I was about half way to Wilcox, AZ when the storm kicked up.
According to my GPS, it's about 6 hours from Alamogordo, NM to the church in Wilcox, AZ.
An hour and a half or so down White Sands Blvd. (also 82) to Las Cruces where you pick I 10, make a right, and bear down for a 4 hour blast thru the 100 + degree heat.
I had gone back to the Verizon store in Alamogordo to get help transferring data from the dead (now suddenly reanimated) phone to the new Iphone. Got to see Miss Alexis, who was so helpful and sweet the night before, again and got instructions on how to transfer the data via Itunes.
Since I wanted to get my contacts transferred into the new phone before I got out on the road (having learned the necessity of having a working phone while broken down - twice) I decided to take Miss Alexis's suggestion of Hi-D-Ho for lunch.
Hi-D-Ho is an old style, drive-up diner, similar to Dino's in Winter Haven or the original Varsity in Atlanta. Talked to the owner, Robin, about my trip. She took my picture to put on her wall to join what looked like thousands of others and I took several of the diner to put here, on the blog. (still trying to retrieve from old phone).
After a very enjoyable, "Tiger Burger" plus onion rings and sweet tea, I cranked up the machine and got out onto 82 South.
I had been told many times how there was nothing to see out in west Texas and beyond. That you really had to just put the hammer down and grin and bear it for 2-3 days of hard riding thru heat and dust and emptiness. And, while there's certainly some truth in that, for me I've found an unexpected beauty in it. After San Antonio, I 10 takes you thru land hardly touched by man since those great paleolithic seas receded eons ago. The landscape is almost universally brown with occasional dots of greenish-brown shrubs and weak, desperate trees struggling out in the sand and heat to keep a foothold. The only break being the odd outcropping of limestone that pop up here and there along side the road. But instead of being bored or wanting to just get thru it, I found a sort of rugged beauty to the landscape. I found it to be oddly calming and serene to look out and see that desolation stretch out to the horizon. Maybe it's being on the bike; the feeling of being more connected to the landscape, being more a part of it than you might experience in a car. And when the interstate cut right thru the limestone outcroppings, I was exhilirated and revived and happy to be there in the middle of it.
The sound of a big V-twin at 75 miles an hour, echoing off sheer limestone walls 50 foot high on either side of the hiway was absolutely epic and looking out at all that desolate beauty filled my heart and soul with peace and I felt a sudden connection to all of the those lone travelers and explorers that had come this way before, whether in cars and trucks and motorcycles, or in wagons, on horses and mules.
From Velasquez to Lewis and Clark to Sir Edmund Hillary, men have been wondering what's on the other side of that river, just past that curve in the horizon, or out beyond that mountain, and I felt a strange connection to them. That burning to go out and see what's to be seen, to find out what's to be found, to live and experience the things that don't exist in the place you were born and raised.
You have to become a part of the picture to really experience it; you have to brush yourself into some corner of that painting in order to really know what the original master had in mind.
On the bike you feel every part of the landscape you're passing thru and I stopped feeling like a guest, an observer, or a tourist, and started feeling a sense of belonging to it, whatever that moment of "it" was.
Even in the 100+ degree heat, the wind, the rain, the tiredness, the breakdowns, and maybe because of all of those things, I could feel a little of those early travelers blood in my veins, and that irresistable urge to go on despite those momentary hardships. And even when I stood for hours on the side of the road waiting for a tow back to civilization, I felt a peacefulness fill up inside me that made it ok to be there, right there, at that exact place and time, as if I had joined that long stream of history that pulled those others along, and the tranquility from that sense of being and belonging over took the sunburn and thirst and exhaustion. For every second of those moments of peace, I paid in hours of heat and miles of hiway, but they were worth it at twice the price.
Coming thru the limestone cuts on I10 in Texas and seeing the wide open plains unfold in front of me, or seeing the cliffs and mountains where once the Apache and Comanche ruled and looking over their vast open kingdom of fir and cedar covered mountains, has been positively exhilirating.
Odd moments stick out, like last night when I looked up at the clouds above me, here in Lordsburg, NM, and saw, perfectly formed, the face of a child staring down at me. I could see the eyes right down to the lashes, a beautifully formed nose, the lips and ears and even the little baby fat around the neck and chin. It was utterly breathtaking and I don't recall ever seeing anything like it before, and even in my state of exhaustion and aggravation for not making it to the church as planned, I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be: sitting on a sidewalk, outside a hotel, watching the clouds pass over, in Lordsburg, NM, 2,200 miles from home, with that giant toddler with his angel's face, staring down and watching over me.
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