The Three Wise Guys (Porthos, Athos, and Malcolm) were heading into the desert on Old Route 66, bound from Tucumcari to Las Vegas New Mexico. They stopped to gas up at the Sign of the Dinosaur Fillin' Station and Tastee Freeze just west of town, where the dilapidated adobe bungalows of the formerly prosperous Highway Souvenir and Holy Relic Merchants crumbled into broken walls and blistered wooden crucifixes, arroyos, then yucca, then grotesquely pink-flowering giant cacti which crouched in the landscape like transplanted specimens from some Martian Hothouse. The filling station was inhabited by a bitter Hispanic man who was absorbing a Ruch Limbaugh broadcast from a his transistor radio. When Athos payed for the gas, he got three dollars and 72 cents in change, plus a "Grand Old Buck" bearing the likeness of a smiling George W Mini-Me Bush and the motto "More Green Back to the Taxpayer".

The Trio left the station and climbed into the waiting red '63 Galaxie Convertible, the one with Seeking Enlightenment emblazoned on the Driver's side fender, and Open to Redemption on the Passenger's. These Wise Men were indeed following a star, the Golden One called Sol, who hurled his might against the parched ground of New Mexico,blasting mesquite bushes into gray skeletal forms, cracking ancient lava flows with hot currents of air,sucking cellular moisture from leaning shacks of long departed homesteaders until timbers tumbled, light as balsa, to the earth. Beyond three twisted strands of rusty barbed wire, the clarion call came: "OOOOOooommmmmm". And three wise heads turned to see the Buddhist Cow bellowing praise to the unnameable.

Malcolm turned and attested "a good omen. We are well on our way to enlightenment", but he was again wrong. In truth, they were only on their way to three Tecates and three plates of enchiladas in a cafe in Santa Rosa, leaving Enlightenment to crop the lush grass in a verdant field 82 miles behind them.