dispatchesfromkansas

Return to the center place

Prologue

The road to Chetro Ketl

In most ways, the road to Chetro Ketl and back began on a Friday afternoon in mid-summer. 

Lori walked in from work, took a long look at me and asked, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. 

“You crashing?”

“No.” 

I lied. I was standing on the brink of an unimaginably vast black hole and my footing was none too steady. Nor, as is the case with these things, was I sure I wouldn’t rather just tip forward and fall in. 

A marriage is made of honesty and openness but I’m still trying to figure out what my mind is doing. If I don’t understand, how can I explain to someone else? The last thing I want is my wife worrying about my mental state.

As I worry.

Not ten minutes before I’d been washing dishes, hands deep in sudsy water, when the walls disappeared and a clear-running stream appeared at my feet and I heard the sound of it rushing over its gravel bed, and the air was crisp and clean and snowy mountains rose up in the near distance and about me a cluster of sunwashed wooden structures. I recognized Fairplay, a rustic town in the middle of an extended ovoid bowl of grass called South Park. My eyes held the long sweep of meadowlands, saw sunlight reflecting off the South Platte River, the stony peaks of the Mosquito Range snagging the clouds. I felt free as a bird, severed from bonds I’d only suspected. And then as suddenly as if a door slammed in my face it was gone, and I was back in our little kitchen in Blue Rapids. 

I couldn’t breathe. My hands shook violently. I sagged against the counter, closed my eyes, gripped the rim of the sink and held on tight. 

The stream still echoed in my ear. “Come back,” I begged. What remained was a mirage, there but not, translucent, fading even as I struggled to hold onto it.

By the time Lori walked in it was like nothing had happened. But something had. I had gone and returned in the blink of an eye, not a chance memory but a bodily visitation, but why or how were questions not all the angels in heaven could answer.

***

The itinerary was three pages, handwritten in pencil by Chod Hedinger, Lori’s distant cousin. When it came in the mail I glanced over it and set it aside. There’d be more time for planning as the time approached. The end of October seemed as distant as the moon.

For weeks I mulled over my visitation, looking for reasons or meanings, and the deeper I searched the more bitter I became. Before moving here I told Lori that I needed to see the mountains at least once a year, and now it was going on three barren years and I was feeling thin and stretched out. Which might account for what happened, but why so vividly?

One afternoon, when darkness settled over me, I walked to Mr. Bun’s cairn and slipped into the trees where I could not be seen, and I berated myself long and harsh over being so weak. I thought of South Park, and of the time I slipped into waist-deep water at the head of Antero Reservoir and cast to fat trout that ignored my fly, and the recollection was a metaphor for everything that failed me. Savagely, I cursed the memory and myself.

The truth is, I never had any of it. Only a short section of serpentine stream that I shared with cows. The mountains belonged to the citizens of the United States, the meadows to the ranchers, the road was long, the traffic fierce, the view heartbreaking, and nearly all of it inaccessible. Every trip there ended in some sort of frustration, whether from fishing or not finding the right camping spot or simply not knowing which way to go. I wanted it all and ended up with nothing but a handful of bad memories. For my mind to whisk me there was senseless and cruel. I hated it. 

***

There is no darkness so deep that light cannot pierce, and slowly, slowly, it filtered through.

I ended up with nothing. The statement was patently false. I have an Orvis medal for the one that didn’t get away—the largest trout I ever caught, and that on a stream so narrow my nine-foot flyrod could touch both banks. What’s the worth of that? Of fishing the small feeder streams, of teaching Joel to fly-fish in Tarryall Creek, the bright brook trout, the ice cold water, the alpine flowers on the slopes of Mt. Sherman, and Lori’s 35th birthday wish to bag a fourteener, when Joel got high altitude sickness and Lori lost her footing and cascaded down a snowfield. The time a friend and I photographed the abandoned mines above timberline and the wildflowers blooming along the tiny rivulets dripping down from the snowpack—does that mean nothing? 

When I was more or less myself again, I took out the itinerary and set it beside a map. With a finger I traced the route from Blue Rapids to the red rock canyons of southeastern Colorado, familiar territory, across northern New Mexico and into the Four Corners area, home to the Dineh, where scattered ruins were not just cities but astronomical observatories aligned with solar solstices and lunar standstills, back into Colorado and over Wolf Creek Pass and past Antero Reservoir where the trout snubbed me, and on down to the prairie and homeward. It was not, to my surprise, just desert and Anasazi ruins I would see, but the mountains of memory.

With tears blinding me, I began adding to the itinerary. I started lists of things to take, and things to do, and things to find, which would be the biggest challenge. And then I went off on a tangent. The road to Chetro Ketl begins here, I wrote. I am going on a long trip. I will walk in beauty.

Beginnings and the flow of time (Part 1)

Time is linear; memories are not. 

Photographs can be, when viewed in the sequence they were taken. But that, too, is not assured. The eye, like the mind, roams wild as the pronghorns west of Sharon Springs, and as light-footed. When I open the folder on my computer where I store digital photos, I’m offered a choice of dates. If I click on the first day of our trip, a Friday, I see one image, that of Chod Hedinger walking along the shoulder of I-70 west of Junction City to retrieve a lid blown off a plastic tub. But when I click on the second day, several dozen images are available, and my eye grazes those with the most color, contrast and resonance. The regulated flow of time becomes like a braided creek. Which is the main channel? It doesn’t matter. Each rivulet is a part and a whole. So, too, our memories and our stories.

But every tale does have a beginning, or several beginnings, and if I had to choose one this would be it: We headed west, me looking for familiar territory and a canyon haunted with more questions than answers, Chod for photographs, new birds and new country, and Jim Mayhew for all the above and more. Jim, the incidental shaman. Shaman says, This rock fell from the sky. It’s a message from the gods. This is what we must do. Jim holds up an ordinary stone like the millions of others that have fallen from the cliffs, and flips it over. The cynic, half-listening while stuffing his tent into its carry sack, takes one look and freezes. Everything he knows or thought he knows suddenly moot.

There—I’ve already lost my place. This might be more difficult than I thought.

When does the beginning begin? When a plan is first conceived or proposed, or when action transforms an idea into reality? I can’t be certain; there’s that stone to consider. For months we three had a plan, an itinerary, shifting, fluid, as meticulous and uncertain as words on paper can be, and as inconsequential. And until the last moment, when I locked the door and stepped into a warm morning, the trip didn’t seem real. It was as if I’d been playing a sort of make-believe, or wishful thinking, and beneath the barely-realized imagery was the idea that I wasn’t really going at all, not because of the lateness of the timing or that I’d agreed to take my first vacation in three years without Lori along, but because I wasn’t worthy of going. That the horizons of my new life were encompassed with work and more work, that work was all that was allowed to me. And then I rubbed Sheba for the last time, shut the door and drove away.

That, too, was a beginning. Maybe the real one, or a side channel, it’s hard to tell from my perspective at the conclusion. Or the beginning. Shaman says…At any rate, it’s what the eye settles upon.

The mid-morning sun slanted through the clouds and burned the transmission poles outside Waterville into a long, graceful curve of bone-white crosses, and between them the grain elevator stark against a dark cloud mass to the west. Lori’s car in the parking lot at Travalong drove home the point of my departure in a way nothing else possibly could. And then I was past, nosing the truck into the autumnal flight pattern of migratory birds, and everything that was to be was before me, and everything I loved behind. 

In Manhattan I transferred my packs to Chod’s truck. While en route to Abilene to pick up Jim I thought of the relief that accompanies the end of packing, when the last zipper is tugged shut and the luggage is hauled out to the car. A second stage in the journey has begun. Lists can be checked and rechecked but there’s no turning back, and anything missing will have to be dealt with later or done without. Where we were headed, the ancestral grounds of the Anasazi, it would be without. 

But that was just a prelude. The start of our journey actually began when we three came together. Jim loaded his things into the truck, space suddenly becoming more constricted. Chod drove, with me in the copilot seat and Jim in back. I had a pen and notebook handy, and my camera. Chod explained that whenever we stopped for gas the copilot would move to the driver’s seat, and the driver to the back. That would put me driving into Cottonwood Canyon, which was good because I was the only one who’d been there and maps of that region were all but useless. Actually, they were useless, for not even the DeLorme Atlas & Gazetteer showed the canyon. We were falling off the face of the known earth. But that was tomorrow. 

Today was Kansas. The route of I-70 was so level I reluctantly admitted that parts of the state really were “flat, boring and ugly.” In Oakley we stopped to stretch our legs, buy water and snacks, and check that everything in back was tightened down. Clouds darkened the northwest. We left the interstate and fled before the storm.

That, too, was a beginning. There is one other that comes to mind, many miles back, the sun just clearing the trees. 

Lori said, “It’s always harder on the person left behind.” After a moment she added, “I’ve always been the one who left. This is going to be hard.”

“You’ll be fine,” I said. 

She was in my arms and so warm, and then she was gone. I sat on the floor with Sheba curled against me and rubbed her into a furry state of bliss. Then I kissed her on her nose, went out and locked the door behind me.

Anatomy of a journey: settling in for the long haul (Part 2)

This is the part I always forget about long-distance travel: the bonedeep weariness, the unrelenting boredom, the sense that time has slowed to a crawl. If the landscape had some defining feature it would be easier, but out here past Sharon Springs, Kansas, there’s nothing. It’s not flat, boring and ugly, it’s just flat and boring. A distant cow is the tallest thing around. If not for the clouds swallowing the blue sky I’d be tempted to believe we were going in circles. Same cow, same fencepost, same abandoned ruin, same prairie dog. The odometer claims we’re moving, but I’m hard pressed to believe it.  

“I’d hate to spend a winter here,” Chod says. 

“Or a summer,” Jim adds.

Or a spring or autumn. One would have to love the land to make a home here, to see something other than utter desolation in fields plowed to the horizon, or close-cropped by hungry ungulates. Not that there’s much grass to eat. Or anything else for that matter. Out here it’s all sky and wind and little else. It takes a certain breed of person to carve a life from a land stripped to its basics. I’m certainly not cut out for it. In fact, I wonder what my impression of the state would have been had Lori introduced me to Wallace, or Page, or Sharon Springs. Somehow I think we’d still be living in Colorado.

When I get home I’m going to hug a tree.

***

Chod’s telling Jim about a store in Cimarron, New Mexico, that caters to the massive influx each summer of Boy Scouts to the nearby Philmont Ranch. My fellow codgernauts are scout masters, and their entreaty that I volunteer to lead a pack of impressionable young men would be laughable were it not for their earnestness. “It’ll make you feel younger,” Jim says. 

“I prefer to age gracelessly,” I snap.

Chod says the banana splits are heavenly, the best he’s ever tasted. When the scouts come off the mountain after backpacking a hundred miles they hit the place hard and eat everything in sight.

“I would, too,” I say. “I’d have a beer float.”

An awkward silence descends. Jim studies me out the corner of his eye. Chod shakes his head.

