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Today has been an interesting day. By interesting I mean completely and utterly SHITTY. Yesterday was quite nice though. I covered approximately fifty miles over about four and a half hours of cycling. That includes stopping for photographs and having lunch at a Subway, so I made pretty great time. That night I camped in Osceola National Forest near to Ocean Pond, a body of water which is as it sounds—a very, very large pond (basically a lake)—and one which I wanted to visit this morning but didn’t due to waking up to precipitation in the form of water falling from the sky. In truth I didn’t really wake up to much rain but I befriended a fellow, Connor, who was traveling by motorcycle (I thought him much smarter than I), and we struck up conversation which of course slowed my packing considerably. Enough so that by the time I DID manage to cram my belongings into the various bags that they only kind of sort of fit in, including the backpack that was not brought along with this intention, the rain, or the day’s SHITTINESS did truly begin.

It was with a sigh of exasperation and arms in the air with resignation and of course-ness that I wandered off along a hard-packed sandy road to Route 90, which, despite it being designated a “route” or highway, is actually relatively quiet and came complete with a cycling lane.

For twenty or so miles I pedaled. The rain let up some, then came down harder, then let up again, then, as though a zipper was undone along the bottom of some bulging cloud above me, rain came down by the bucketsful (as they say). My back ached from the backpack, my thighs chafed from my soaked bibs, and as I slowed down upon arriving at Lake City (checking for coffee and food resources of any kind from my phone) I began to shiver. Not the best set of circumstances to find oneself in.

As there were no small, specialty or family-owned types of cafes in town, I made my way to a Panera on the far western edge of town, chosen for its wi-fi and the heartier food options than the nearby Starbucks. Well? What else is one to do in this situation?

Anyway. I dined on warm carbohydrates, and was bought a coffee by a woman who cycles, runs and generally speaking stays active. We chatted for a bit and it was apparent that she was genuinely enthused about my trip. It was here, after stripping out of my sopping jacket and jersey for a dry top and my insulated jacket, that I decided to seek refuge for the night at the Driftwood Motel, an appropriately named place for the state I was in. So here I am, in Tallahassee, typing this up as though I was still in that motel with the time to write while my tent and other belongings were strewn about the motel room undampening in a pretended state of organization while I prepared my meh dinner of rice, red lentils, zucchini, garlic, and a few snagged basil leaves from a cart of plants lined up against a fence at Walmart.

Hopefully my things dry out completely overnight, though I’m not counting on that, and any rain tomorrow is spottier and weaker. Twenty miles is a pathetic distance for a day, and I’m rather done with this getting soaked business. I should probably just walk back to the Walmart and buy a poncho (assuming they have any)….

November 6, 2016, Bit East of Gallup

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A couple miles off is a train, creeping along beneath towering, red, sandstone cliffs spotlighted by the lowering sun and glowing like they had recently been removed from a forge. The train looks like a toy miniature running on plastic tracks amidst an elaborate display set up on a table in an old firehouse.

November 6, 2016, Thinking Outside Gallup, NM

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Gallup, NM, El Rancho Hotel. Huge, just enormous sort of mansion-like place. Above the front porch is a large sign, clearly visible while hurtling along the highway: “Charm of Yesterday, Convenience of Tomorrow.” Fascinating! Already thinking towards the future. Already in the future! I wonder what Tomorrow’s convenience might be like? Is it better than Today’s? How does it work? Does it know what I want before I want it? Will anything and everything, all my wishes and demands simply be brought to me and dropped at my feet? It’s unfortunate that I won’t be staying here, but am instead just passing through. I’m curious as to what this future will be like. Alas, here I am in the present. Sounds like a good business model though because everyone is either infatuated with and looking back to the past, or obsessed with the future. Very few people seem to be content with the present.

