Towing, breakdowns, and the law on Arizona’s roads — from I-40 in winter to what’s legal when your car gets towed.
It’s dusk somewhere past Munds Park, the light’s gone flat and gray, and the dark shape on the shoulder you were half-watching stands up, turns out to be the size of a horse, and steps into your lane. Brake hard. Stay in your lane. Keep the wheel straight. Sometimes you can miss it, but sometimes…
You walk back to where you left it, and there’s just asphalt. No car. For half a second you wonder — did I move it, did somebody take it, am I finally losing it — and then you spot the little sign zip-tied to the light pole you breezed past on the way in, and…
You’ve seen it, if you’ve lived here through a July. The sky over the Peaks goes bruise-purple by early afternoon, the first fat drops smack the windshield, and twenty minutes later a stretch of road you drive every day has a sheet of brown water running across it — moving, carrying sticks and gravel, deeper…