“You are screwed up,” Jim snorts. “That’s why I like you—you make the rest of us look normal.”

When we hit the time zone we set our watches back an hour. For a long time there’s just the whine of the tires and the hum of the motor. Cow. Fencepost. Ruin. Prairie dog. Cow.

***

We haven’t been on the road for a full day and already my plan is unraveling. 

In preparation for this trip I rented “Jason and the Argonauts.” As a kid I thought it the best movie ever made, with thrilling sword fights, skeletal warriors, a gigantic metal Cyclops, the Hydra, the Golden Fleece, etc. There was something about the Argonauts that stuck in my mind and made me, decades later, want to inaugurate our trip along the same lines. But why were Jason’s men called Argonauts? And how could I adapt it so it would adequately describe the nature of our adventure?

The movie, alas, was almost painful to watch. “Argonauts” derived from the ship, which was called the Argo. Since we three are older and more crotchety than the young members of Jason’s crew, I settled on a translation of codgernauts, or curmudgeonauts. Personally I preferred the latter but found it unwieldy. When I realized we’d have to name our vessel in order for the scheme to work, I almost gave up. A white Chevy pickup named Codger? Wouldn’t fly.

On the console between the two front seats is an envelope with the words “Receipts for geezer trip” written in bold letters. Chod is evidently thinking along the same lines. My problem is that I don’t consider myself a geezer. As Chod and Jim are both a decade older than me, they certainly classify as geezers. But me—I’m a young thing. 

But I am a codger, and a curmudgeon, and I know my partners are, too. Age teaches us to adapt, whether by begging, borrowing or stealing. I call it blending. Taking the best of both definitions (“eccentric,” “old,” “ill-tempered,” “full of resentment and stubborn notions”), in spirit if not in letter, I settle for codgernauts. 

I secretly think the others find the term ridiculous, but they’re ill-tempered old farts so I’m going to ignore them.

***

The Arkansas River Valley of southeastern Colorado, cottonwoods tinged with yellow and orange, broad fields bracketed by acequias, the Hispanic influence at play. Someone forgot to tell the cartographers that this part of the state belongs to New Mexico. I’m on home turf now. My pulse quickens. The sun touches the horizon.

In Lamar, we’re three to a room, Chod on the floor in his sleeping bag and pad, Jim and I with our own queen-sized beds. We unpack, trying not to breathe too deeply of the manure-infused air, and walk across the highway to a steakhouse. The food’s excellent, worth every mile of the drive. 

Now we’re back in the hotel, Jim’s asleep and Chod’s watching the Weather Channel for tomorrow’s forecast. The smiling face says there’s a 30% chance of rain and snow showers tonight, tapering off with a high of 57 tomorrow. 

I call Lori. As always her voice turns me inside out. It’s awkward talking to her with the others in the room, but we’re all friends and this seems to be the norm. Sheba, Lori says, is sulking under the table. Wants nothing to do with her. Wants me. She isn’t the only girl in the house with that problem.

Places known only to the heart (Part 3)

Comes dawn, comes wind, comes a cold drizzle. We load the truck in the dark and eat a quick flavorless breakfast. The streets of Lamar are deserted, ghostly in a gray, unforgiving gloom. Leaving town we pass the last fringes of civilization and enter a land as rawboned and wild as it was the day after creation. The few houses we encounter lean empty-eyed and hollow, skeletal remains of failed dreams. Here at the southeastern corner of Colorado the land is merciless. It takes no prisoners. And at best it allows, grudgingly, the imposition of a paved ribbon of highway rising and falling on its stark, barren back.

West of Pritchard we run into snow flurries on a raking gale. I’m poring over an atlas, trying to decipher the maze of interconnected lines, most of which are barely visible in the fading light. It’s not a matter of finding a way to Cottonwood Canyon but of finding a way from Carrizo Canyon, which lies to the east. When I realize we’ve gone too far, Jim turns back. We settle on a dirt road that looks not at all familiar, but it’s been fifteen years since I’ve been here. Nothing has changed but me. We head south.

The road dies at an intersection marked by a collapsing stone house. And suddenly, like an epiphany, I know where we’re at. Two miles more and we see a small wooden sign pointing to Carrizo Canyon. The road narrows into a thin track scraped through cholla cactus and the first fringes of pinyons and junipers. A flock of mountain bluebirds flash by, impossibly blue. We bump through shallow washes and wind upward to the high ground, where the land falls away into deep chasms and rocky gorges. The transition is startling, even when you know what to expect.

A rocky trail leads us into the canyon. Snow is blowing sideways but the clouds overhead are breaking apart. We cross the stream, a clear, spring-fed rivulet pooled between huge blocks dislodged from the cliffs, and climb through Gambel’s oaks to a sheltered spot beneath the crest of a ridge. On a flat slab varnished to a deep oily black are etchings of bighorn sheep, or elk, or fabulous creatures of a prehistoric imagination. 

“These are new, right?” Jim asks. They look it, but actually are hundreds of years old. We stare at them in silence. For the first time we get an inkling of the age of humanity in our native country, and all the empty-eyed houses, the rotting corrals, the tottering fence posts, are nothing more than remnants of a time nearer to us than yesterday. 

***

“Oh my Lord,” I say. “I could live here forever and never leave.”

I’m standing behind a hand-hewn cabin moldering back into the soil of a minor side draw off Cottonwood Canyon. The skies to the south are Oklahoman. A stone wall, now collapsed in places, shows a linearity out of place in such jumbled terrain. Set back in the trees is a corral, and below, in an oak-shaded gully, runs a trickle of water, the green shoots of watercress vivid against banks carpeted with fallen leaves. Dark clouds scud overhead. An occasional Chihuahuan raven soars by.

I walk to the stone wall and sit on a large flat rock. It provides an unobstructed view of the old cabin and the high walls of the canyon. A canyon wren scolds. Oh my Lord. My emotions suddenly raw, tears a blink, a thought, away.

It’s like coming home only different, a return to a place I had once loved more than home. From the first time I saw this cabin I’d felt an affinity for it, as if I’d lived there in another life. Each visit was the same, and as powerful, but then we’d stopped coming and finally left Colorado for the prairie, and the years had swept away its memory. Until now. Chod goes searching for the wren. I hunch over, queasy with yearning.

I’m weighing the feasibility of having them leave me here when Chod returns. Reluctantly I join him as we scramble over the wall and hike back to the truck. My feet are leaden, each step a betrayal. 

***

A new emotion filters in. If Cottonwood Canyon affected me so strongly, how will I fare when seeing the mountains? I’m soon to find out as we cross into northern New Mexico. The road gains altitude, winding between buttes and low ridges, until the peak of Mount Capulin juts into view. We drive through Folsom, a town so lovely we barely keep to the road, our heads swiveling madly. 

“How come I didn’t know about this country?” Jim demands, but we have no reply. He’s practically speechless, a comical change of pace. 

His silence grows deeper at the sight of northern New Mexico as seen from atop the dormant volcano. Here the vista is on a grand scale, a raven’s eye view, gazing down on the broad sweep of pressure ridges, flat-topped buttes, treeless mesas and the snow-dusted slopes of Sierra Grande. And, more important to my state of being, the distant Sangre de Christos, half-veiled by storm clouds and not dusted with snow, not whitened, but buried, vertical snowfields fulgent in the afternoon sunlight. My pulse races. Though the climb to the pinnacle of the volcano was tough, mostly due to the frigid gale blowing from the north, all that comes to mind is a fragment of Whitman’s poem: O my soul. O my soul. 

And I wonder for a moment if I can ever again be content in Kansas.

***

We decide to stay the night in Raton rather than pitch tents in 24-degree weather, which is forecast. At the hotel Jim and Chod make themselves comfortable, curtains drawn to the rarified autumnal air of New Mexico. I drift outside and find a Say’s phoebe plus a small flock of pine siskins. The falling light lies golden on the cottonwoods and chamisa. How could I have ever left?

My emotions are on overload. Lord, I’m tired. And tomorrow we cross the mountains…

Revelations at a confluence (Part 4)

The third day almost ends before it begins. A deer wanders into the road in the predawn darkness a few miles southwest of Raton. Chod sees it at the last minute, brakes hard, swerves and misses. And brakes again for another a quarter-mile away. The road’s a veritable playground for mulies, and we don’t let down our guard until the rising sun bathes the foothills in light.

We’re entering a part of the state that New Mexicans cede to outsiders, both reviled Texans (among whom my family is unfortunately numbered, though in fairness we’d had the good sense to renounce the faith by relocating to the mountainous West—lapsed Texans, that’s us) and Boy Scouts. Chod drives through Philmont Scout Ranch to show Jim around and provides a running commentary on its history and purpose. In 1922 Wade Phillips, an Oklahoma oil baron, bought 300,000 acres of mountains and plains and then donated a sizable portion of it to the Scouts. It was an incredible act of largess, and perhaps a tidy tax deduction, but I really wish he’d passed it down to my family.

“Whoever said ‘money can’t buy happiness’ didn’t know where to shop,” I say as we coast past the palatial grounds of the main lodge. 

In stark contrast is the tiny town of Cimarron, just outside the entrance. Inundated each summer with a zillion uniform-clad kids and their chaperones, it’s put to sleep in early September like some droopy-eyed bear. Now at October’s demise it quietly slumbers as the river sidles by, low and clear. Other than a gathering of vehicles in front of the James Hotel, a historic outpost on the Santa Fe Trail whose ceiling still bears bullet wounds from the 1800s, the town appears deserted. We keep our voices low as if concerned some merchant or resident be roused to open their curtains onto a bright sunny morning and wonder what the ruckus is, and us disappeared without a trace.

The prairie behind, we ascend along the Cimarron River. Westward now, the canyon narrow and shaded. It looks familiar as all such canyons do, a thin forested band with a jumble of boulders foaming with whitewater and cliffs anchoring a blue sky. Jim yet harangues us about not telling him about this country. To nobody I say, “For most of my life I took this scenery for granted.”

Indeed. And now it’s as if I’m seeing it for the first time. Though there’s a part of me that deeply yearns for it, it’s odd how little effect entering the foothills has. Not at all like I suspected it would be, and certainly not the emotional upheaval I briefly brushed against at the top of Capulin. But I haven’t seen snow-capped peaks yet, which is another beast altogether.

When we do, Chod asks, “Now?”

“Not yet,” I say.

In my tote is a CD recorded for just this occasion. Actually it’s the soundtrack to the PBS special “The Way West,” but somehow over the years its central theme has come to encompass every emotional nuance associated with the West condensed into one achingly beautiful melody. But something holds me back. 

We pass Eagle’s Nest and descend into Red River. From afar the town looks ridiculously narrow, squeezed between the narrow walls of the canyon. The main street is lined with ticky-tacky stores geared toward stealing one’s hard-earned money, and this is evident even in the grocery store where the cost of a pack of hot dog buns stuns me. Even the snacks are outrageous. I decide I don’t need anything that bad. It’s a relief to leave, and mentally I shake off its dust from my boots. If I had to choose between Red River and the howling wastes of Sharon Springs, Kansas, it would be no contest. Sharon Springs might be depressingly desolate but at least it’s authentic. 

