6.27.01

June 27, 7:00 a.m. Casper, WY Catch up day. Have to be in New Mexico by tomorrow morning. That's the better half of a thousand miles from here. ++ I took a shortcut on a two-laner in the middle of nowhere with fewer cars than that other road but considerably more comforting scenery. Flying. Against a crosswind that kicked around the bike on the back of the car and jilted the car itself. Flying. Into scads of prairie dogs, sitting up cheerfully and unbelievably cute on the pavement or the shoulder on their hind legs. Casualty: One. Scores others long dead and melting on the road. Stopped at Medicine Bow to mail postcards. This is an old town. A barren town. This is the home of The Virginian Hotel and the book of the same name. No trees, no hills, no people. Few people. I mean, I got out of the car and stood before the highway and it was silent but for something metal clapping somewhere and the whistling wind. And dusty. No cars on the highway. Across the road, buildings all looked dead. From nowhere, a man entered my vision, opened a door and the door shut behind him leaving me alone in a frozen world tortured by suspended dust. So what do I do? I looked both ways, stepped into the highway; crossed it. Inside the post office two people were talking with the clerk. They stopped when I entered. I dropped the cards in the box and left. I tried to enter a store but the door was locked. At the Medicine Bow Museum an old woman tended the counter. She said, "Windy?" The museum itself is filled with The Virginian artifacts and a bunch of stuff local residents cleared from their attics. The best of it includes anecdotal accounts of old Medicine Bow life typed up and hung on the walls. Stories of cowboys' drunken debauchery and train robberies. At the museum I learned that the highway, Hwy 30, traverses the US and is the same 30 I traveled on in Philadelphia. That's the main line. I learned that Medicine Bow used to get quite a bit of traffic but when the interstate bypassed it, the town practically died. The museum said interstate construction has had a more profound effect on the area than any other event in its history. Medicine Bow is my favorite spot so far. I will not forget standing there on that desolate stretch of highway staring at a near ghost town. The rest of the drive to Taos was nearly uneventful. At the Colorado border traffic picked up and generally sucked until well south of Denver. The temperature raged in the 90s and I swung over to Boulder to rest in air-conditioned stores, the same stores you see everywhere else. Boulder then, was a disappointment—just a town like any other town anywhere, except pushed up against a different hill. Long about Pueblo I started feeling tired. Sick of driving and becoming anxious over still heading south, which meant not being even halfway through. Meant, I have to drive four days more. Wished I could put my car on a train for a while. But then the sun began to set and the thunderheads rolling through turned purple and other clouds became orange. And where I was, the clear sky still cobalt, the mood changed. Dark at the border, and Mars and the stars were this close as I turned onto 64 for the 90-mile drive to Taos. Ninety miles in desert darkness. I turned the radio off and it was absolutely silent before the two white lines and the yellow dotted one stretching to infinity. I could see the flatness reflected in the moonlight and it was beautiful. I am at home in New Mexico. I'd forgotten that. At some point the road hits the hills and it curves round and round through trees and over red earth. I saw two wolves and a handful of cars. I saw the stars constantly. I watched the moon lower.

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