November 6, 2016, North Arizona Landscape

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Arizona landscape driving east from Flagstaff to Santa Fe: a flat plain interrupted by shallow ravines, the occasional wash, plateaus, mesas; dotted with pastel, mute, sagey green shrubs large and small. The occasional tree. The colors of the land, various and multitudinous: greys, siennas (burnt and raw), ochres, umbers, oranges, reds. On the whole, unsurprisingly warm.

Ahead, something that lies visible but which I can never reach, tantalizes with its unknowns, its questions: the horizon, a flat line like that which separates, yet holds together, ocean and sky, as if without it they would burst apart and anything and everything would be flung off, ejected, torn into the vacuum of space.

Very much a ranchers’ landscape and, once a wilderness where buffalo freely roamed, and the Navajo with them (or so I might imagine).

Railroad tracks paralleling Interstate 40, and a miles-long train, its individual cars bound together with an invisible string stretching from coast to coast, like a necklace encircling the throat of our mother, Earth.

Signs for Indian gifts, moccasins.
Earlier: “Petrified Wood From the Forest”
“Rugs”
“Indian Ruins Gas This Exit Save”
“Indian Ruins Exit Don’t Miss It”
“Indian Center”

Here is one of the loveliest, most enchanting landscapes I’ve ever experienced. Today the air so clear. The horizon crisp.

Does a horizon have a beginning or ending? Does it simply go on forever, an arc around a human body? A halo played like a hoola hoop, as well as a symbol of divinity, rather than just worn as a crown?

October 30, 2016, Nogales Borderwall

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So, I’m in Nogales, AZ. Came down here to see the spot where José was shot across the border and killed by U.S. Customs Border police. A sad story, as so much of what regarding the United States’ border with Mexico is, particularly in light of the politics of the day, not least because an innocent boy lost his life and a family lost a son. To add to the family’s pain, it’s nearly impossible to prosecute an officer for an incident of this sort. In fact, to my knowledge, the prosecution, and the found guilty verdict, of the officer who shot José was a first in history. This took yearssss, however. Anyway, just being over by the wall was such a singularly surreal experience. I’d never been anywhere near the U.S.-Mexico border before, and yet there I was standing beneath the wall, peering up at it, and sighting along its length: a twenty-ish foot steel wall, slatted so that one can see through it. A monstrosity which dominates the town because it is so very hilly here, and so it rides those undulations of the hills so that no matter where you are you never lose sight of it. I can only imagine the feelings of the residents on either side of this… thing. I can ONLY imagine, and perhaps my imagination differs from reality. Do they feel like caged rats, subjects in someone’s science experiment? A remarkably sentient tropical fish swimming back and forth along the glass of an aquarium?

This is just the silliest thing in the world to me, that we create these barriers around each other, because, really, we’re all humans. We’re all the same people, essentially. And when one travels over land, either by bicycle or by car, you see that the land continues, and animal and plant life continues, and it all bleeds and blends together, and fluctuates and changes with climate zones, terrain, soil types, etc. And the fact that we create these borders… I mean the idea of countries is utterly ridiculous. Yes, culturally we might be different, but again, that’s something to be shared, and there’s some of that going on, but at the same time the idea of sticking a huge wall up, like that clown Trump insists, is utterly insane (particularly because there already exist walls along this border where it’s been deemed necessary). That money could go towards countless more beneficial social/industrial/environmental projects rather than trying to divide us further as human beings.

October 29, 2016 Driving (Near Algodones Dunes)

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Mountains brown and black. Not even mountains. Just jagged, ragged hills, like the earth had been wounded some time in the past and the stuff of her oozed out and dried, hardening into thick, ugly scabs—sharp peaks pockmarked, harshly eroded, carved out—not by rain (which never comes)—but dissolved in acid.

There is a rawness and a primalness to this desert landscape that is hellish and unforgiving. It takes life without a thought, desolate and emotionless, dead eyes staring, bloodshot. It cuts one to one’s soul. Painful (nearly) to look at.