***

There’s a surprise waiting for me when we clear the foothills and enter a wide valley of sage and stone. On the northern horizon juts the tall rounded dome of San Antonio Mountain, an integral part of my childhood topography. Thinking of the dozens of times my family drove past it on our way to southern Colorado leads inevitably to thoughts of my parents, whom I haven’t seen in over three years. 

The feeling intensifies as we enter Wild Rivers Recreation Area, an area they often recommend to me. After a hurried lunch hunkered down in a shelter, punctuated by a flurry of excitement as a Clark’s nutcracker flies overhead—a lifebird for Jim—we follow the road to its conclusion on a spear of land sandwiched between two vast gorges. The Red River rolls in on our left and the Rio Grande on our right, and the sound of their currents conjoining is muted by the jagged basalt walls into a soft mournful sigh like wind in pines on a moonlit night.

The enormity of the geological spectacle makes it difficult for the eyes to linger on any one thing, but rivers have always fascinated me and confluences most of all, and here are two fabled rivers becoming one. Leaning over the railing until I grow dizzy, I spy a flash of color below. A flock of pinyon jays skirt the base of the cliff, their raucous cries merging with the rivers to become one wild, untamed sound. 

Again I’m reminded of my father. He once related a story of how as taps played at the military funeral of a friend, a lone pinyon jay perched in a nearby tree called and called as if in some primitive response, and how forever afterward the jay held a special place in his heart. Plus there’s the fact that my hanging over this railing with a pair of binoculars draped around my neck is mostly attributable to his influence.

Leaving, I dip into the tote and bring out the CD. 

“Now’s a good time,” I say.

The opening strains rip open whatever armor I’d placed over my emotions. It’s not mountains I’ve lost but family, I suddenly realize, and as we drive away my eyes fix on the distant snowy peaks as the pinyon pines, junipers, chamisa and sage flow by in an endless loop, as if they were in motion and not us. The others are respectfully silent. Within me something collapses. I am undone.

Across the riven land (Part 5)    

It’s hard to feel morose when crossing the sage flats of northern New Mexico, so soon enough I rouse myself to tell Jim that if he thought the view from the cliff’s edge at Wild Rivers was good, he should see it from the bridge outside of Taos. Chod mercifully says nothing, for I’m being a real dope here. My half-hearted map-checking of our itinerary apparently enlightened me not at all, for as we wend our way southward I realize our trajectory will skirt Taos and leap the Cañon del Rio Grande.

Good Lord, my heart’s getting hammered. How much of this can I take?

The emotional whipsaw now lashes me another direction. Thirty-three years ago Lori and I walked out onto the selfsame bridge, newlyweds of less than 24 hours, and here I am without her. I had no idea us codgernauts would be here and the suddenness is a fist to the gut. Ironically, prior to our departure Lori asked if the others knew what they were getting into by inviting me. The question should have been if I knew what I was getting into. 

Thinking of her brings a smile and a sense of peace. The mood-setting CD is still playing but it’s become an aggravation. At my request Chod ejects it. 

Jim says he’s always wanted to see Taos. I tell him he wouldn’t like it. Noise, congestion, it’s too expensive, everybody acts like a celebrity. But I’m not sure he believes me. 

The bridge, though is mind-boggling. It’s the second highest cantilever bridge in the nation, a delicate silver arch stretching 500 feet from rim to rim and 650 feet above the emerald Rio Grande. 

Sullying its splendor is a blood clot of vendors lining the parking lot. Fronting them is a brown-skinned man with an old beater car covered with vegetables. He’s flailing a guitar and loudly shilling folk tunes while staring vacuously into space. A beautiful black woman twists into a lotus position atop her vehicle, eyes closed in meditation, as her boyfriend hawks cheap silver jewelry, his ragged clothing and waist-long blonde dreadlocks doing little to entice customers. The others are equally bizarre. 

“These people inhabit a world of their own,” Jim muses. 

We steer clear and step onto the bridge. It’s something like walking on air. Flexing and thrumming with each passing vehicle, the span transmits an electric vibration that sizzles from sole to gut. People approach the railing like it’s an optical illusion, uncertain of its solidity until their fingers grasp the cold steel. And grasp it they do, vertiginous, giddy, almost queasy. 

We were so young. I remember her standing there braced against the rail, eyes shining, long hair fanning in the wind, a smile that encompassed all possibilities and all futures. If there were others with us I can’t remember. There was only her. And now—bad singing, cheap trinkets, tourists dressed like celebrities, old geezers for company. Such a future I could never imagine.

But I wonder if these memories are carried by us alone or if the past is ingrained within these steel beams, these basalt walls, only to be released at the right impetus. Such as me looking around for her. Camera shutters snap like a gaggle of paparazzi. Tourists crowd the rail. Without her it’s just a big empty hole. 

***

West of the bridge we encounter the first “earthship” communities. Self-sustaining, energy independent, constructed of recycled materials, theoretically they’re the future of housing in a world depleted of resources. But mostly they’re grotesque conglomerates of part-berm, part-fantasy structures like hobbit holes only far more ornate, festooned with turrets, pennants and colors like rainbows on steroids.In keeping with the spirit of the codgernauts, Jim becomes incensed at the sight.

“It’s too much,” he gripes, hammering on the dash. “Simple is elegant! Why don’t they get it?”

His idea of architecture is the adobe casas we occasionally drive past, with dark-wooded vegas and smooth earthen walls melding into the landscape, or the Taos Pueblo, which can be seen in the distance. The natural colors are seamless with the golden cottonwoods outlined against a turquoise sky. These fever-dream monstrosities only vie with their neighbors for outlandishness.  

I can’t be certain but I sense a change in Jim. If the sight of housing fashioned from old tires and beer cans arouses his ire, those made from the earth itself creates a deep resonance. It’s more complex than simple shade and hue, or primitive nostalgia, but centers on being one with the land, as integral as the aromatic sage, the gnarled juniper or the rounded knoll of San Antonio Mountain. He grows silent as we leave Taos behind, climb a saddle and disappear across the riven land. 

***

A sign outside Tierra Amarilla shows a Che Guevara-like head and the words, “Tierra o muerte.” Land or death. It’s a sentiment dating over a hundred years, fueled by the outright robbery of land grants issued by the Spanish crown. On June 5, 1967, this tiny New Mexican village was the focal point of the struggle to return land to its rightful heirs when Reies Tijerina, leader of the La Alianza movement, raided the Rio Arriba Courthouse to free several of the group’s members. In the ensuing kerfuffle two law enforcement officers were shot, followed in short order by the largest manhunt in the state’s history. 

My family’s sentiments then were common to the Anglo Republican elites we thought ourselves to be: kill them all. Only after living in Las Vegas did I realize there was complete justification for the uprising. My sympathies still lie with the locals, but I wonder if they know that. 

Heron Lake State Park is only a few miles away. We find a level site to pitch our tents and set to it as shadows lengthen. The camping part of our trip is finally here.

Night without end, amen (Part 6)

I’ve enjoyed camping since I was knee-high to a collard lizard, and I’ve done just about every kind a person can imagine short of tent camping in winter. Which is exactly what we’ve preparing for, a fact that gives me pause. But I learned long ago that enduring cold weather is as much psychological as it is physical. If you want to do something bad enough, the cold will have little effect. The physical part can be dealt with by layering. I’ve taken long walks in white-outs and sub-zero temperatures and barely felt discomforted, so this should be a piece of cake. No worries here. 

Our tents pitched, Chod turns to his duties as head chef. Ham and beans is the menu but I eschew it in favor of burned Wranglers, not because of any lack of trust in Chod’s culinary arts but because beans pose frightful consequences for me. A layer of yellowed pine needles, another of small twigs, crisscrossed by larger sticks, two matches and in short order the hotdogs are turning black. 

The smirk on Chod’s face lets me know how he feels about that second match. Self-righteous Boy Scout leaders anyway. I’m suddenly reminded of my older brother, who could light a fire with a single match but only after adding copious quantities of combustible liquids. Orbiting satellites could witness his handiwork.

Under the disapproving stares of my companions I slit each Wrangler lengthwise and lay down a thick bead of habanero mustard. A cold beer and scalding coffee wash them down. Excellent.             

At dusk Chod lights a small fire. Ever the show-off, he uses only one match. Canadas sound from the lake, preparing for night. The late-October sun is down far too soon. What does that leave for us to do, talk? We’ve talked all day. Jim slips off to his tent, and shortly after Chod and I retire to our own nylon domiciles. I’m developing a new appreciation for my camper, with its lights, oven, four-burner stove and, best of all, forced-air furnace. 

It’s ironic that for months I’ve said that if I ever had another vacation I’d sleep straight through. Here’s my chance and I’m not pleased. It goes to show that some people are never happy. A sentiment essential to the codgernaut manifesto: find fault, complain often, bicker without end. 

***

Lori asked, Will I hear from you every day, and I said, I don’t think so. I’ll call from motels, otherwise we’ll be in the boonies. But if some night you hear the echo of an agonized bellow, it’ll be me crawling into my sleeping bag.

My screams are confined to my mind, I believe. (Neither Chod nor Jim hear anything, or if they do nothing is mentioned the next morning, and they’re the type that go for the jugular at the first hint of weakness.) Though I’m layered with polypro long johns, cotton sweats and a fleece hat, it’s still like being mummified in a freezer. I stuff my pillow in the bag’s opening and dunk my head like a turtle in its shell. It’ll warm quickly, I promise myself. The bag, narrow at the feet and shoulders to prevent cold spots, is rated to 15 degrees, which should be plenty warm enough.

Nor am I concerned about things that go bump in the night. Being buried so deeply precludes hearing anything other than the chattering of my teeth. 

The pillow pops out. I wrestle it back, bunching up my clothes and skewing my hat. The bag’s narrowness makes straightening them impossible. Turning over is an exercise in futility and knocks the bag off the mattress. In spite of these thrashings I eventually doze off. I think.

A frigid stream of air down my spine wakes me. Wrestling the pillow back into place twists my clothes into more knots and shoves the hat over my eyes. Again I slide off the mattress. Silently cursing, I duck my head back into the bag and try to relax. I’m freezing.

Why hasn’t the bag warmed up? In the past Lori and I always had our bags zipped together, and the warmth of two bodies was more than adequate. Now I feel like a boa constrictor is squeezing me to death. 

I can do this if I set my mind to it. We have a full week ahead of us with camping every night. It’s simply a matter of psychology.

I’ve lost feeling in my extremities. Psychology, my ass.

***

Later, in the darkness, comes the subtle murmur that inevitably croons me awake, either sooner or later depending on the amount of liquids consumed and the ambient temperature, one which is high and the other very low.

Go away, I say.

No. It’s time.

It can wait.

