There is little better way to express one’s independence in America than hitting the highway on a spontaneous road trip. The freedom of an unmarked calendar. The upheaval of the workweek routine. The chance to meet new and interesting people.

Except, of course, when those people are law enforcement officers who take a disliking to you.

Last week, I drove east from Los Angeles to southwestern Utah, looping north to the mountains in east-central Nevada before making the long trip back home. Well over 20 hours of driving in three days’ time. A testament to the whimsy of a solo adventurer hell-bent on seeing new land–and an old car as reliable as a Somali mule. And the perfect itinerary for an introvert looking to check off a couple unhiked trails.

During my 20+ hours of driving, roughly 15 of which outside of my home state of California, I experienced no less than 4 uncomfortable run-ins with police officers. Four times where I was singled out as being worth examination by local cops. Or in cinematic terms (and since we’re talking mostly desert territory, I believe this reference is appropriate) that’s one run-in with the law for each of four back-to-back screenings of a Lawrence of Arabia during a Peter O’Toole movie marathon. Precisely what I call “too much”.

So what does the Highway Patrol want with little old me? On the surface, I escape many of the unfortunately traditional rural American bugaboos that might get a person profiled. I am relatively clean-cut. I have no visible tattoos or piercings. My vehicle is an unassuming. I smile a lot. I’m white. And below the surface, I’m legitimately non-threatening: I have zero criminal record and barely any traffic violations on file, either. In fact, the one time I received a speeding ticket was in Pottawattamie County, Iowa. When the state trooper pulled me over and announced our location, I summed up my innocence with a childlike reaction. “Pottawattamie County!” I exclaimed. “Is that going to be a problem?” asked the cop. “Do you have a record here?” “No, sir,” I answered, surprised. “I just have this license plate collection at home, and my Iowa plate is from Pottawattamie County. It also reads ‘HOODRAT’…” The trooper offered no reaction. “It’s a vanity plate,” I said, shaking my head. But he wasn’t in the mood for lightheartedness. The ticket ran me $160.

State troopers just don’t seem to jive with me. This weekend was no different. I’ll take each encounter separately:

1) Entering a National Park

It was 11pm and I just noticed my phone had service as I was entering the park. Having been to the park once before, I am familiar with the shoddy service in the area. So seeing that this was a fairly important email concerning my recent film project, I pulled over at the next wide shoulder to provide a quick response. Fresh out of urban living, prioritizing emails is a given. Particularly when they’re attached to career advancement. Plus, I didn’t know when I’d have a connection again.

Halfway into my six-line response, a policeman pulled up next to me.

“Everything okay?”

I looked up from my phone, producing it before him as I explained, “Oh yes, officer. I just got service for a moment and wanted to respond to a message before I lose it again.”

“Well could ya drive up to the pull-out ahead? You’re sticking out in the middle of the road!”

I looked at the tires. My car was about 20% on the road. A two-lane street with a speed limit of 25 miles per hour. No one was on it.

“Yeah, sure,” I responded. “There’s a pull-out ahead?”

“Yeah,” he said, sighing, incredulous. “It’s fifty feet up.”

“Okay, great. Thank you.”

He shook his head and sped off, reaching well over the 25 miles per hour limit.

I obeyed and crept up to the pull-out. Not a single car passed.

2) Parked in the same National Park

Twenty minutes later, I was finishing up preparing the back of my truck for sleeping. It was a warm night, around 80 degrees, so I took my shirt off as I arranged a series of mats in the truck bed. I was exhausted, looking very much forward to sleeping in the open air, under nothing but a blanket of stars. Surely, I’d fall asleep as soon as I hit the pillow.

I was almost done preparing my bed when I noticed that there was only one other car in the lot. “That’s strange,” I thought. “I wonder if–”

Just then, a second, different police officer pulled into the lot, circling around and stopping in front of my truck. I stood up to meet him.

“Have you got a place to stay tonight?” he asked.

Having lived in southern California for three years now, I have begun to identify the nuances of passive-aggression much better. So I immediately interpreted his question as “You can’t sleep here.” I responded in kind.

“Actually, I’m still looking for one. Do you have any suggestions?”

I was pretty jazzed with my reply, especially considering I was nearly comatose with fatigue. The conversation went smoothly from there, with the officer politely offering knowledge of a BLM site ten miles east where I could sleep in my car, then he bid me adieu. I had to respect the way he handled the situation. True, the BLM site was back quite a ways in the direction I came, far out of his local jurisdiction. And, of course, the BLM land he referenced was indeed closed when I got there–ex post facto internet searches reveal that this BLM site has been shut down since 2009–so maybe he was just a little, um, late in getting the news. But despite the clear message of “Get out of my town, hobo,” the man was at least polite about the way he spoke to me. That counts for something.

