two and a half pages of descriptions of his beloved. He exhausted all his crush induced energy by trying to write like a real author and putting into words the image that he had of Robin the Magnificent. To say that he was putting her on a pedestal would be quite the understatement. Her pedestal was growing tall so quickly that it would soon be a danger to all the satellites that were just starting to be sent into space in those days.

Happily for Adam, luck was again on his side that week. Robin’s biology class took a field trip the next couple of days, which were Thursday and Friday. So, Adam didn’t see her for four days. During that time he had a lot of opportunity to think about his chances of actually dating a girl like Robin. Although he had learned to be very confident about certain of his own talents and intelligence, he really couldn’t judge his skills with the ladies, since he had never been able to put them to the test. He spent a difficult few days obsessing over the issue.

“Adam, you seem a little low energy this weekend. Are you feeling okay?” his mom asked during their early Saturday evening family dinner. “I hear a lot of kids are getting mono this year.”

“I would have to have actually kissed a girl to get the kissing disease,” Adam said, letting his emotions show more than he would have preferred.

“What’s that?” his dad asked, remembering similar feelings in his own past. “It sounds to me like there is a particular girl you would like to kiss. What’s the story, Casanova?”

That got Adam started, “Oh, it’s nothing. There is this girl, Robin, who is awesome. She is completely beautiful, and funny, and smart, and she is really nice, and everybody likes her, and…The problem is that I think she is just out of my league. And I’m afraid I will act like an idiot like I always do with girls.”

“That doesn’t sound like nothing to me,” his mom wisecracked, which made Craig laugh until he noticed that he was the only one. Then he began to just look disgusted by the whole thing.

Their dad was gentler. “I don’t see any reason why a girl like that is out of your league. Have you spoken to her at least?”

“She sat with me at lunch the other day, and we talked for a little while. But I started talking about how awesome I am at basketball. And I never let her talk. And then her friends came, and I made an idiot out of myself,” Adam truthfully explained.

There was no way his parents could make him feel differently about the whole thing, although they tried. Adam spent Sunday reconciling himself with the fact that there was no hope. He decided that if he just pretended nothing had happened, and that he hadn’t gotten a huge crush on her, maybe he could still be her friend. If he couldn’t go out with her, at least he was lucky enough to be able to hang out with her.

Adam woke up even more resigned to this strategy on Monday morning. He took the El Camino for an air born spin bright and early. He was more silent than he had been for the last several flights. He was practicing being brave in the face of emotional pain, since he knew that Robin would be back in school that morning, and that he would begin suppressing his romantic feelings in the interest of friendship.

He was in the air right as the sun peeked out from below the eastern mountains. The sky changed rapidly from bright orange to pale blue, as the land in the foothills woke up from nighttime darkness to bright earth tones of light red brown dirt, dotted with the green spots of the Piñon trees. Meanwhile the forested mountains remained dark, but started to reveal a deep blue color that would turn into green by the late morning. He might have a swollen heart, but he was in a setting that could heal almost any pain.

To Adam’s surprise, he found it much easier to ignore his romantic feelings than he had feared, simply because he did enjoy his time hanging out around Robin and her friends in a non-threatening situation. Anytime that he felt himself getting frisky feelings about her, he managed to keep them to himself. If he happened to catch a glimpse of the way she turned her head when she heard her name, or notice the way her voice cracked when she was excited about something, he managed to keep focused on being friendly. He had experienced enough doomed crushes by that point to have finally developed a way of putting those thoughts to the side if he was convinced that they would never be returned. And he was absolutely convinced that his romantic feelings for Robin were not returned. She was simply “out of his league”.

The lesson that Adam took out of this experience is an important one that he remembered for the rest of his life. It is almost as if the universe takes a certain joy in showing us how little we know about its true nature. The more humans become convinced about something, the more the universe likes to throw us a curve ball and show us the opposite is true.

In Adam’s case, there were reasons to explain why his lack of expectations caused things to work out unexpectedly. Since he did act like himself, and was comfortable around Robin and her friends, she began to feel comfortable around him. Her friends even began to make comments to Robin about how cute the two of them were together. Ironically, when Adam showed that he had no intention of forcing things, Robin began to wonder if he even thought about her romantically. There is a saying about how one only chases that which is running away which describes the effect that Adam’s lack of pursuit had on Robin. She began to have doubts about her own charms, and she wanted Adam to prove them wrong.