Ah, but for how long? Remember, you have to crawl out of your bag, get dressed, unzip the door and crawl out. That’s a lot of contortion on a full bladder.

Beat it.

I’ll be back.

And so it is. Though it pains me to reach an arm out of the bag, I check my watch. No way can I make it through the night.

Outside I hear a zipper and the pad of footsteps. One of the others had the same argument and lost. 

I finally roll out of my bag. The cold is unbearable. My boots are like ice packs, my jacket stiff with frost. Opening the door unleashes a deeper wave of Arctic air. I debouch into sandy soil and straighten to the stupefying display of the night sky, the millions of stars etched diamond-sharp against a velvet black, the spiral galaxies, supernovas, red giants and yellow dwarfs, the double stars in the crook of the Big Dipper, the fuzzy Seven Sisters, each momentarily obscured by billowing plumes of exhalation. For a moment I feel nothing but awe. 

The emotion is short-lived. Back in the tent, zip the door shut, burrow into the bag, stuff the pillow into the opening, hunker down. The pillow pops out. Tent camping sucks.

Descent into the center place (Part 7)

Chod’s thermometer reads 20 degrees in the predawn darkness. There’s frost on the tent, in the tent, glistening on the truck. Our breath flares in great clouds that glow ghostly in our headlamps. Greeting him as he prepares breakfast, I kick in with my cold-weather whining as only I can do.

He listens as he stirs the sausage, a slow grin spreading like an oil spill across his whiskered face. “Sissy,” he says.

I remind him who was too wimpy to eat the fiery enchiladas in Raton. “I am a sissy when it comes to cold,” I snarl. “Remember, I’m a desert dog.”

Jim joins us. He looks more tired than when he went to bed last night. “Don’t you ever stop complaining?” he asks.

“Why stop now?” 

Though the coffee is hot enough to melt lead we gulp it down in shuddering gasps. There is only the tiniest hint of light in the east. Chod hands us each a plate and we chow down. I learn what it is to eat biscuits and gravy in subfreezing temperatures. Hint: hold plate to mouth, shovel food into maw, chew when plate is empty.

***

Northward now, the early sun slanting hard through the cottonwoods lining the Rio Chama. A few miles upstream we pass a hotel advertising hot tubs. Our heads swivel in unison as we drive by. Nobody says a word but it’s clear that we’re all imagining how last night could have been different. 

There’s a palpable sense of anticipation or expectancy this morning, as if everything we’d seen, every place we’d visited, mere prelude to what would come, mere roving southwestward, traversing the “empty space” between. From the onset the voyage of the codgernauts was fixed on the ruins of those who came before, the Anasazi, spread across the San Juan Basin throughout three states and two nations. And now, turning west from Chama, we descend from the Continental Divide into the Jicarilla Apache Reservation, ponderosas giving way to junipers, fur-clad peaks to flat-topped buttes, and we all, in our way, leaning forward to see what awaits around each bend.  

Around one such bend a prairie dog wanders into the road and is promptly flattened. I’m appalled. Jim acts like he’s surprised to feel it under the treads, yet I saw the beast a hundred yards off. “Are you blind?” I ask. Chod and Jim find this hilarious, so I scrunch down into my seat and sulk. Jerks.  

Buttes give way to vast stretches of wasteland the color of old mustard stains, crisscrossed web-like by dirt scrapes angling off to oil fields, derricks and storage tanks. Our conversation turns to how the white man relegated the Jicarillas to this heat-blasted sinkhole, only to discover untold mineral wealth beneath the barren soil. Oops. Who’s laughing now? And yet the few towns we pass show little sign of wealth of any kind, with government housing being the only structures halfway decent. Everything’s coated with a patina of despair and neglect. 

I chart a shortcut to Nageezi, where I hope to buy Lori something at the trading post, but first we pass Teepee Junction, a compact gambling complex crafted from white plastic sheeting. As if still shell-shocked by the Taos earthships, Jim says nothing of the cheesy architecture. The parking lot at Nageezi is empty except for a single car. When I step from the truck a stout Navajo girl talking on the pay phone shakes her head. Victim to the plastic tarp. Ditto for 44 Store a few miles farther north. We turn back, leave the pavement and immediately begin losing altitude. The outside temperature rises into the sixties. An occasional octagonal hogan dots the horizon but otherwise there is only sand and bunchgrass. If not for the placement of the hogan’s single door, which always faces east, directions would be impossible. 

Eighteen miles of dirt road leads us to a pair of sandstone hoodoos. Framed between them is the distant crown of Fajada Butte. I center the trio in the viewfinder and twist the polarizer filter. Thin cirrus clouds leap out of a sky gone indigo. A tuft of gray fur, a bloody-edged bone splay out on the nearest stone, almost sacrificial, relic of the once-alive, now spirit. As spirits are everywhere here, tangible in the shifting breeze, in the stark silences, in the vast blue dome of sky the ancients knew so intimately. The shutter snaps. And for a moment I wonder what I could bring to this hallowed place, what offering, but I can think of nothing but my self: marrow and blood, breath and bone, heart, spirit, soul, reverence. The others are waiting at the truck. I breathe a silent prayer to the gods of this place and join them. The road to Chetro Ketl takes us in. My heart is singing.

***

After finding a suitable campsite we eat a quick lunch and pitch our tents. They’re still rimed with frost, but the warm sun rapidly dries them. Inside is warmer than I could have imagined or wished for early this morning. It’s better than a hot tub, but I know it won’t last.

There’s also another option: the bathroom has a heater. If necessary I’ll spend the night there, and if someone has to use the toilet they can step around me.

The heat makes us ripe. Other campers look fresh and neat, their clothes crisp and pressed, and us rumpled, wrinkled, frowzled, fetid. It looks like we slept in our clothes. 

Come to think of it, we did sleep in our clothes. 

From frostbite to sunburn, it’s a day of extremes. I slap on my wide-brimmed Tilley hat to protect my ears. Jim smirks and says, “Now you look like a birder.” Somehow I don’t think it’s a compliment.

Where the moon stands still (Part 8)

Solstice, eclipse, equinox, standstill. If the Chacoans expressed their lives in the long slow arc of the moon and sun across the celestial horizons, ours is the opposite extreme—a race to beat the sun. Already descendant, it falls into a west rapidly clouding over. Shadows creep across the face of Fajada Butte, pool in tree-choked Chaco Wash. We pile into the truck and head deeper into the canyon, binoculars and cameras ready. 

By the time we reach the visitor center I know that everything I’d hoped for hangs on that narrowing interstice between the horizon and the pendant yellow dwarf. As I stop to look at a small butterfly a surge of apprehension jolts me; here is a new species, and there, in the truck, is my field guide, and over there, quickly disappearing over a rise, are my partners. In the distance a cluster of ruins stand out like broken teeth against a glyphic, carved cliff. Una Vida. The witchcraft woman’s house, according to the Navajos. Could she witch me more time? Legends say that Jacob commanded the sun to stand still, but in this desert place the gods have fallen silent. One last look at the butterfly and I’m scurrying up the trail. Incrementally, heartbeat by heartbeat, time and hope slip away.

***

White-crowned sparrows flee the truck, interrupting our motion with regularity. Jim mutters something vile and announces that he needs a sage sparrow. Hungo Pavi passes with barely a glance. When a bird flies up to perch on a tall bush I yell for him to stop and clap the binos to it. Dark gray mantle, broad white throat stripe, eye-ring—“Sage sparrow,” I chime.

Silence falls as we study the bird. 

“That’s a northern shrike,” Jim says. His tone expresses grievous doubt about my birding skills. I’m immediately on the defensive, remembering too clearly the shiver as the prairie dog went under the tires. 

“Are you nuts?” I seethe. “How can you mistake a sage sparrow for a shrike?”

“Because I’m looking at a shrike!” he snaps.

Jim’s something of a legend in Kansas birding circles but we aren’t in Kansas anymore. I’m aghast that he could be so—wrong. 

Following his line of sight I see a shrike not twenty feet from the sparrow. “Pan right,” I tell him. He does, pauses, and says, “Nice.”

  Indeed it is, and the satisfaction of finding him the bird momentarily eclipses the sting from his judgmental attitude. Though the two of us haven’t birded much together before, I know that beneath that gruff, curmudgeonly shell there’s a warm and generous nature. The problem is breaking though that gruff, curmudgeonly shell. 

He lowers his binoculars and turns to thank me. His eyes are startling pale, like ice melting in the sun, made paler still by a ruddy face capped with a white shock of unruly hair. A slight smile plays on his lips. Score one for the youngest member of this irascible, crotchety trio. 

***

And here at last is Chetro Ketl, whose fabled wall forms an axis from the minor lunar standstill to distant Kin Bineola and Pueblo Pintado and beyond. What once was five stories tall is now rubble, and the sun is falling fast. Chetro Ketl, where I thought to feel the power of something I cannot name, now witnessed through fast footwork and the shutter of a camera. We’re there and gone before it even registers.

A small crowd follows a park ranger into Pueblo Bonito, the largest of the Chacoan great houses, so we bypass it in favor of nearby Kin Kletso. As Jim stays near the truck to bird, Chod and I hightail it past the ruins to a narrow incline leading to a notch in the cliff. The first fifty feet are almost straight up and there are no ropes or rails to assist. Near the entrance I look down and shudder. “That isn’t going to be fun,” I say.

“It’s easier going down,” Chod says. 

“You haven’t looked down yet,” I remark. We squeeze through the cleft and break out atop the bluff. A pair of youthful hikers confronts us.

“You’re going to run out of light,” they say. The sun lower now.

“We’ll make it,” Chod says, setting off at a grueling pace. The next group of hikers makes the same comment. I’m getting irritated. Do we look too old to make it to the overlook, a distance of only a mile? Loosely following the edge of the cliff, we zigzag past cairns until the half-moon shape of Pueblo Bonito appears far below. Jim waves at us, no larger than an ant on the valley floor. Shutters whir. Cottonwoods lining the wash glow golden in the slanting sun. 

We’re halfway down the notch when I mention how I wish we could stay longer. Chod says, “This is a month-long trip squeezed into one week.” Yes, and more’s the pity. And contrary to Chod’s placatory musings, he does not skip lightly down the fractured detritus of the escarpment like some two-legged bighorn sheep. His descent, like mine, is largely made on his butt. 

***

Another sleepless night. As I toss and turn and fight my sleeping bag, it comes to me that Chaco is a sacred place, a place of power, the center of a civilization that extended hundreds of miles outward like spokes of a wheel. In the end, it is a place of forgetting, and of remembering. 

Lately I’ve been transcribing my old diaries of the first years of our marriage. The entries were sickening, with me preoccupied with myself, living a twisted macho fantasy where I pitted myself against criminals and always prevailed. I often wondered if it would be best to burn them. 

The people of Chaco knew the paths of the sun and moon. Such knowledge was not gained lightly. Nor was that in my story. In the dark emptiness of night I feel the bad memories slip away, as if in this holy place they have no hold over me. I see Lori standing at the bridge above the Rio Grande, the sun in her hair. I see her waiting for me at home. Like the Chacoans who left here so long ago, I, too, know where my sun rises and where it sets.

