Stranded

Written from a hotel room in Tucson, Arizona on January 3ʳᵈ, 2026.

I began the day in northern Arizona, departing mid-morning to drop a few friends off at the airport in Phoenix. The trip there was uneventful, and yielded beautiful views of distant rain and rainbows as we drove westward into Flagstaff and south from there towards Phoenix. Being a Friday, and with time on my side, I decided to depart to the east on I-10 and take the southern route back to my Alabama home. A few hours into my drive, I decided to make a quick little detour in the outskirts of Tucson to Saguaro National Park for some photos since I have barely broken out my cameras at all on this trip.

Seven or eight years ago I spent a small amount of time in and around Tucson while I was in the military. The city appears to be spreading much akin to fast growing cities back home like Huntsville, Alabama, which I noticed because the particular exit towards Saguaro N.P. has been built up a good bit since my last visit. Further away from the interstate, some much needed roadwork was being performed (also much like Huntsville), but somehow a particularly small yet deep pothole on Houghton Road seemed to have eluded the road crews. It did not, however, elude my front driver's side tire. It imparted a lovely and violent jolt to my car which startled me a bit, but the steering seemed to be fine and I noticed no new noises or vibrations so I continued the last few miles to the park where I drove the loop and got some pictures of the surrounding cacti and mountains. At one of the stops on the loop, I just so happened to spot the pothole's new years gift to me: a large bulging zit on the sidewall of the tire that it came into contact with. I finished the loop and made a bee line to a tire store that I had spotted just off the interstate, as my appetite for risk when it comes to time-bombs at 80 MPH 1700 miles from home is relatively non-existent.

"I know I've got some tires to get you back on the road today," the clerk responded as he inspected the tire. I was thankful to hear it, but was not as enthused for his next sentence: "There are 19 cars ahead of you, so it'll probably be closer to 7 o'clock before we're able to wrap it up." Either he didn’t hear my appeal to expedite the work or he ignored it, but I didn't really have any other options so I swiped my card and $500 later (I decided to go ahead and also replace the matching passenger side tire as well), I found myself wandering around towards the one thing that can make any grieving, stranded, melodramatic man feel better: a Mexican restaurant.

I enjoyed a delicious (albeit average) fajita burrito and drowned the sorrows of my wallet in copious amounts of chips and salsa. With my hunger satiated, I paid and departed back to the tire store. Time did not pass me by in the slightest though, as I sat down in the lobby having only spent a measly 45 minutes of my three and a half hour wait indulging my penchant for Hispanic cuisine. I settled into a lobby chair and managed to spend another 45 minutes in John Green's Everything is Tuberculosis, which I was certain managed to knock two hours off of my wait in rubber-scented purgatory, but my watch quickly called the bluff of my internal clock. I turned around to spot my vehicle still sitting right where I left it, and a single tear escaped my eye. The clocks on the wall mocked me sixty times per minute, laying bare one of my greatest character flaws: impatience.

I suppose all things considered, I was far from being stranded. I could have, at any point, grabbed my keys, requested a refund, and taken my chances playing chicken with danger on I-10, but the sparsely populated stretch between Tucson and Houston (I wouldn't vacate my vehicle around El Paso for any sum of money) dictated reason and logic to my thought process.

As promised, by 7PM I finally had keys in hand and booked a room a little ways back into Tucson for the night, where I decided to spend some time writing about this small experience here. Just a simple journal post for me to make my problems feel a little less trivial than they really are, and an outlet to distract me from the noisy ice machine outside my door that currently belays my slumber.