We were headed to Phoenix, but had some half-cocked idea that that trip would be better if we made a detour to find the exact spot where Travis Walton was abducted by aliens in Fire in the Sky. From Holbrook, it’s about an hour and a half southwest, running out the last of the Painted Desert until the flats give way to the savannah of piñon junipers and ponderosa pines that grow along the narrow edge of the Colorado Plateau. I met @rocknrollranch in the parking lot of the Wigwam Motel. He had come in from Wyoming and I drove from a forgettable assignment somewhere nearby. It was there that we first saw Barbra Streisand’s RV. BJS, her initials, were monogrammed on the doors of a late 80s camper that was parked outside of the motel’s registration office underneath a streetlamp. I don’t recall how the conversation began but its driver told us that he had just purchased the vehicle in California from among Streisand’s depreciated holdings and was en route to an intermediary state where lowered emissions standards would allow him to get tags for it. According to the driver, Streisand was no fan of public toilets. She had purchased the RV to serve as a highway-ready shitter, a loo that could be kept to her standards at all times during her tours. Everything was as she left it –except for the toilet, he explained. She had it removed prior to the sale to prevent it from becoming an eBayable artifact (or something like that). Chris filmed and I chuckled along as the man pulled open the door to the RV to show us what he meant: the interior was pristine except for the void over the gaping abyss of a toilet flange above which there was no toilet.
We thanked the man for his story and Chris asked if he could take a souvenir. The man opened a cabinet and offered up a roll of paper towels from what he called “the Don Johnson era.” He authenticated the towels with his signature and we departed into the night, headed south along the escaping heat waves of the Painted Desert in search of the aliens that, in retrospect, we had already just met.