After an hour of searching for a safe place to sleep, and seeing that local hotel options were booked, I found a side street where I could pull over and sleep in the cab of my truck for a few broken hours. Hardly the pinnacle of my tenure of frugal travel.

3) Caliente, Nevada

After conquering my chosen trail, I headed to off to Nevada mountains. It was another difficult night, this one spent in the thin air at 10,000 feet, braving intermittent thunderstorms of unrelenting intensity. But I pressed on, waking at 5:00am for a pseudo-alpine start. I was back to the truck by noon, having reached safely reached my intended peak.

It was at that point I decided to head back to the office. The brief spate of wildernessing had rejuvenated me, and I was ready to be home and work on my creative projects. Plus, I was tired. Butt tired. And the office seemed like the best place for a good night’s sleep. So I headed south.

Caliente, Nevada, is one of many speed-trap-towns along the seldom-traveled Highway 93. Entering the town, one’s speed drops precipitously from 75 miles per hour to 40, then quickly down to 25. Whether the purpose is to keep the cars moving at safe speeds for the residents, generate revenue from distracted motorists who miss the signs and end up ticketed, or slow folks down in hopes that they’ll stop in and spend their tourist dollars, I can’t be sure. But it sure is difficult maintaining that speed on the open road.

The town hooked me, though. Evidence of extreme poverty–windowless trailers with garbage-strewn lawns–were interspersed with well-manicured public lawns and new streetlamps. It was as if the town had received a single windfall of pork-barrel funding before being re-forgotten into obscurity. A strange place. And definitely photo-worthy. So I started snapping pictures. I mean, shit, I was only going 25 miles per hour. What else was I going to do?

A minute after snapping the above photo, a police officer in a marked Explorer began tailing me. So I put away the camera, sat attention at 10 and 2, and executed one of the most difficult maneuvers a suspect can accomplish: acting innocent despite being 100%, completely innocent.

It wasn’t until I reached the city limits, where the speed limit increased to 40mph, that the officer turned off the road. It was then that I realized that my California license plates might be calling attention to myself.

4) Stewart Brothers Ranch Road

It reads like the address of an apple orchard. Perhaps a Baptist preacher lives at the end of its pavement. Or maybe next month’s Klan rally is taking place out by Jeb Stewart’s gazebo. It’s hard for me to say. But Stewart Brothers Ranch Road (pictured below, intersecting with Highway 93) seems like anything but a hotbed of traffic and activity.

So when nature called on Hour Four of my ten-hour drive back to cheery Los Angeles, I found this to be a perfect spot to empty my bladder.

Highway 93 is desolate. There are but a few hamlets along its searing flanks, and even fewer gas stations. One could go an hour without finding a proper restroom facility, particularly one that wouldn’t produce a few raised eyebrows courtesy of an out-of-towner looking to use their toilet without doing some cash-related business as well. Understanding this matter of etiquette–that bathrooms are generally for paying customers only–I generally decline to relieve myself at an establishment unless I’m buying something. Peeing roadside seemed A-OK.

I didn’t seem to be the only one with this philosophy. Numerous vehicles could be seen parked at the side of the road, their inhabitants taking leave of their air-conditioned cocoons to fertilize the local landscape. So when the urge struck me, I pulled off to the side myself. It was at the corner of a minor side street, or perhaps a driveway. The little road was unidentified, marked with only a mailbox and a stop sign, but I would later identify it as Stewart Brothers Ranch Road. Not a soul was around. Checking for cars in either direction, I deemed it safe to saunter to the other side of my car and relieve myself short of a fence.

The situation reminded me of being in rural Haiti a couple of weeks prior, having to be reassured over and over again that I could urinate anywhere, from someone’s yard to a school building. They even laughed when I expressed my concern that I wanted to “respect” people’s property. “But you have to pee,” they’d say. What sensible logic! So here, seeing no signs of life, short of a blur of a car that had just passed in the opposite direction, I saw no harm in initiating my release. After all, I had to pee.

And I did. For a moment. Until I saw something out of the corner of my eye. It was the car that had just passed. And it was making a U-turn.

Stopping a piss mid-stream is hardly a pleasant experience. But it was a mild urge in the first place and the stakes seemed high. So I stopped, turning back towards my open passenger door to feign action. I hoped that in doing so the car would pass. Perhaps I was just being paranoid, having already had a few run-ins with the law over my brief foray into the sticks. But as I heard the tires screech to a halt, I knew that the jig was up. Turning to the flashing lights of the officer’s Expedition, I acted surprised and cocked my head with a smile as he strode towards me.

“Getting out for a stretch?”