October 23, 2016, Around Santa Maria, CA

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California and her rolling hills. Eternally rolling along the 101. Trees sprouting from these hills like spores on a mold. A prehistoric landscape untouched by the hand of man. I see some fences of course. A cow here and there. But otherwise it’s nature, nature in its unaltered original form. Some of the tops of the hills and those in the distance are veiled, obscured in a mist: mere soft silhouettes. Appropriate, because I’m looking far, far into the past…

And I think back to yesterday along Big Sur. About people trying to capture moments and memories with a camera (like clawing at the air, trying to grab it, grasp it, hold it in one’s arms), and watching while driving along the highway, watching the waves hammering continuously against the rock walls, and after we go to bed at night this living world continuing to hammer against these rock walls which will continue to deny it, absorbing blow after blow. And this goes on eternally. After we sleep. After our deepest of sleeps.

California is a magical place. What must settlers have felt when they first arrived here to this bounty? This impossible world where it is spring and summer year round. It is very much an Eden, like that from which Adam and Eve were tossed out I imagine. And here I am, rediscoverying this lost land buried in antiquity and legend. What right do I have to be here?, for surely I am no better than Adam or Eve (though I might have wisdom enough not to take advice from a serpent or snake, unless he was a very tricky and persuasive one, even if I am in the habit of trusting easily).

These hills remind me of bread dough a little bit: in their smoothness very much uniform. Like agglomerations of soil covered with a smooth, even carpet of grass, like a table cloth thrown over a dining table, then stuck with trees like a pin-cushion.

84 – The Face of Joy

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Having left Arcosanti feeling slightly regretful of having not stayed another night, I drove north to the comparatively colder (and wetter) city of Flagstaff. Temperatures were in the 40’s and the rain was coming down by the buckets full. I wanted to go for a run that day as there are trails all over, and so skipped stopping in Sedona unfortunately, but the uninviting weather that greeted me on my arrival at Flagstff discouraged running. I suppose that’s sort of an ironic way of killing two birds with one stone. Oh well. I was happy to check in at Motel Du-Beau, which nowadays is not just a motel but a hostel too.

The motel/hostel is an old, traveler’s motor-hotel (hence, motel, if you didn’t know) from the earliest days of the great American road trip. Opened in 1929 by a French Canadian, it’s original purpose, which it certainly still meets, was to provide a place for traveling motorists to lodge for a night, or several, on their travels across the country. The U-shaped, single story motel is classic in style, and reminiscent of a picture on an old postcard one might find in an antique store. Standing on the opposite side of the street one can easily picture those old, heavy, steel cars of the thirties, forties, fifties… parked out front of each door. Maybe someone is lugging crates of luggage packed full of clothing and souvenirs between a car and room. Others are standing around, slack-jawed, some turning in circles, heads thrown back, gazing up through a confusion of pine needles at the blue sky, smiles on their faces. Despite the rain that appeared with me, and would reappear in bouts throughout the few days I was there, this was how I felt during my time there. In fact, all of Flagstaff struck me as a magical place where one’s head must be thrown back quite regularly to smile at the sun when it’s around, or a bird or tree, the beautiful clouds furling and unfurling, appearing and dissolving, skating across the sky, some marvelous building, or one of the three tall hotel signs from decades ago that are still standing today.

For a city its size it manages to accommodate a much larger population than one might think. Permanent residents are outnumbered by students from the university during the fall, winter and spring months, and during the summer it’s inundated by tourists come to visit the Grand Canyon. What this means is that despite its small size there is a surprisingly large number, almost gratuitous, of restaurants, bars, cafes, and shops for one to peruse.

Despite its proximity to great outdoor adventures and sites, I went on none. Instead I spent much of my time working on this blog, exploring town with my camera, relaxing with a book, and hanging out with this older fellow I met, Marc. His is an interesting story, though short. He lives up in Buffalo and his girlfriend travels a bit as a performance artist. He was on his way here for the third or fourth time to visit her when in Colorado he sent his car several hundred feet down an embankment (incidentally, near where I was staying with my friend Doug, months ago). Somehow he survived this ordeal—he calls it a miracle, which seems to me an apt term—though his car was obviously trashed. Some way, after attending the hospital and apprehending a back brace (yes, that’s all), he continued his way to Flagstaff. I’m not sure how because I never asked, but he was in the room we shared when I arrived and immediately introduced himself, coffee in hand.