What the shaman said (Part 9)

The bluffs are irregular silhouettes swimming against a paler darkness when we three converge on the stove. It soon begins hissing a small blue flame. Chod throws together what passes for breakfast burritos, and as we choke them down by the sterile light of our headlamps I consider petitioning Congress to ban him from ever again cooking Mexican food. The thought of the Blake’s Lottaburger green chile hamburger I’m going to eat at lunch—and the motel later—is a sweet warmth dispelling the 38-degree temperature. 

Leaving the others behind, I march to a point overlooking Fajada Butte. Though I hope for an errant sunbeam to strike the peak, it’s a vain hope. There is no dawn, only a gradual shift from black to gray. I wait beside my tripod as sparrows and rabbits stir in the chamisa and the sky brightens and the butte rises like some craggy sentinel, and I wait some more, and finally shoot a series of photographs anyway and hustle back to camp. The others are already packed so I throw myself into knocking down the tent.  Jim wanders over and watches me as I finish jamming my sleeping bag into a stuff sack. Motioning me over to the picnic table, he lays his hand on a large flat stone.

“Shaman says, ‘This stone has been sent by the gods. We must do what it says.’”

I’ve still got work to do but I’m humoring him. All his haranguing about connections between patterns found in the terrain and how people lived has been thought-provoking but I’m a little busy right now. The stone is like any of the millions that have fallen from the cliffs—reddish, rough, fissured. He flips it over.

For a moment I stare stupidly. It’s not just a stone—it’s a blueprint of Pueblo Bonito, the largest of the Chacoan communities, replete with its odd half-moon shape, pocked with dozens of circular indentations like kivas and banded with outlying walls. When I open my mouth to say something nothing comes out. Jim claps me on the on the shoulder, barks a laugh and walks off. 

In all the Chaco literature I’ve read there has never been a mention of shamans dictating architectural designs from asymmetrical stones, but here is proof. And I wonder if I could steal the stone, ferret it away as a memento of the shaman’s speech. I don’t, but it’s tempting. We leave it on the table for the next acolyte. 

***

  North we go, past the occasional hogan with its brush arbor and wooden corral. The land morphs into weird rock formations and colorful banded ridges, the towns all named in a foreign tongue. Traffic picks up as we near Farmington, but we veer off toward Aztec, the northern outpost of Chacoan civilization. If we thought it would be another Chaco, we are sorely mistaken.

Not much remains of the ruin other than a few buildings and several kivas. One has been restored and this surprises me. For some reason it never crossed my mind that the Anasazi would plaster the stone walls with adobe. The kiva is huge, dimly lit by recessed lights, and our entry triggers a recording of Native American dances. Regardless of the interactive music, I’m unable to get a sense for anything other than a lifeless room. The sign at the entrance says “This is a sacred place.” I wonder if die-hard Bible-thumpers are able to make that connection or if their self-righteousness blinds them to the fact that others worshipped differently, if not equally as fervently as themselves. 

On the way out of town we pass a Blake’s. My suggestion for an early lunch is soundly nixed. Democracy in action. Mouth slavering, heart rent, I pass on.

***

In Farmington my incorrigible cohorts decide they’re starving. It’s been many years since my last Blake’s green chileburger and my craving knows no bounds. The problem is that there are two codgers and one chilehead in the truck, and that math doesn’t add up to anything favoring my odds. Jim’s not picky but Chod is a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy. Self-proclaimed and unrepentant about it, says it drives his wife crazy. I’m beginning to think we should have left Chod at home but since it’s his truck and he’s the chef I probably should just keep my Big Fat Mouth shut. But it’s damned hard.

We pass every kind of restaurant known to man and a few that aren’t. No Blake’s. The edge of town is coming up and we’re too tired to turn around so when we spot an Arby’s I’m commanded to pull over. Inwardly I’m gnashing my teeth and rending my garments.

As we eat our tasteless fodder we puzzle over how to head south out of town. Chod finally gets up and asks two burly dudes if they know. When he comes back he’s wearing a predatory leer.

“They say to go straight on this road and turn left at the Blake’s Lottaburger,” Chod says. He’s clearly savoring this moment.

I stop masticating mid-chew. “You’re screwing with me,” I stammer.

“I kid you not!” Mr. Innocence leaps to his feet and strides over to the pair. “Tell him where to turn,” he insists. They look at me as if I’m some kind of dweeb and say, “At the Lottaburger.”

The look on my face is cause for great hilarity. Jim’s croaking like a raven and may well be choking on his sandwich. Chod is all teeth.

Slowly, ever so slowly, I bow my head and bang it on the table.

When we get in the truck and head off, Chod says, “Notice what I did? I asked for directions. They say men never ask for directions.”

“Yeah,” I say, “but you’re the one who went to the ‘Becoming an Outdoor Woman’ thing. What does that mean?”

“I was there as an instructor,” Chod says. His voice has an edge to it. 

“You wear such a lovely shade of mascara,” I say.

So much for Blake’s, and so much for men asking directions.

Turn away in shame (Part 10)

If the intersection is marked we do not see it, but the Blake’s Lottaburger is impossible to miss. Swinging into the turn, nose attentive for the divine aroma of fried burgers and green chile, I point out how full the restaurant’s parking lot is. As compared to the Arby’s we just left. But the codgernauts, sated, bellies filled with insipid gruel, are volubly and crudely unimpressed. The road climbs from the San Juan Valley and the city falls behind, and with the high plains before us we pass into a sovereign nation not our own. 

I was here thirty-something years ago with my younger brother. Or not, it’s hard to say. It was before detailed maps, and we roved the highways and backroads with little idea of where we were or where we were going. Theoretically our destination was a moonscape known as the Bisti Badlands, a 4,000-acre void of multicolored hills, wind-sculpted hoodoos, fossilized trees and dinosaur bones, but anything photogenic would do—the forbidden church at Tecolote, a half-collapsed bridge near Cabezon Peak, eroded bluffs, a sunning collared lizard. We never found it.

Now it’s easy to find. But Chod’s getting fidgety as we trade pavement for washboard and he soon tells me to pull over. Grabbing a roll of toilet paper, he lopes across the sand and disappears down an arroyo. Jim and I meander to a shallow wash studded with stunted salt cedars where a lone Cassin’s finch plays hard to get. When we get back to the truck Chod is pale but wearing that ineffable grin of his. “I can say I left a part of me in Bisti,” he says. It sounds like an oldtime heartbreak tune, something sung when the world was young. Jim snorts. I groan.

There are no facilities at the trailhead other than a wooden sign announcing our destination and a gap in the barbed wire fence. No map, no visitor center, no gray-shirted ranger. With no idea which way to go, we just go, and as at Chaco it’s in a rush. 

The badlands look like a wasteland where God threw all the unused parts left over from creation. We pass twisted rock spires jutting from seamed bluffs, black sand hammocks lumped atop red gravel piles (and vice-versa), sandy washes streaked with alkali, iron and other minerals, rock falls, hills so rounded they look like butter melting under a hot sun and a broad arroyo of water-sculpted ridges. It’s not a place to be in midsummer. Even here in late October it’s warm enough to shed clothing. I’m stripped down to a T-shirt and it’s soaked with sweat. From our latest exertions we’re past the point of rancid—we’re downright offensive.

In places the soil is fine and soft and hard as stone in others, and soon my legs are tight and sore. My right shin hurts fiercely, has had since yesterday, and now my left foot is cramping. I’m falling apart at the pace. 

But I manage to gimp across the wash to the opposite side, a distance of perhaps a half-mile, where worn hills form deep ravines topped with teetering sandstone slabs, many of which have fallen to form impenetrable jumbles. A few scraggly plants make a scenic foreground so I hunker down to frame them in the viewfinder. The shutter snaps, freezing time’s inimical progression in a fraction of a heartbeat. My sense of haste blinds me to what I just did. In the distance the others are tiny specks against a raw and unformed land, and as I straighten the immensity of the phantasmal wilderness stretching away for thousands of square miles comes down like an unburdening, and the camera, solid in hand, as integral as throbbing leg or gritty eyes, becomes a half-forgotten sense of completion, a true compass to a place I once thought would be my meridian. And then it’s gone, fleeting as thought, and I’m left with a mile of sunblasted earth to traverse and an inkling that something has irreversibly changed, though what that might be is impossible to determine. 

***

Where would we be without maps? They show us where we are and where we’ve been, and proffer nearly unlimited futures, given time enough, and money. According to the map a good road branches off toward the town of Shiprock, which would shave 35 miles from tomorrow’s destination of the Hovenweep ruins on the Colorado-Utah border. A vote is cast and we subsequently change course. 

What maps cannot render is what will be found, or not found, making them a sort of cartographic augury no more accurate than divining tea leaves or foretokening steaming piles of entrails.

We enter Shiprock from the south. The town seems in a general state of disrepair, a sort of modern Anasazi ruin whose inhabitants have fled without a trace. There’s a half-abandoned mall with shuttered stores and empty windows, rusted cars moldering into lifeless yards, trash-strewn streets and a cluster of duplexes swimming in mud and trash. We stare aghast at the latter, taking in the desultory plywood walls devoid of paint, the wrecked vehicles, the listless mongrels, the sad scraps of clothing pinned to sagging clotheslines. 

We want a motel, someplace with a shower and a real bed, but Shiprock is bereft of such accommodations. After driving through town we turn back and take the road north, but it soon breaks free into the desert. Another road leads westward, but it too peters out. I turn around in a high school parking lot where a group of Navajo teens watch us. Our waves are not returned.

Again we pass the hovels. I want a photo but am incapable of taking advantage of other people’s misery. The sense of abject poverty is palpable.

“This is worse than the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota,” Chod says.

Jim says, “Nobody in the United States should have to live like that.”

Me: “It makes me ashamed to be an American.”

A chorus of amen’s echo the sentiment. The long drive back to Farmington is a subdued one.

Flight to El Morro (Part 11)

Showered, shaved, clothed, fed—transformed!—we codgernauts collapse on our hotel beds and stare at the TV. The smiling faces are radiant with news of an impending cold front. Rain is coming and lots of it, a veritable tempest, a gale, a monsoon with all manner of dire inclemencies, and keep it right here for the latest breaking news. Manning the remote, Jim clicks to a football game and settles deeper into his pillow. Within minutes he’s snoring.

“It don’t look good,” I say.

Chod shrugs and pulls out a map. “Well,” he says, “plans are made to be broken.”

We quickly kill the idea of Hovenweep and settle on Mesa Verde. Camping is out but we can spend the morning there and then head east over Wolf Creek Pass to the Great Sand Dunes. Perhaps we can get in two more days of tenting.

For now it’s a rare luxury just to be clean and warm. After phoning Lori and updating her of our adventures, I slide between the sheets and stretch out in utter contentment. The mattress is deliciously soft and, unlike the sleeping bag, spacious. Let it rain. I’ll stay here. 