Luckily for both of them, there was a social institution which allowed them to move beyond their respective insecurities, and to take the next step towards getting involved romantically. This institution is known as the Sadie Hawkins dance. It’s based on a classic comic strip, Lil’ Abner, which appeared in all the newspapers at the time. In the rural hillbilly world the characters lived in, there was one day a week when the women folk could go hunting for a husband to get hitched to. If they caught a man, he was theirs, and the men ran for their lives. This translates in the case of a Sadie Hawkins dance to mean that the girls are supposed to invite the boys, instead of vice versa, as has long been the tradition.

In the case of Adam and Robin, their Sadie Hawkins dance was scheduled for the next weekend. Adam had never been to a dance with a date, but he enjoyed music and dancing, so he had been to almost all the dances at the school anyway. He was planning on going to this one with some of his buddies from the basketball team. But, little did he know, Robin had other plans.

He was just about to sit on a bench for lunch, when he heard Robin call to him, “Hey Adam, come sit over here.” She patted the spot next to her on the bench she was sitting at.

When he went over and sat the two friends she was also sitting with both said that they had to go check on something with another girl. They got up and left Robin and Adam sitting alone.

“So, I was kind of wondering if you were going to the Sadie Hawkins dance with anyone,” Robin started in immediately. She probably already knew he wasn’t, since it was a small school and all the girls discussed things like this with each other. But it was a way to start the conversation, and Robin wanted to get to the point.

“I was planning on going with Tommy and Joe. Nobody ever asks me to those things, so I am just going with the guys. Who did you ask?” Adam really had convinced himself that there wasn’t any chance of anything happening between the two of them, so he assumed she had asked someone already.

“Well, I haven’t asked anyone. There is only one guy in school I am interested in, but I don’t know if he is interested in me,” Robin said coyly.

She was still trying to decide if Adam was playing it cool, or if he really wasn’t feeling the same way about her as she did about him. She had seen him get flustered and start acting kind of weird around attractive girls before. He had acted that way with her just a week ago when she first tried to show him that she was interested by sitting on the bench with him. But, he seemed to have calmed down this week, so maybe he just didn’t think of her that way.

But there was no sense hinting around and not just getting to the bottom of what he really was feeling. “So, can you guess who the one guy is that I want to ask?” she pressed on.

Adam thought for a few seconds, even though the subject brought him some pain and jealousy. “I don’t know, probably Will Thompson, or Randy Small.” He threw out the names of a couple of upper classmen who had a reputation with the ladies.

“No, you jerk. I kind of wanted to ask you to the dance. But it sounds like you aren’t really interested,” she finally admitted.

“Yeah right. Are you doing this because one of your friends dared you to? Are you guys pranking me?” Adam asked, not believing her yet.

Robin was starting to feel like her emotions were exposed a little more than she liked, and she was a little hurt that he didn’t take her seriously.

“Okay, well I was going to ask, but it seems like you are trying not to take it seriously, so if you don’t want to go with me, I will stop bothering you,” she said as she started to get up from the bench.

“Wait, are you saying that you really want to ask me to the dance?” A glimmer of understanding was finally reaching Adam’s brain.

“Well, I was going to, but it sounds like you aren’t interested,” Robin said quietly back to him.

“Wait, sit down, sit down,” Adam insisted. “If you really want to go with me, there is nothing in the world I would rather do. I just didn’t think that you would want to go with me. I really thought you would prefer to go with Tommy or Joe.”

Robin had sat back down on the bench by now. She asked, “Why would I want to go with one of those show offs? Those two guys think they are god’s gift to the female half of the species. I can’t even talk to them. But, I can talk to you. And you are really nice most of the time, although right now I am starting to feel differently about that.”

“Wow. That is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me. I would love to go to the dance with you, if you still want to. And I can drive. I think you will love riding in my El Camino.” Adam tried to make sure she understood how happy her invitation had made him, without giving away too much of his game.

BOOK 3: The Enchanted El Camino Saves the Town – Chapter 1: Adam and the El Camino Get Acquainted

As strange as it seems, life went on in a more or less ordinary way for a teenager Adam’s age for the next few weeks. The main difference was that he developed a routine that allowed him to explore his El Camino’s abilities, while keeping them a complete secret from everyone else. He drove everyday to school, and even started giving other kids rides now and then. After the shock of seeing the unusual car in the parking lot, the other kids all seemed to have decided Adam was a cool guy now. Luckily, Adam had been uncool for long enough to know that being cool was only as good as long as you remained that way. He was always nice to other kids who hadn’t climbed as far up the social ladder, simply because he remembered what it was like at the bottom. Adam had also been lucky to be exposed to other cultures from birth. He knew what it was like to not be in the majority as far as ethnic background and culture, thanks to the mix of peoples he grew up with in Tesuque. All this meant that he was developing into a very admirable young man who respected his peers.