A coffee cup isn’t a mere detail with this man because there is nearly always one in his hand, as though he’d lost an appendage and affixed a coffee cup in its place. That leaves him one good hand for holding a cigarette, phone, set of keys, camera, etc. Perfectly fine. Anyway, he felt an affinity for me, and I for him. There was a kindness in his face, an affability, joy. A tiredness in the way he walked it seemed (though that could just be the bad back) that had me feeling a deep sympathy for him. When he smiled, which was often, it was that of a child, and his eyes shown brightly. He listened to me eagerly when I talked about my trip, when I talked about traveling in general. He’s retired and it’s something he wants to do more of. He also wants to leave Buffalo. Move elsewhere. I think part of his journey here was looking for that place. He really enjoyed Flagstaff. He talked about wanting to stay, but unfortunately with the accident it was important that he got home to his family who were naturally concerned for him. He took an Amtrak home the day that I left, though much much earlier in the morning. We said our goodbyes the night before with a simple handshake. Exchanged numbers. He implored me to call him. I haven’t yet, but I was just thinking about this earlier today. I should soon. There are few people in this world that I bond with so quickly. I can’t even say what it is that attracts me to him. He strikes me as a sort of saint. One who smokes cigarettes, is profoundly addicted to caffeine, and listens to a lot of classic rock, but a saint nonetheless. Despite that, I felt that I was the one imparting some sort of esoteric knowledge or wisdom, not he. I’m genuinely curious about what has transpired in his life these past two months since we parted. I still have a number of people to call and get together with here though, too. Well, all in good time! And Merry Christmas to him!, though I know he’s not reading this.

82

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Mission San Xavier late this morning.

Time worn, desert worn, crumbling like the mountains, immaculate beauty, hard calculating exterior shadows, soft and cool interior ones amongst the arches and domes, the smell of burning candle wicks, restoration work occurring amongst the shadows and scaffolding, woman sitting meditatively against a wall. All is peace for a while until the bloke with the noisy camera comes around. Soporific atmosphere, gentle light, gentler shadows, pins placed on St. Francis’ shroud, redbluegold painted walls like Q*bert’s realm, hard wooden pews—arms and seats’ varnish worn through to the wood. That bare wood a symbol for something. Truth?

Last coffee at Cartel, an unexpectedly delightful discovery in Tucson for this coffee geek. Leaving with an astounding P.N.G. Soon to be on my way to Arcosanti.

At Arcosanti now. Dinner. A delicious dinner mind you. Buffet style. I’m well impressed; it’s worth the $10. Somehow ended up at the one table where half the staff is. Not sure why they sat with me with all the empty tables in the place. These two kids in their early twenties are beside me eating, not saying a word. Sort of mumbled conversation after sitting, but the last ten minutes is just the ‘tink’ of fork on plate. Maybe they’re embarrassed that I might hear some juicy, undisclosable secret (though if that’s the case why not just get their own table). Or just boring. Their colleagues beside them are carrying on lively enough. Thank God I’m on the corner. It’s an easy escape if necessary. There are at least ten other empty tables, as I mentioned. What about me is so magnetic? Like Kevin at the AirBnB in Tucson. Wouldn’t stop talking. Latched onto me like a crab. Or a leach. Or a disciple.

I have great neighbors in the bedroom adjacent to mine. Drinking wine and making merry. I’ll have a glass with them when I’ve finished dining. If any is left. They’re peak bagging. All the highest points in each of the fifty states. What a challenge! (and an expense). I rather like the idea. Quite a collection of memories acquired I imagine.