***

Dawn comes gray and sodden with low sullen clouds scudding before a hard north wind. Breakfast is bare-bones continental with the weatherfolk giddy over the disaster heading our way. And now the equation changes, the balance tips—blizzard, the face says, teeth bared like fangs—ten inches in Durango and much, much more on Wolf Creek Pass. 

Frozen midbite, we gawp at the weather map and then at each other. 

Heavy snow is expected from central Colorado to northern New Mexico, funneled by high winds and plunging temperatures. The latter part of our itinerary is now dubious, if not impossible. Quickly we clear a space on the table for the atlas. With no way to circumvent the pass, going north is no longer an option. Months of planning now have to be scrapped. 

I trace a path southwards into familiar territory. Jim adds his two cents. In ten minutes we’re ready to go. Light rain is falling as we run before the storm.

***

Photography, like birding, is as much a matter of timing as skill, especially when timing is construed as blind luck. Finding a rare bird takes no more talent than picking one’s nose, an observation guaranteed to dismay a certain elite cadre of birders. The same holds true for photography. Being in the right place at the right time might not guarantee great shots but it certainly enhances the potential. 

Our timing, alas, is inopportune at the ancient volcano known as Shiprock. Rising 1,800 feet above the valley floor, the spire is both holy to the Navajos and easily the most dominant landform within 100 miles. And when we find a good vantage point the sun tantalizes, teases, flirts and ultimately skips the towering edifice and instead plays at the base like some broken spotlight. 

A cold wind propels us ever southward, past Little Water, Newcomb and Sheep Springs. The Chuska Mountains to the west are concealed in roiling clouds. Looking at the map, I wonder why towns fronting the highway have English names while those offroad have Navajo names. The latter are much more musical: Teec Nos Pos, Sanostee, Toadlena, Tohatchi. And then it dawns on me that the road we’re on is designated Highway 666, surely an ill-omened numeral. The Highway to Hell!

It also occurs to me that the city of Grants will be my last chance at a Lottaburger. It’s late morning when we skirt the city and approach Interstate 40. Restaurants abound, and I’ve secured a promise from the codgernauts to stop when we find one. But as at Shiprock the promise never materializes. We leap the freeway and climb into low hills furred with junipers and enter the Zuni Indian Reservation.

***

Besides having a permanent waterhole, the white pinnacle known as El Morro had an added benefit: soft sandstone walls on which to pen (or dagger, or sword) graffiti. The earliest record comes from April 1605 when Don Juan de Onãte, the territory governor, carved “Paso por aqui.” He wasn’t the only one to pass by, and in the succeeding 250 years dozens of travelers left their mark while passing down the old Zuni Trail.

Some time later I arrived with a young girl who would one day become my wife. Though we left no visible mark of our stay I can hear her in the whisper of wind through the ponderosas, and I’m contemplative of beginnings and the flow of time. These places of the heart stagger me.

Now we find a sheltered spot out of the cold wind and eat a cold lunch under the baleful eye of a raven. After relinquishing our spot to the corvid, we hike the short trail to the bluff and inspect the pool and inscriptions. On the north slope the land falls away into a broad valley with a stark rocky outcrops in the distance. To the north the sky is black but here it’s mostly open, the clouds dark-bottomed and dazzling white above, sailing serenely overhead. Shadows drag across the grassland and eclipse the gentle hills. Chod and I push on to the summit.

The strange part of this odyssey isn’t how I felt in the mountains—that was predictable—but in how the buttes and scrub oaks suddenly move me. I’ve been wrong about everything. Let me return to this beloved land when I die. Scatter my ashes at the base of El Morro, in a shady glade under the gnarled lattice of a Gambel’s oak thicket. Let them soak into the earth under a gentle spring rain, or whiten like alkali under a broiling summer sun. Let them sleep when the oaks flare golden and scarlet and the sky deepens to turquoise. It’s all the resurrection I need.

Dance of the cranes (Part 12)

After a thousand miles of two-lane highway, mostly through unpopulated regions, the traffic flow on Interstate 40 at San Rafael is like an explosion. Vehicles hurl past with no pretension of adhering to the rule of law, truckers being the most egregious. In the complete absence of enforcement, unmitigated anarchy rules. We’re swept up in the maelstrom, more prisoner than freeman, and when Chod obstinately sets the cruise control it quickly becomes obvious that we’re a terrible hindrance to the free movement of commerce. Sociopathic truckers inch forward until their polished chrome grills are inches from our rear bumper, or when passing glare like some B-grade Western baddie. Coupled with all the inattentive boneheads with cell phones pasted to their ears and the usual percentage of lunatics, it’s a shock to the system.

As we descend into the Rio Grande Valley, the Manzanos rising to the east, the Sandias to the northeast and Albuquerque an unseen but felt presence below those rounded blue mountains, I’m again reminded of my parents. I miss them terribly. On the truck thermometer the temperature hits 70 degrees, and not for the first time today we’re glad we didn’t head north. The valley is a vibrant ribbon tinged with yellow and amber and bright with fractured sunlight.

If anything the irritability of truckers increases when we take a two-lane shortcut southeastward toward I-25. Chod seems oblivious of the rising tension but Jim is visibly disturbed. As if in order to get his mind off the ill-mannered, rude, loutish—and potentially lethal—antics of lowbred, narcissistic drivers, he turns to me and asks, “Not counting your parents, who most influenced you between the ages of zero and eighteen?”

Nobody immediately comes to mind, but I pursue the idea. I was fairly insulated from the world back then, interested more in lizards and the outdoors than friends, though I had a few close ones. Or maybe not so close. Teachers bored me, as did school. Church was social, religious, mandatory, but nobody was a mentor or guide. Who then?

All I can come up with is Mr. Brown. He was a friend of my parents and a member of the church, and sometimes I would housesit for him. On his own accord he took a gangly red-headed kid and revealed to him the night sky, and for the first time the heavens had a semblance of order, and a beauty both heartrending and divine. There was Betelgeuse glowing red as a torch, Sirius like a distant beacon, the glittering belt of Orion and the pockmarked surface of the moon. I never knew his first name. He’s dead now, gone for many years. 

Hesitant, unsure of Jim’s intentions, I confide how Mr. Brown literally opened a new universe for me. And in the saying emotions honed by proximity to a place once called home catch me unawares, and my words, sundered, fall into a wistful silence. An insistent wish to thank him suddenly strikes me. But how does one speak the language of the dead? I do not know. As the truck melds with southbound traffic, drawing me closer to yet another place of the heart, the best I can do is cast out my thoughts, silently, like a prayer or an affirmation, a song of one man’s selfless endowment, a priceless gift that has carried me breathless for all these long eventful years. Thank you, Mr. Brown. I have not forgotten. 

***

And so we come to the place where my adult life started: Socorro, New Mexico. It’s a sensory overload. The town’s changed since I was here in ’72. All things do, I guess. Across the street from our motel is the McDonald’s where my parents and I had coffee before heading into Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge. A few blocks away stands the old hotel where I spent those first lonesome nights separated from everything I knew and loved. The airport’s still there, and businesses have grown to surround it. How have I changed? 

We dump our luggage, food and camping gear at the hotel, keeping only our cameras and binoculars. While the others wait in the truck I make a quick phone call to my parents, ostensibly to ask for the location of a primo Mexican restaurant. In reality I just want to hear their voices. And maybe, in the back of my mind, I wonder if they’d drive the 90 miles to see me, that we could meet again after a separation of over three years. But there’s no answer, and I set the phone in the cradle and try to fight the rising sense of loneliness.

I take the wheel now, the way familiar and certain. As if to deny us its light, the sun falls rapidly now. On the highway I open it up, but once past the small town of San Antonio the speed limit drops to 25. I can barely restrain myself. By the time we arrive at Bosque the eastern sky is purpling, flecked with hundreds of thousands of geese and ducks winging in to roost. The serrated hills westward mere blackened lumps like the spine of some great sleeping beast. 

We’ve done this before, we’re a well-oiled machine now, spilling from the truck to surround the watering hole behind the visitor’s center, calling out the names of birds with a feral passion—white-winged dove, lesser goldfinch, white-crowned sparrow—as if that alone were the only language necessary, and then we’re back in the truck heading to the main pool. Behind us the sun touches the rim of the distant hills and wallows in flame. And in that magic space between day and night the sandhill cranes come on their long graceful wings, gliding above shallow waters gone peach and saffron, their reverberating calls like some primitive music redounding time until the low marshes transform into antediluvian swamps of yesteryear’s inland sea, and us mute witnesses, interlopers from a newer age, incapable of anything more than speechless wonder. 

Return to an unfamiliar dawn (Part 13) 

At the gateway to Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge is the famous Owl Bar and Café, and it is here that my codgernautical companions, in a fit of uncommon mercy, allow me to stop. Though a clear majority of our odd democratic party had settled on eating at K-Bob’s Steakhouse in Socorro, they take pity on me for my inability to find a Lottaburger. And, possibly, crave a cessation of sniveling. 

By now I’m practically delirious. I babble my order of two green chile cheeseburgers to the waitress and then recoil at Chod’s unregenerate refusal to follow suit. Visiting Bosque without eating an Owl chile burger is downright immoral if not potentially illegal, and I furiously demand an accounting. He dismisses me with a bored look. “Because I don’t have to,” he says.

I don’t have to. Here’s his chance to try something new, something unique to southern New Mexico, to sample the very pinnacle of green chile burgers—the benchmark, for God’s sake—and all he can do is act like a spoiled child. I’m so disgusted my eyes are crossed. His parents should have beaten him more. 

Jim orders a regular burger and asks for chile on the side. 

Now, eating a green chile hamburger is not a meal so much as a religious experience, and nowhere on the face of the planet is it perfected as at the Owl Café. Years ago Outside magazine ran an article that listed ten restaurants that were so sublime as to warrant detours of up to 200 miles. High on the list was the Owl. Impressive as that sounds, my partners are unfazed. Their intransigence utterly dumbfounds me, and as I sourly nurse a beer I glance around at the other people and wonder if they would have been better companions. 

When our orders come Jim slides the chile across the table with a wink. I add it to my burger until it oozes from the bun like green manna and remark that it’s a pity I didn’t bring my camera. Such a photo would have warmed many a cold Kansas night. With a zeal hitherto unseen, like a ravenous beast or deprived chilehead, I set upon the burger with claw and fang. At the first savorous mouthful the walls roll away and the heavens open, Gabriel’s trumpet peals, an angelic choir belts out the hallelujah chorus and divine light fills the room. It’s that good.

Chod refuses to look my way. With a sneer I hiss, “Sissy.” 

After that I’m a little busy.

***

Night. We cruise the main drag for a liquor store with none to be found. Nor is beer sold in convenience stores. Socorro puts me in a drinking mood but my thirst goes unslaked. 