But, this young paradigm of maturity did still have his secret life. Every couple of nights he would set his alarm clock for 4:30 AM. He made up a story about how he was doing some early morning running to keep in shape. He would dress in his work out clothes, and take his El Camino out to go to the athletic track at the northern city limits of Santa Fe. At least that is what he told everyone.

What he in fact did was drive up to the slopes of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. He knew some logging roads that didn’t see any cars for days, and that were shielded by trees in all directions. He found one particular road he could take that was covered by tree branches until a big meadow opened up that overlooked Tesuque below, with its two meandering streams. In the distance you could see Santa Fe, with smoke rising out its chimneys from wood burning stoves being lit up in the morning. In the background to the south, Sandia Mountain would be lit up from behind by the morning sun. It would look dark and menacing on its western slope, comprised of steep granite cliffs. When he accelerated at the end of the tunnel through the trees, he would push the accelerator pedal the extra notch at just the right moment. The car would be propelled up into this beautiful scene just as they hit the opening in the branches of the meadow.

He made sure to fly high enough up so that nobody would think they were seeing a car any time he was over homes or the city. This meant that he got to know the terrain of Northern New Mexico very well from the sky. He bought a map of the state, and he would amuse himself at night before he fell asleep by finding areas to fly over the next day. He would mark his route on the map, and then attempt to follow it the next morning during his flight. He made additional notes on the map based on his observations.

But he only allowed himself an hour of true flight time per day, although this was sometimes a difficult rule to enforce. He knew that he didn’t want to be in the air when people started waking up, so he disciplined himself to be safe. Thanks to these precautions, he managed to enjoy his amazing vehicle without anyone noticing for the time being.

Since the El Camino had already shown that it had hidden talents, Adam had asked it several times what other abilities it had. All he had received in the way of an answer was a snippet of a news broadcast, “…only time will reveal the true nature…”

As time went on, Adam discovered that the car seemed to have moods when it didn’t communicate at all. Adam continued to talk to it one way or the other, sometimes in the same way that humans have been talking to their tools for all of history, not expecting an answer. He got used to the fact that he couldn’t always expect a dialogue.

Once the El Camino sensed that it had made its point about having the option to remain silent, it started playing the radio for Adam so that he would have a nice soundtrack for his drives and flights. The car seemed to know Adam’s taste in music. The radio would skip from station to station, providing the perfect DJ mix for Adam’s musical needs. Adam would tell the car any time it didn’t choose correctly, which helped to inform the car’s choices, so the two were soon in perfect alignment. This was an ability that Adam wouldn’t have been able to imagine his car having if he hadn’t experienced it himself.

As far as Craig and Samwise go, even with the punishment Craig endured, they were both spending happy days getting to know each other. The day after almost burning down the house, Craig tried to build a new cage for Samwise next to his bed. He made sure it was nice and cozy with the light and heating pad. Craig knew enough not to put anything near the electronics that might catch fire now.

But when he tried to introduce Samwise to his new home, the iguana started thrashing its tail around and struggling in a way that it never had before. It made it perfectly clear that it did not like the new home Craig had prepared. In the end, Craig had to try moving the cage back to the garage. Once he did this, Samewise once again became loving and docile. He practically scampered into the new cage that Craig had put together for him in the old location. Apparently there was something about the garage that really made him feel at home.

Adam was able to discover what that something was a few mornings later. He had decided to take an especially early flight with the El Camino that day, so he got up yawning at 4:00 AM. He tiptoed to the garage, but he heard something right before he opened the door. He heard the distinct sound of baroque classical music coming from inside the garage. He assumed it was the radio that Craig had been leaving for Samwise to listen to. But then he remembered that Craig had taken it to his room when he tried to move Samwise there, and he had left it on his desk.

When Adam put his hand on the door knob the music suddenly went silent. Samwise’s cage was placed much more in the open now to avoid starting fires, so Adam could see the lizard when he opened the door. It was laying near the heating pad on the side closest to the El Camino. It had a look of a baby in its mother’s arms as it gazed through half closed eyes at the car. Adam started to suspect that he wasn’t the only friend that the El Camino had made since it was put back together. And now the mystery of why Samwise refused to live anywhere but in the garage was explained as well. But Adam couldn’t tell Craig, since that would reveal his car’s talents, so he let his younger brother contemplate the mystery. He decided that an added benefit was that this would keep Craig’s mind occupied, and hopefully out of trouble.

With this discovery Adam thought he had seen the limits of the car’s special abilities. Already he couldn’t believe the ones the car had, so it was normal that he wouldn’t imagine other ones. But what proved to be one of the car’s most amazing talents was revealed slowly as the boy and car spent the next few weeks together.