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expressed our condolences, he thanked us politely. The minutes passed. No further warnings came. For a few moments, I considered asking him to let us out in the town of Lake lsabella on some pretext, but, stymied by my inability to think of a good excuse as well as, more damnably, by my own sense of politeness (the man was doing us a favor, after all), I said nothing.
    In retrospect, my own inertia staggers me. I knew what lay ahead: a twenty-mile stretch of unimproved canyon road running, at times, a full 150 feet above the Kern River. A road so narrow that the few cars that did take it would invariably stop at every turn and honk to make sure no one was approaching from the other direction. A road without walls or guardrails of any kind. I had taken it twice, years before, to save the four hours, and driven it, each time, at barely over walking speed.
    He stopped at the cattle guard where the canyon road began and turned half around over his right shoulder. He was smiling, but he looked as though he were about to cry. “Don’t forget those seat belts, kids,” he said, like a television announcer on the verge of a nervous breakdown. That same instant he stomped on the gas.
    Let me dispense with the rational right off: This was not, for example, a superb if reckless driver testing his skill, or some variety of local daredevil, intimately familiar with the landscape, out to terrify the college kids. This was something entirely different. This was a man in such pain that he no longer cared to live; a man calmly holding a revolver to his temple and, with four chambers empty, two to go, pulling the trigger. This was a man making a bet with God—or lunging at him. It’s quite possible that he himself had no idea why he had picked us up. In some essential way, we were beside the point.
    What followed was madness. We skidded blindly into turn after turn, fishtailed down the straights. Again and again we sideswiped the wall with a sickening screech of metal and bounced toward the edge. Once, twice, three times, I felt the right rear wheel begin to drop, felt the car begin to lighten, sickeningly, sensed the pull of the canyon air below us.
    So what did I think of, those thirty minutes or so? Nothing very original, I’m afraid. I remember realizing, with a mixture of rage and disbelief, that this was it. That my life, our life, was somehow, impossibly, over. I remember my mind racing, searching for options. Hit the crazy bastard? Unthinkable. There was no margin. We were over the margin already. Try to say something, calm him somehow? Impossible. He was elsewhere now. And I knew, as surely as I’ve ever known anything, that if I said even one word, he would turn around to look at me and simply turn the wheel into the empty air.
    I’ll confess that I did not believe we would live. I knew the road we were on. We had nearly gone over a half dozen times already, and there were sixteen or seventeen miles of curves still ahead. My wife, a genuinely brave woman, had buried her face in my shirt.
    But here’s the thing: although I knew we weren’t going to make it, my mind, divided against itself, stupidly refused to accept that fact. And so, never a religious man, I did the only thing I could: I willed that car to stay on the road. Irrational? Absurd? Of course. And yet that is what I did. As though it were possible. As though, like those sad individuals forever trying to bend spoons with their minds, I could simply force the physical world’s attention. As though reality were that malleable. And the mind that crude a weapon. I willed that car not to go over, to hold. I fought for every inch. Rigid with fear, I drove those twenty miles like a ghost inside his body, wrestling for the wheel, turning the skid, forcing us, again and again, back to the wall.
    But enough of that. We lived. When we emerged from the canyon, he slowed, and when I asked him, as soon as I was able to speak, to please let us out, he pulled over on the shoulder.