At the hotel we turn on the TV and watch the weather forecast. Our usual routine, only now we’re wondering if our southward flight were wisdom or folly. Wise, it was, and then some. The smiling faces regale us with tales of blizzards and road closures, of belligerent winter cruel and savage. And here’s a new equation—a major storm to the east has us sandwiched between that roaring down from the north. 

Out come the maps. Going south has added a day to the itinerary, mainly due to the extra mileage. Today we drove over 350 miles, and tomorrow should be about the same. And for the first time our direction takes us homeward. While none of us are yet willing to mention it, our trip is slowly drawing to a close. Now we’re at the mercy of an unpredictable stormfront.

I call Lori to tell her where we are. She’s surprised and wants to know if we visited my parents in Albuquerque. No, but I called them and left a message. I don’t tell her how much I miss them now. That it’s a bonedeep ache that throbs and throbs. That the very nearness compounds the pain. “Two more days,” I tell her. “Maybe three, depending on the weather.”

Hanging up is like some inward severance of sinew and muscle. I drag my wounds to the lobby where I scribble notes until weariness draws a veil over the pages.

***

How long ago did I wake in this town to an unfamiliar dawn? The twin beds, the rusty radiator, the bathroom tiles cracked and missing, the claw-foot tub mangy with worn enamel, the window staring out at the empty fountain whose waters had long since turned to dust, only a memory, like the memories choking me in my time of despair. The Colt unholstered on the nightstand. Uniform draped on the other bed. A pair of scuffed boots, a small suitcase, a book, notebook, pen. The earthly possessions of a vagabond or gypsy trapped in a limbo between what was and what was to be. And in that gray dawn my choices were so few, pared down to a grim minimum that I could not help but recognize. To stop or go. Behind me a manhunt, before me the lonely anonymity of a stranger, and always, always, the reiterant castigations and forlorn wishes that tasted like ash. The pistol, finally, heavy in my hand as I slid it into the holster, secured the snap, and went out into the new day. 

Shadows stretch long in the early sun. We load the truck—a familiar routine now, our plastic containers against the tool box, the food box canted across the fifth-wheel hitch, bungee cords laced through all, ice box wedged by the wheel well, our personal belongings tossed in the cab. At a gas station we fill up and grab snacks for the day. Top off our coffee cups. Jim starts the truck and asks for directions. “Texas,” I say.

Across the Jornada del Muerto, the journey of the dead, and after that the malpais. 

Scenes from the fallout zone (Part 14)

Even then I felt a displacement or disembodiment, subtle at first but intensifying as the miles rolled past. Whether lulled into a daze by the rhythmic hum of the tires or succumbent to a nameless residuum of the fallout zone we traversed, it seemed that  while my temporal form occupied the front passenger seat, my focal plane existed somewhere else, slightly to the rear of the cab and above, peering through the dusty rear window at three men slumped in various stages of weariness and boredom, or sometimes low to the ground with the air rushing across my face, the ground below a blur while the truck remained standstill with only the bright sun winking off the chrome to mark its passage, or sometimes high above, a cartographer charting a tiny white speck wending sluggishly across a broad waterless plain littered with bleached bones and every manner of thorned vegetation. Less participant than voyeur. So compelling was this that even now my memories are of being not within the truck but without. 

If only that godlike view had remained mine a little longer. 

Yet while it lasted I was granted a transcendent view of this tortured land as only angels may aspire to, from the desiccated expanse of the Jornada del Muerto, the nuclear-glassed sands of Trinity, the pallid ice blink of distant gypsum dunes, to the rumpled slopes of Chupadera Mesa lifting above the Tularosa Valley. And then the vision abandoned me and I was summarily remanded to earth. 

My corporeal self blinked and focused on a suddenly constricted view. The atlas open in my lap, binoculars resting on the divider, camera riding the dashboard, Chod nodding off in the back seat, Jim hunched over the wheel, the road gently rising to the cleft of Taylor Canyon. Behind us the Jornada del Muerto, the Journey of Death, so aptly named, first for the fallen travelers along the El Camino Real, but most notably for the new sun that rose here in the middle of the last century, a sun that would incinerate over 200,000 sacrificial lambs offered up on the altar of one nation’s suicidal lust for world dominion. 

We stop at a roadside clearing to stretch our legs and follow a flock of birds into the brush. The north wind like razors shredding our resolve, so that soon we stagger back to the truck cursing the wintry gale, our reward frozen fingers and a lone Cassin’s kingbird. Jim cranks the engine and we continue, rising higher and higher until we summit and the faraway escarpments of the Sacramento Mountains limn the horizon, and before us a wide dark depression. The Valley of Fires. The malpais.

But oh, if only it had not failed. 

***

Malpais is a Spanish word whose literally meaning is “bad country.” And bad country it is, a river of lava frozen in time, rippled, jagged, bubbled, sharp as knives, black as soot, interspersed with sparse desert vegetation incapable of softening its raw dermis. 

This malpais—there are several in New Mexico, many much more extensive—was created nearly 2,000 years ago when the valley floor split open to vent a hellish stream of liquid magma. Six miles wide, 44 miles in length and 160 feet deep, it’s considered the youngest lava flow in the continental United States. Hewn into the stone on its western bank is a small campground and visitor’s center. When we pull in Jim opts for indoor comfort rather than outdoor misery, and drops us off at the campground before continuing on to the main office.

A few big RVs parked along a rocky ridge take the wind broadside. Nobody is stupid enough to brave the cold except us two, and I’m not sure how Chod feels but I’m regretting this. It’s miserable going. The wind hits hard and polar, roving unhindered across this dark melted plain with little to hinder its passage other than a few stands of sotol, Apache plume, prickly pear and cholla. Hunched over in full Gore-Tex regalia, we walk down a narrow trail to enter the lava flow, binoculars ready. Immediately we’re surrounded by birds.

Hidden in the sheltered coves are a bevy of sparrow species including the beautiful black-chinned sparrow. Chod attempts pishing but the wind freezes his lips. Only a slurry hiss escapes, something we find comical. A rock wren scolds. I’m distracted by a small mammal that pops out of a crevice to study us. It’s a ground squirrel reminiscent of a golden-mantle but subtly different—my first antelope squirrel. When I point it out to Chod he stubbornly ignores it. Mammals have no place in his imagination unless they’re the large flashy kind, like cougars or bison. This I consider an unimaginative self-imposed tunnel vision, much like his lame meat-and-potatoes regimen. Sad.

Coming to the end of the trail is a relief. Turning back, we’re pushed, propelled and battered back to the luxuriant warmth of the office. Jim’s ready to go so after only a  cursory look at the library we pile into the truck and head out. 

At the entrance a merlin zips past. And if in my omniscient hindsight I can claim that panoptic view again, to briefly inhabit the body of the falcon, to possess it unreservedly as my own, I would see that the campground follows the contour of the ridge and drops into a shallow declivity where a lone camper huddles protected and secure. In it are my parents. But the vision had abandoned me when I most needed it, and we three codgernauts, incognizant, unwitting, oblivious to their presence, are borne away on the restless wind.

Long miles to Texas (Part 15)

Sign on a small building on the main street of Vaughn, New Mexico: “I buy rocks and things.”

Another, larger, says, “Female vocalist wanted.”

Barren, windswept, desolate, stores shuttered, cafes closed, Vaughn looks dead except for a budding resurgence in new service businesses huddled around the convergence of intersections east of town. Common to those found everywhere in the United States, the very newness and sameness of the brand-name motels and restaurants is a suppurating scab on the town’s sun-rotted corpse.

But for some they must seem a beacon of civility in a wild, uncompromising land, especially for weary travelers arriving late at night or looking for shelter in a storm. And, I suppose, they provide a few jobs. Road weariness is robbing me of objectivity. 

The terrain undulates gently with nothing to capture the eye. No cow nor sheep nor dwelling, no tree, no shrub nor any other growing thing taller than the drought-stricken grass, only an endless procession of fenceposts singing in the wind. Inside the truck conversation dulls, as if that terrible voluminal emptiness could not dare be disturbed. 

Had we known how lucky we were in those prolonged hours navigating the bleak prairie, how its very desolation, both of terrain and of road, was also a sort of consolation so that time and miles drifted weightlessly away in our slipstream, we might have appreciated it for the reprieve it was. Lulled into a state of benumbed dormancy, only dimly aware of our surroundings, we sailed along in a mesmeric daze of monotony. But it was shattered at Santa Rosa. 

***

Is this indeed the old Mother Road, and can the Joads still be heard on the wind? Fat chance of anything being heard above the incessant roar of diesel engines and the jackhammering of construction as new branded businesses multiply like fungus. Three exits, each connected to the umbilical cord of the highway, sucking in travelers and spitting them out. Jim dimly remembers a Lottaburger here from a previous trip, but we’re unable to find it. Traffic is horrendous. We backtrack on a frontage road looking for a place to eat. A crowded Mexican restaurant looks appealing but I’d promised my partners to let them choose for the remainder of the trip. When Jim turns into a McDonald’s my stomach lurches.

The place is packed. As we wait in line the congestion worsens when two school buses deposit their loads. Dozens of young girls stream in, a voluble horde strangely singular in nature with each individual yakking away on a cell phone. Maybe they’re conversing among themselves. We take our tasteless meal to a remote table and contemplate the chaotic scene. We haven’t been around this much humanity since—when? I can’t remember. It’s frightening. Our nerves are fraying. 

Santa Rosa serves as a reminder of why intelligent travelers should at all costs avoid interstates. Other than portions of I-80 near Cheyenne, Wyoming, I’ve never seen so many semis. And every one of them piloted by a psychotic lunatic.

It comes to me that I’m being a trifle harsh with Santa Rosa. It’s an extraction business—no more, no less, such as the Kerr-McKee mines in Grants or the gypsum mine in Blue Rapids—just a different sort of extracting. Money from wallet. And anyway, if we’d located a Blake’s Lottaburger I’d still be singing Santa Rosa’s praises. That level of hypocrisy should shame me but I remain stubbornly intransigent.

Northeast of Santa Rosa we run into road destruction. Orange cone hell. Thinking of home, dust blowing, temperature 54 degrees, sunny, hot in the copilot seat. Old Highway 66 paralleled the interstate, the latter now in ruins. Top speed of 45, which by trucker standards is infinitesimally slow. Jim’s cursing the truckers, they’re cursing back. Chod dozing in the back seat. We’re getting our kicks on—oh, shut up.

A sign says another it’s another 121 miles to Amarillo. It seems like a million miles. Tired and bored, the scenery stark. Between work zones traffic jackrabbits to impressive speeds, with trucks and cars jockeying for lead position. I try not to watch as the speedometer crests 75 and then 80. Chod cocks an eye and tells Jim to watch his speed. Jim’s response is swift. “I’m trying not to get run over by these #@%*# truckers,” he snaps.

“That’s fine,” Chod says calmly, “but keep it below eighty.”

His driving is making me nervous. Why can’t he use the cruise control? Just set it, sit back and relax. Let everybody go around. I can’t imagine any trucker being crazy enough to ram a vehicle from behind. But you never know.

