When I rolled in very late last night it occurred to me that I wouldn't find cheap lodging here. I was right. But this place sets me up just fine at $70. Free breakfast anyway. The woman behind this bar here is calling me Sweetie.
I'm taking the day off. I'm tired of driving.
June 29, 10:30pm. Moab.
Camping in the coolest campground. A veritable B&B for tents. Grass for tent pitching. Showers. Ice. Cheap. No RVs allowed, just cars and tents. Gotta walk your tent from the parking area to the camping area. It's a good trick for keeping the RVs out.
If all goes well, tomorrow I'll be biking through Arches.
Bummed around the Rio Grande yesterday. Taos, Santa Fe, Bandelier, and Los Alamos.
After breakfast went for a swim in the public pool in Taos. One thousand yards—not very far. I was the youngest person in the place except for the trio of lifeguards, who were all under 18.
Then I got on the bike and rode around the town. Disappointed to see that culture has been obliterated by the same generic indian art you can buy anywhere and the stores were stocked with salespeople fresh from LA or Santa Fe they wear so much make-up and care so little.
Couldn't even find a taco joint. Found a boy selling burritos from a cart. Bought a coke from a nearby Thai noodle stand then returned to the boy for a burrito. He said he thought I was going to buy noodles. Said some days everyone buys the noodles. In New Mexico? Yeah, he said, I don't why.
Good burrito. Whole beans spiced and green chiles added.
Driving in daylight again, along the Rio Grande. Up north the river valley is quite narrow and rocky. Scrub brush and hardy trees. Almost unremarkable except for the way it offsets the sky, which is humongous and close and agitated with clouds, some small and puffy swimming in schools or purple thunderheads staining the horizon.
I love New Mexico. I'm very at home here but it's been awhile since my last visit. Driving along the Rio Grande reminded me of the last time when it was too hot to move and I spent many hours sitting beneath a tree watching the sky thunder through.
But I hate the way all things native and local are exploited. Not just the art but social position is manufactured to fit the idea of New Mexico.
Tourists walk around in their Kokopelli sweatshirts, their turquoise jewelry, their chili pepper anything, ignorant of the lie, or not caring. They come to New Mexico to see indian stuff and as long as it looks indian that's good enough. But as long they don't have to really deal with indian stuff, all the better. As long as an air-conditioned store or gallery or restaurant peddling homogenized, all-american goods is within easy reach, they don't have to be touched by the place.
It's bad like this: The café where I ate breakfast was painted in a turquoise motif, the color of Mary's eyes. In the center of the room, wholly turquoise, was a totem pole stacked with unrecognizable northwest coast figures.
In Santa Fe I only wanted to walk the plaza looking for a piece of jewelry. I have something in mind that I'm looking for but nothing there came close.
It's the same thing there as Taos: indians sitting on the plaza selling jewelry for cheap among countless galleries and generic clothing dealers raking in the cash. GAP has a store on the plaza itself.
This really bothers me.
Next was the Georgia O'Keefe museum, also a disappointment because of its pitifully small display. Loved seeing what originals were there though, walking right up to the canvas to view the brush strokes and imagining her hand making them. Got shivers over my cheeks and down my neck seeing them life-size and brilliant.
Back on the road for Bandelier and Los Alamos. Hiked around Bandelier, which was cool but not so much as Mesa Verde. At the far end of the trail among the ruins was a giant bat cave. Strong guano smell and funny sounds came from there.
Camped at Bandelier.
Big fucking bugs in New Mexico. Had a hard time finding a camp spot that didn't come with its own ant nest. In the bathroom the carnage was so severe ten stranded campers could've eaten for days. Giant moths beat themselves up trying to get out. Flying ants. Beetles. I kicked one by accident and it scraped across the floor on its back, it's underside and legs groping for upright.
Drove into town and the evening looking for provisions. Took a long time to find a grocery store and when I found one it was late and the deli was closed and the shelves needed re-stocking. I bought a pre-configured salad in a bag, which was a convenient invention I thought. I opened the bag, dumped out the small bags of croutons and dressing into the big bag, added a mushroom and dried cranberries I'd bought separately, and ate it like that. Also bought more soy milk and cereal and fruit. Bought a donut for dessert that I said to myself I would only eat half of after dinner but I knew it was a lie even as the thought surfaced.
I didn't sleep well. The Thermarest is one of the things I forgot and the ground was hard. I kept waking up and once when I woke up I heard a low throbbing bellow that was similar to an atrocious snore. I thought it might've been one of the other campers, but it seemed to move to and fro, quieting and swelling. Who knows what it was.
The occasional clawing I heard on the side of the tent I imagined were beetles and not tarantulas.
So this morning another pool, this one in Los Alamos. This one's a competition pool, sized in meters with a massive deep end. The lanes were super-wide and I had one to myself. I aimed to swim continuously for a thousand meters and I did it. Fourteen hundred meters in all.
Spent some time trying to learn about the Manhattan Project but Los Alamos doesn't really want to dwell on the past. New laboratories are everywhere and scientist types line the streets on bicycles and in their cars. Everything I learned about atomic history at Los Alamos I already knew except that Oppenheimer was only 40 and the average age of the physicists working under him was 29. I also enjoyed reading personal accounts of what it was like to live there during the war. One funny thing is that the local physician was kept busy delivering babies. Most scientists were young and recently married. Besides the project, there was little else to do, apparently.
Street names include, Trinity Drive and Bikini Atoll Road. Was a little funny and eerie to see them—like driving on pathways of destruction.
Back on the road, heading for Utah. Drove through the most beautiful Jemez Mountains, the Los Alamos end of which were blackened and dead from the recent fire. I think I like the trees better like that. Not completely combusted, many trees were bare and charred from the ground up to about half height where the needles appeared merely rusted and gorgeous against the scorched trunk and limbs. Higher still the rust blended to a green the shade of the name of the trees.
Then into the high baking desert, windy, with roving thunderheads. The sky was glorious and I thought maybe why I like the area so much despite the obvious lack of water is that the sky is like the ocean turned upside down, the clouds kissing the horizon in waves. Thunderclouds are humongous invertebrates feeding off the bottom, scraping it with purple and slobbery tendrils.
It started to get really hot around Shiprock. I mean, hot. And dusty. No escaping burning because I had to have the windows opened completely. (No air conditioning.) And despite driving straight for bruising and electric thunderclouds for hours, only a few drops of respite.
The direct sunlight seared and besides being painful I began to worry for my skin so I constructed a burnous out of the towels on hand and drove like that.
Shiprock was very cool, like a sea stack.
It is a sea stack.
Then four corners, a hideous baking place I only stopped in long enough to pee and buy Navajo frybread.
Then driving on the tiniest, remotest roads for Utah and Moab, hauling ass to make it before sundown so I could pitch a tent. I made it with daylight to spare.
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