79 – Two Kinds of Desert

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I left Brawley and drove east to Tucson, or nearabouts. The temperatures were in the 90’s and the landscape was dead, or if it wasn’t dead it was dying. Nothing but sand, and the road scoured clean from its blowing incessantly. Some gaunt, skeletal, shrubs, all looking very much stressed by their existence in this demanding environment. About thirty minutes east of Brawley are the Algodones Dunes. The highway splits the dunes into two parts; on the north side is the wilderness which is accessed by a dirt road on its eastern edge, and to the south is the recreation area which allows for dune buggies, dirt bikes, jeeps and anything else capable of taking on the waves of loose sand that are the dunes. Stopping at an overlook off of Hwy. 78, I was fascinated to watch the goings on: all these many and various motorized vehicles zooming and zipping up and over and atop these sand hills, across the landscape for miles around. It’s a form of recreation that doesn’t interest me to pursue myself, but seems quintessentially American, and so fascinates me from the standpoint of the purpose of my trip, which is to discover and photograph things symbolic or representational of America.

I stayed long enough until I felt like I saw all I needed to see and took enough photos to satisfy my curiosity and amazement at the area, before moving along to the wilderness area, which is why I came out all this way in the first place. Interestingly, I think I like the representational aspects of the dirt bikes and dune buggies—tiny specks some of them, like they are themselves mere grains of sand, in this enormous, stark landscape—more.

I was pleasantly surprised despite not hiking all the way to the dunes, which began a couple of miles from the dirt access road. Between these two places was a firmly packed sandy plain spotted with hardy, woody shrubs and bushes (skeletal and gaunt ones too), many of which were leafless and lifeless looking—sticks and twigs bundled together and stuck into the ground by some unseen hand—though many others were not, but were in fact quite sizeable, green even, and lush, which gradually became looser mounds, undulating and dune-like as I moved westward. Feeling the slight pressure of a schedule on my mind I unfortunately did not spend as much time as I would have liked in the dunes (nor walked as far), but I was happy to experience all that I was able in that short time, and to have seen and heard what little wildlife I did in such a vast, dry place. That wildlife included some sort of grasshopper, which was fairly numerous based on their soundings I heard, a Black-tailed jackrabbit, and a Zebra-tailed lizard, several of which I saw scurrying away from me, black and white striped tail erect like a flag. Additionally, I heard some sort of songbird (a sparrow likely) but didn’t see it. I’m going to post up some pictures below of these different places that share the same name and are only separated by a highway, yet are so very obviously different in their appearance and intent of use.

After fixing a flat tire with the help of a couple of nearby Border Patrol agents (my car apparently only came equipped with a jack, no bar for turning said jack, and also no wrench for removing the lugs from the wheel) I continued east where I would end up in Casa Grande in a room large enough to host a yoga class, at a cheap motel owned and recently renovated by Motel 6. In between the dunes and the motel were, strangely enough, a cotton field, corn field, as well as other crops being grown in of all places a desert. Truly baffling that in this extremely arid part of Arizona that there should be any sort of agriculture, but particularly cotton which requires copious amounts of water.

And then there is the Sonoran Desert, beautiful with its forests of Saguaro Cacti (and a sprinkling of a few other low growing shrubs), the only specks of green in this blackened, clay-colored monotony of small mountains and large hills, all jagged like broken teeth, bursting upward like tumors through the skin of the earth, like an inversion of a ragged wound torn into the flesh of an earthly body. Inhospitable. Violent. Primeval. Raw. A landscape of barbarism if there ever was one. I met a skinny, dirty, bearded man with a kind and inward looking countenance at a rest stop, though, where I thought to make a cup of coffee. It was a nice opportunity for a conversation with a fascinating individual, and a time to relax and soak in the landscape, instead of being locked in my car viewing everything through a windshield like watching a television screen, and appreciate it for what it is, which is something absolutely magical. A place where no life should exist, yet has sprung up. A place that no human should see and live to tell of it. Like going to the moon without a suit that preserves some form of atmosphere breathable, hospitable.