More cones and signs, the highway narrows to a single chute. Jim chafing at the delay. Chod nodding off again, me wanting a bathroom and an empty road out of here.

***

Any question about my emotional status upon entering my home state is brutally answered when I read a sign at the border. Bolting upright, I let loose a vile imprecation, adding, not without some justification, “I’m going to throw up.”

Jim, nerves afire, looks around wildly. “What!”

I can’t decide which phrase makes me most nauseous, “Drive friendly the Texas way” or “Proud home of George W. Bush.” Anyone familiar with Texas knows the drivers are suicidal maniacs, so this could be an invitation to forget everything you learned in driving school and really cut loose. As for the Bush shibboleth, all I should say is that as a former Texan my sentiments run closer to those expressed by the Dixie Chicks than, say, mainstream Republicans. Though that’s certainly changing. 

To make matters worse, the map shows a rest area that plainly isn’t here. Discomfort turns into acute suffering at the conjoined gravity of too many fluids and too many miles. The traveler’s travail. Jim’s keeping it at 75. For once, just once, I wish he’d drive the friendly Texas way. 

Home is also part of the journey (Part 16)

“This is loserville,” Chod says.

At a truck stop in Texas we confront an America nightmare. 

Each pump is tethered to a vehicle like some intravenous feeding tube. More vehicles lie in wait, the faces of their drivers pinched with anxiety and impatience. Doors open and slam, a mass of humanity surges toward the doors to engage a second exiting mass, shouldering past one another with neither apology nor eye contact. They love this place for its amenities, the bathrooms, the snacks, the cold drinks and milkshakes, the fuel to whisk them away as fast as possible, while at the same time despising it, the cheap goods, the sullen clerks, the unkempt facilities, the jostling, rude strangers, the raw cold wind raking dust in their eyes, the colorless sky, the endless miles. 

For a very brief moment I take in the scene. “The more I’m around people,” I say, “the more I like Cottonwood Canyon.” And we wade into the fray.

The place is stocked with a staggering array of shoddy trinkets and brand-name knockoffs manufactured in Asian sweatshops, and the truly horrifying thing is that people are actually buying the crap. They pore over it with a scrutiny not out of place in Cartier’s. One college-aged kid holds up a cheap leather wallet to show his friend. “This looks good to me,” he says.

To me it looks like discolored scraps of leather barely held together with fishing line, but what do I know.

I turn away, any hope for the human race diminishing by the minute. These are our next leaders. We’re doomed.

***

The girl at Days Inn is friendly. Very friendly, and excruciatingly helpful. She has all the answers and all the y’alls, and it sounds good coming from her. That soft Texas drawl is music to my ears.

I grew up with y’alls, mind you. 

We rolled into Amarillo too late to visit Palo Duro Canyon, which is Jim’s choice of destinations. The sky has turned ugly, with dark clouds scudding before a stiff north wind. All we want is a place to eat a Texas-sized steak and then to lock ourselves into a room where we can relax. Plus, I have a date with a six-pack. 

Our familiar routine kicks in: unlace bungee cords, stack plastic containers beside the truck, haul inside, return for another load. Jim grimaces as the weight of his container puts undue stress on his knees, and as he waits for the pain to subside he stares off at some reference point known only to himself and says, “It’s time to go home.”

It catches me off guard. Jim the shaman, the wise one who sees patterns and rhythms where others see only stones, or passing cars and trucks on the nearby interstate, and now, perhaps, a reader of hearts, for this was ascendant in my thoughts for several days now, though I vowed not to be the first to utter the words. At first I think he’s talking to himself, but I’ve never seen him do so. That leaves me with the certain knowledge that his comment is directed toward me, for Chod has disappeared into the hotel. 

What is there for me to say? An agreement only, and no more. For I have suddenly been elevated to a precarious position, confidant to two others whose desires are now at opposite extremes, and none to ask where I stand. 

In truth, I could go either way—home or another night camping at Scott City Lake in western Kansas. And I realize then that my ambivalence is my strength, a bargaining chip, that straddling the middle doesn’t make me a tie-breaker so much as a bystander. They will decide among themselves. 

This is not a sign of weakness on Jim’s part, but unvarnished honesty.  I’m proud of him.

  After unpacking I walk over to the Love’s gas station cattycorner to the hotel. It’s the place to buy beer, the gal says. And the closest, which is important because I’m edgy now that we’re in the city. I grab a six-pack of my favorite brew and take it to the front counter. The clerk is young and so clean-cut it’s almost frightening. The fact that we’re deep in Baptist territory does not escape me.

“Are you old enough to purchase the product?” he asks with a shy smile. 

“I hope so,” I say.

“The white gives it away,” he says, fluttering his hand toward my beard. He’s kind enough not to mention the wrinkles.

I smile and hand him the money.

“I hope I made your day,” he says. Same syllabication as the hotel clerk. Same politeness, the puppy-dog eagerness to please.

“I’m too tired for that now,” I say, “but I’m sure tomorrow I’ll have a warm fuzzy feeling.”

On the way out I hold the door open for a lady who gives me a sweet, and twangy, thank yew. 

All the way back I keep saying “thank yew,” trying to stretch those three little letters into something you can take to the bank. For good measure I add a y’all. The rising gale plucks the words toward the Gulf of Mexico. Much as I hate to say it, Amarillo is a real friendly place. 

We drive to the steakhouse, the skies now completely sealed, night falling early. The temperature plummeting. Since this is Texas the serving sizes are enormous, providing much-needed ballast upon our leaving, for by then the wind is a seething, angry monster. 

Once again, outside the hotel, Jim pulls me aside to talk of cutting short the trip. “We’ve had our fun,” he says. “Going home is also part of the journey.”

And so it is. I’m noncommittal, but all night I remain half-awake, wondering how the morrow will play out.

Coming full circle (Part 17)

So this then is the end, the real end, not the one I’d envisioned for the past week, not the solo drive from Manhattan to Blue Rapids with my pulse quickening with each passing mile, not the opening of the front door and the stepping inside and my calling out, “I’m home,” not that one, though it makes sense that that would be the real end, the finality of it, the coming full circle. No, this is the real end, right here, sliding out of the truck into a cold wind, seeing for the first time the concrete path leading downward through sere gray fields to a shallow rocky foundation barricaded behind roughhewn timbers and the cottonwoods beyond, green and gold leaves clattering above tiny Ladder Creek, bare conical knolls rising in the background, the cloudless sky so blue it hurts the eyes, and the sudden jarring of emotions like a brick upside the head or a compression of the heart, as if a giant hand ripped through the bones and fibers of my chest to squeeze and squeeze until my eyesight dims and my ears ring like gongs and my knees buckle, and in those fading last moments the sudden realization that this is, indeed, the end of the journey, and everything that follows, the long drive back, the opening of the front door, the calling out that I’m home, mere aftermath and nothing more. This, then, is the by-God end. This is El Cuartelejo, the nation’s northernmost pueblo—the Kansas pueblo—and the sound of it rolls off my tongue like honey. 

Almost I had asked my companions to allow me a solitary approach, a solemn, wordless promenade, but Jim is already halfway there and Chod’s screaming for us to look up, his arms flailing like a fledgling bird or a drowning man, and I follow his finger to a featureless reach of sky that looks like every other reach of sky but where in that vast depthless blue a trace of movement catches my eye, movement magnified through my binoculars into a ragged formation of sandhill cranes heading south. No doubt to join their brethren at Bosque del Apache, where we, too, had been. Full circle, indeed.

It seems there should be more. Having grown up in a country ringed with pueblos, from the ancient Sky City of Acoma, the multi-storied Taos Pueblo, Isleta, Jemez, Nambe, San Ildefonso, Cochiti and others strung like pendants along the upper Rio Grande, to the astral-aligned ruins of Chetro Ketl, Pueblo Bonito and Aztec, I had imagined something similar, close-knitted stone and mud daub, fawn-colored adobe prickly with wooden vigas, structures built for eternity but now an inhabitance only of the wind’s incessant lullaby. So little remains. Even the stones have softened and melted away.  

What’s left is this: seven narrow rooms, an outline in the soil, an artist’s rendition. Leaves shimmying in the wind. Cranes fleeing the onslaught of winter. And three tired men wordlessly paying their respects before turning away.

***

We would not camp. That was decided almost from the beginning. With Jim in the shower, I told Chod at breakfast of our conversation, how he wanted to cut the trip short and run for home. 

“And you?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Either way’s fine with me.”

Nothing more was said. In the predawn darkness we loaded the truck, bundled against the frigid wind, cursing the cold. Once inside, Jim announced that the selfsame wind would make Palo Duro Canyon unendurable. Chod, to his credit, didn’t even blink. “We’re going home,” he said.

And so it was settled. I nosed the truck onto the interstate and headed north, traffic mercifully thin, the sun just breaking the horizon to cast shadows onto the rolling contours of the Llano Estacado, or Staked Plains. The Canadian River a demarcation, the land beyond leveling out into a parallax shift whose horizontic measure was of sky and more sky and a minimum of terra firma, and upon whose surface we traversed like blind prophets seeing the end of times and little more. Small towns came and went without distinction nor characteristic other than of something to be left behind. Their names not even registering as we focused on destinations unique to each vision. Conversation sagged under the weight of that limitless sky.

Only Dumas, Texas, provided any comic relief. The name lent itself to a crude appellation we were quick to exploit, and we were even quicker to exploit the small museum advertising free coffee and clean restrooms. The proprietor showed us the exhibits while proudly lauding Dumas’s claim to fame—a hit song from the 1920s with the dubious title of “I’m a Ding Dong Daddy from Dumas.” 

So popular was the tune that it ended up on the Jack Benny Radio Show. After World War II, residents organized radio station KDDD, appropriately enough. The success of a caricature of the Dumas Ding Dong Daddy spurred the creation of a second Dong, this one named the Ding Dong Dolly from Dumas. This Dolly looked equally as ditzy as Daddy but with none of the bountiful attributes of that other, more famous, Dolly. 

He also mentioned that the main communal event is called “Dumas Dogie Days.” 

The coffee was good, the restrooms better, but there were altogether too many Ds for our liking. We didn’t deign to dally.

The sun rose to its apogee and began its long descent. Oklahoma came and went, and the border of Kansas, and still we maintained our northerly course. Past Scott City we turned westward and the flat land rumpled into creases and folds, and so we came at last to a lake shining bright where once the Plains Apaches held sway and, for a brief two decades, a tribe of Puebloans escaped Spanish dominion to create a downsized version of their mudwalled Taos homeland. El Cuartelejo.

***

It’s over. Cameras are put away, binoculars cased. Chod takes over driving, Jim moves to the front seat, me to the back. It’s 2:55 p.m.

And now I imagine the aftermath. Stepping inside the house and calling out, Sheba’s ears perking up, Lori moving to meet me…

Lori. This is where the road to Chetro Ketl finally leads. My sweet wife, my center place, I am coming home.

.