On a warm evening in early June, Loretta Johnson pointed her white Chevy Silverado with a Navajo blanket-patterned steering wheel cover south on the main road leading out of Shiprock, New Mexico, and hit the accelerator — lightly.
The retired nurse drove herself and a friend on the plumb-straight road and weaved stories as mile-wide dust storms tumbled across a landscape that inspired the Road Runner cartoons. And as the stories picked up in her rolling cadence, the speedometer ticked down. She was on a mission and she tackled it at her own pace, so the occasional driver on the road pulled around and passed her with no honking or lights flashing.