I wasn’t falling for it. No tramp with a pulse is going to flat-out lie to a man of uniform in his jurisdiction of remoteness, where the rule of law is but a he-said, she-said affair. My response was measured.

“Yeah, that and this (indicating a water bottle I’d just grabbed as part of my activity-feigning) and using the bathroom; it’s been a long drive and–”

“–Wait, here? You were going to use the bathroom here?”

My reply had only part of the desired effect, but the cop was baited. Without lying, I didn’t admit either that he’d caught me in the act. And in babbling about the confusion of it all, I established a cloudiness of thought that suggested my intent was muddled as well. Was I pissing? I don’t know. There’s so much going on that, geez, who can tell what’s right or left? The officer, however, had clearly made his U-turn with a strong intent. And he wasn’t afraid of making that intent known. I’d have preferred to enable his reservation, letting me go just as the officer in Utah did. But instead he was incredulous.

“You mean to tell me you thought this was a good place to piss. Here? People coming to get the mail? A busy road? You couldn’t wait til you got to the gas station up the road?”

It was 5:30pm on a Saturday, hardly peak mail-picking time. No one was on the road. There were no signs of active human life whatsoever. And, never having been to the area, I couldn’t possibly have known there was a gas station ahead of me. You know, in the future.

“I’m sorry, officer. I didn’t realize there was a gas station nearby.”

“Where are you coming from? I mean, did you come up 93 or 375? ”

“Um, I don’t know what roads I’ve been on, but I’m coming from the national park…”

The picture was getting clearer for him. I was a tourist who came to see his state’s land and, ostensibly, bring my tourist money with me. Though this clarification was no cause for him to relent. He was pissed at something, and he was damn sure going to give me a lesson on etiquette because of it.

“Well didn’t you just pass through a town? Wasn’t there a gas station there?”

He was literally asking me. He was so angry, he didn’t himself seem to know. Maybe it was a long day for him, too.

“I don’t know,” I said. I kept mostly silent, allowing him to vent his frustration on… whatever.

This went on for probably three or four minutes, which is a long haul in cop-in-the-middle-of-nowhere-is-pissed-at-you time. His wraparound sunglasses remained on his face, below his balding, white head, the entire time. I could see my reflection as he babbled on about etiquette, my arms dangling calmly at my side, wondering how a man protecting the social order in the only state in the union where prostitution is legalized in rural brothels can lecture anyone on matters of propriety, and do so with a straight face. Or maybe that’s why he kept the glasses on.

After acknowledging once again that there is a gas station ahead (3 miles in my future, to be exact) the police officer began to wear down, seeing that I wasn’t going to either take his bait to argue with him or say anything nearly as trifling as he. It is then that he got to his thesis.

“Look,” he said. “I get it. It’s rural Nevada. There’s nothing around and you’ve gotta go. Fine. But not here. I don’t come to California and start pissing anywhere I want to.”

Ah, there it was. My California plates. I had been profiled without a single question about my background or character. A Californian pissing on the Stewart Brothers’ fence, representing to this man some kind of cultural invasion on behalf of a resident of the most hated state in the union. It’s a state that typifies excess and redefines self-involvement, a reputation so notorious for disrespect that rolling through a stop sign has come to be universally known as a “California stop”. Our state diverts water from their rivers and our residents snatch up Nevada property to avoid our taxes. To this police officer, I was just another aloof Californian stomping on his flowerbed because it was convenient for me.

Ironically, had he interviewed me for a minute, he’d have found out I’m not particularly crazy about the culture in my hometown, either. I’m hardly so black and white about the place, but I’m definitely critical. So he was berating me based on false identification of a symbol. What’s more is that his solution only perpetuated the problem. The average gas station toilet uses nearly 2 gallons of water with every flush, further exacerbating the waste laid on Nevada resources and “sensibilities” at the hands (or dick) of another pesky Sunshine Stater. The flaws in the man’s logic were substantial.

Perception is a funny thing. The same person who in one area is perceived as a degenerate loner might in another be seen as a well-heeled socialite elsewhere. Anyone coming into a situation does so with preconceived ideas of how she is going to manage that situation. The same goes for people. We represent different things to different people. The danger is when we make strong conclusions based on those perceptions and then act accordingly and inflexibly. It is in those moments when we risk offending others, treating them unjustly, or simply looking childish.

When you approach someone and you think you have an idea who they are based on their appearance, based on whatever category you place on them, there’s a chance that you’re wrong. A good chance. If you act on that judgment, you might end up looking like this police officer did. Unprofessional, out of control, and foolish. He should be embarrassed with himself. I was certainly embarrassed for him.

The moral? Treat others with respect, tread lightly in rural America, and don’t lecture others about social etiquette if you preside over the law in the land of legalized whoring.

Happy trails, partner.

– TOH