It’s not the only measure, but the ratio of sweet to bitter when leaving a place seems a real reading of the heart. Feelings spiritual and physical accompany any location. Some people seem more sensitive to this than others. Certainly I am. When a physical location has no resonance emotionally, I am dislocated; any place I feel emotionally grounded is one that presses on me physically.
Leaving Salida a week ago had the right ratio. My heart put on several pounds the evening we said goodbye to our friends and family and pulled up the last stakes, but rolling out the next morning brought with it the familiar clearing of mind that comes with significant action. Eventually you have to close the eyes in the back of your head and focus only on what might be ahead.
New Mexico has always pressed on me. The expanse of it, the color and the light, and the wind that tears across it, shredding all flying flags to half their rightful length. Right at this moment, New Mexico is definitely pressing on all of us. Driving out of our recent campsite to make our way to town, the unmistakable sound of a tire blowing out and deflating at high speed had us veering off the road to a stop. Not one tire. Double rear flat, driver’s side. Now we’re parked on a virtually deserted highway listening to the wind shove at the camper. The dog is wiped out, curled up in his spot. The cat sits like a fat, soft pear in the bed, waiting for the next inconvenience while Sacha pages through the owner’s manual to find how far we can limp along on one spare. “Maybe we could get to Carlsbad – It’s 55 miles of perfect road.”
We had spent the last couple of days camping out here, working via hotspot during the mornings and climbing in a deep, remote limestone canyon in the afternoons. The road to the canyon was rough as hell, and we didn’t get too far before we simply had to park the rig. From there, we swung on our climbing packs and rode mountain bikes for 3 miles to the trailhead, stashed bikes in the brush and then hiked another mile down from the rim to the routes, reversing the whole thing once it got dark and riding to the camper by headlamp under the cottony pink moon. Tonight when we drove the rig back down that rock-studded road to the highway, the hubcap must’ve shaken loose — once we were up to speed, it cut loose and ripped both valve stems out of the tires.
Sacha finds what he’s looking for: The recommended maximum distance to travel on one spare tire is 500 feet.
I wonder how many 500 feets to the next human. Even though Carlsbad is about 60 miles away, it’s a wildly barren 60 miles. When we call our insurance’s roadside assistance, we have to give them our latitude and longitude instead of cross streets. And it’s late. 11:30 pm. We’re fried and hungry. Twenty minutes and the loud crinkle of cheap ramen packages later and we’ve all got bellies filled with warm broth. Sleep starts to drag us under, just as the brutal highbeams of the mechanic’s truck shatter through our windshield. Everybody out (but the cat) while he jacks up the rig.
Sacha watches the mechanic’s swift, practiced routine with 3-foot long tire irons, a pneumatic driver and a flashlight. “This isn’t your first rodeo, is it?” Sacha asks. “No sir,” the curt answer that invites no more small talk.
Amato and I huddle on the side of the road with Pocket. Fatigue and annoyance creep around the edges. It’s chilly – not terribly – and incessantly, insistently windy. I think of the shredded New Mexican and American flags we’d seen straining in the gusts along our way. Why would people even come here? We came for climbing, a fringe novelty. But absent that objective, there’s nothing here but yucca and cactus and mescal and agave and rocks and sand and all the animals we can’t see. We don’t have to be here.
What if we had to be here? What if we had no choice but to leave a place, maybe a place we deeply loved, to come here? I think of an account I once read of a Mexican mother crossing the Sonoran desert with her young son to get to the U.S. They dug beds in the dirt to try and keep cool in the day. They carried nothing but a little water, a little food, a desperate drive to get somewhere else. I try to imagine having fled to this desert with my child, for our lives, escaping whatever it might be, heading anywhere safer. Peel off the giant down jackets. Erase the warm soup we just drank, forget feeling safe enough to sleep – daytime, we hide in the dirt. We move at night.
My son and I are sitting in this dirt, among these shrubs, by an embarrassingly privileged choice, with thousands of dollars worth of mountain bikes strapped onto a virtually new vehicle we’ve just called someone else to come fix at nearly midnight on a Wednesday.
We’re tired.
We’re fine.
