My story, an urban fantasy set in mid-fall of 1998, has three main plotlines. One of them involves a young man named Jordan Masters who, while driving through the middle of nowhere at night, accidentally runs over a child. The child had been traveling with her mother when their car broke down and, not understanding how long it takes cars to stop, naively ran out into the middle of the street to try to signal Jordan to help. He couldn't stop in time and crashed straight into the little girl, killing her. The mother, who as it turns out is a powerful magic user, blames Jordan for the accident, and uses her powers to magically strike Jordan permanently blind. Then she takes his car and drives off, leaving him to die stumbling blindly through the middle of nowhere, or so she thinks. Reality has other plans, but that's another story. One of the places I'm considering this happening in is the Mojave Desert in California. But I don't live anywhere near there, and thus have very little information about the roads through that desert and why people use them. Can somebody give me a hand coming up with believable reasons why somebody who lives in California would be driving through the Mojave Desert on the night before Halloween in 1998?
Night sky photography: meteor storm, good view of Mars, blood moon - somewhere probably even lists what was visible each day
...Oh damn, imagine wanting to get a nice view of the stars, and then someone makes it so you can never see them again.
He works for a windfarm and there's a problem with one of the windmills. It's got to be something on the ground so that you don't need a team hoisted up there . . . Maybe a communications line is damaged and he's going out to look at it.
There aren't many roads out there, so any reason to get from point A to point B will suffice. Literally anything. You don't have a choice but to travel on the one road.
I grew up in the mountains west of the desert and we would certainly take back roads through the desert at late hours coming back from other places (like Big Bear or Arrowhead). Was faster than sticking to the highways. Depending on where in the desert you’re talking about there may be fewer roads and fewer reasons someone would be driving them in the middle of the night but there are certainly places where it is plausible to be on the road at all hours just going from one place to another.
The Mojave was between where I went to school and where my family lived; I traveled back and forth many times. I also once spent a week in the desert studying kangaroo rats and Mojave green rattlesnakes.
Amateur astronomy or astrophotography is a really good suggestion, especially given the irony you noted. How important is his reason for driving through the desert to the rest of your story?
As an aside, I was driving through the Mojave desert around 11 PM on Sunday. Mostly on the highway, but I was on a side road at one point and there wasn't much traffic on it. It was a shortcut from one highway to another.
My question, just out of curiosity—what are desert roads like? Are there gas stations and stores out there, or is it more like just go straight through, do not pass go, do not collect $200.00?
This. The answer as to why, of course, is because he needed to get somewhere. Is that somewhere important to the story? If not, it's superfluous detail.
When I lived in NH I had to drive through the mountains all the time. Why? They were between point A and point B, so unless you had a helicopter, treacherous mountain roads it was!
Ok if nobody else is going to do it... Why did the character cross the desert? To get to the other side. Seriously, he got a call that a loved one was in an accident or had a medical emergency. So he was distracted already while racing through the night to get there. Which helps explain how he could hit someone in the road, since it's pretty wide open country for the most part.
It doesn't have to be the Mojave. There are lots of lonely stretches of highways in the western states. Like Route 666 (since 1985, US 491) from Gallup NM to Monticello UT.
Back when I was in the army, I lived in the high desert. Lots of folks commuted to work from Tucson, maybe a hundred miles across the desert each way. They did lots of speeding, and clearly the morning drive was in the dark.
For me, it was because I liked the car that I was renting, and I was in Arizona to meet my friend. I drove at night because it's cooler at night. I'm not originally from Arizona and it was my first time driving in a desert. Out of curiosity, I drove out on the off-roads. It turned out to be a bad choice because the car got stuck on the sand. And I couldn't see far at night. Fortunately, the area turned out to be a popular off-road driving area. And it was only about 30 minutes away from the nearest town. I saw a jeep and a few SUVs nearby. I asked for help. The guy with the biggest SUV pulled my rental car out. I would've been stranded for a very long time if I was stuck in a more desolate area. I noticed more things about the desert when I got off the car. You can see a lot of stars. And I saw what seemed to be a bat fly over. On another night, I went to a lake not far from Mesa, Arizona. At a parking lot near the lake, I picked up a couple who got stranded when the man's pickup truck wouldn't start. I was kind of surprised when I saw them because the woman suddenly appeared from the darkness. After I let her in the car, her boyfriend ran out from the darkness and ran into the car. Apparently, the lake in the desert is also a convenient place for privacy and dating. But I guess this wouldn't be the motivation for your main character because he'd be driving alone, not going out on a date.
I've driven through the Mojave desert often. If you want to get from Bakersfield to Barstow, you pretty much have to use route 58 to get there. Lots of that road are still two-lane, but high-speed (because truckers like to use it), so I could easily see an accident scenario.
There could be any further story for driving through the desert at night. But for a story that goes on from there it could just be a mundane reason, such as to meet a deadline the next day in another city across the desert, which the driver must cross at night to make it.
I'd love to take a motorbike to a flat land of nothingness and make the engine scream a little. Although I'm not sure this is a good idea, especially in a desert.
