Read an excerpt from Chapter 7:

One item that endears about the American southwest that humdrum New England regrettably lacks, with its staid English name transfers—though you might get lucky with a native American-to-English hatchet job—is the occasional placename with ironic twist. Past half-way to I-40, once beyond Heber but two dozen miles to the desert east sits Snowflake. And back in Payson, where you’d need a dinner plate-sized Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass to find even the slightest clue of a blade of grass, we passed the turnoff for Green Valley Park. Now, with us cruising northeast on Route 377, or Dry Lake Road, we were heading straight for… Dry Lake.

Whether we passed undried waters as we skirted the starboard side of Dry Lake has since evaporated to time but at Holbrook we did take I-40 East. This soon led us through the Petrified Forest, where, on another occasion at some other time, I’d stopped at a souvenir shop on its outskirts and purchased a chunk of petrified wood. It seemed odd then that I could buy myself, with just a fistful of dollars, a rare Earth artifact, one perhaps rarer than diamonds. Yet for a few dollars more than a single Lincoln I was able to haul off a stone roughly 9” in length, which, millions of years ago, had been a tree branch. The small price I paid signaled that I hadn’t bought one of the tiny but more expensive polished pieces of petrified wood inside the shop—more expensive because these were sheltered and thus drew rents, and someone had polished them, which thus added wages. Instead, I picked from the migrant flotsam on a scrap table outside, as if miraculously formed ancient rock were no different than used toys or kitchen utensils at a flea market. For a time I held onto this rock until one day I decided its marginal utility hit zero. And at that, like any good American I simply discarded it. In fact, this final act may have occurred in the lead-up to my journey to El Paso, as if in some cosmological way I was completing a circle. But with Julio now aboard we’d make no souvenir-buying stop. For us, the Petrified Forest was nothing more than the midpoint between Holbrook and Chambers, our turnoff for Route 191.