Tuesday
August 23, 2005
More ridiculous beauty.
Leaving town on switchbacks up a mountain into miles of forest, five years ago charred by an out-of-control, government-controlled, burn; fuzzy green life peeks up under charcoal. Elk crossing signs are followed by (cue the elk) a herd of elk and on this far side of the mountain, the side with no fire, a sign with a stick figure man on it says, Congested Area but since the fifteen cars on the fringe of Los Alamos I've seen no cars and no people.
This side of the mountain is the most beautiful place on earth I've never heard of, Valles Caldera. It is a miles-wide bowl, a million years old, cuddled under hills and down below, where the volcano blew, animals graze on thick grass and bellow their sounds away before they bounce back. This is not a striking and severe beauty of rocks and angles like the rest of New Mexico. This beauty is a large and lush, every shade of green, never-want-to-leave-it, beauty.
I feel no world outside of this valley, no Crawford, no Iraq, no back home. No UFO museum, no Little Boy, no Fat Man, no Fat Rush. No yelling, no preaching, no headache, no back pain, no chest pain, no thought, no jokes, no nothing. Maybe not even me. It's just back of the moon quiet broken by the occasional elk snort.
A few miles later at the next pedestrian crossing where no pedestrians cross, someone has stuck a UFO-face on the head of the crossing pedestrian and it is very funny. And just a little farther down the road someone else has shot a deer crossing sign, which, after ten thousand shot deer signs, is not at all funny.
I ask for directions from the man who owns the general store at the "Y" in the road. He moved up here from Albuquerque in the spring to change his life in mid-life.
"Which way should I go?"
"Either way," he says. He is Zen.
"How long will it take?"
"All the same."
One way is seventy miles and paved, the other is forty, half dirt, half paved.
"I'd take the dirt. More interesting," he says.
The road goes washboard at ten miles, just as a large municipal garbage truck rumbles down the steep mountain kicking up dust and pebbles and smell. I eventually rise 10,000 feet, cutting and switching back and forth, five miles per hour, through forest and past small streams and a pond and piles of elk shit. It is colder, higher, about forty degrees. Days of nine hundred mile drives are over, now sixty or seventy miles seem like a lot and these twenty miles of dirt is a full day. Everything has slowed.
An old lady walks alongside the road, she wears a wide hat and pushes on a cane and looks up and smiles and waves when I drive past. A young-guy truck driver driving down the mountain at three miles per hour smiles and waves, too. A giant tree two feet from the road is burnt, root to branch. It is the only one and is the prettiest of them all and I stop my car in the middle of the road, walk over and examine it.
Don Imus shows up on the radio but only for an instant. Click off.
Down the mountain and out of the woods, and I begin a conversation with a flag-woman at a road construction site. She says the project should have been long done but concrete is in short supply, new Wal-Marts have first dibs and use it all up.
Crossing the continental divide, every drop of water falling left runs to the Pacific, every drop right runs to the Atlantic, one way or the other. There is no middle ground, no pond, no place to settle and collect before moving on. Only left or right and the dry land looks worn down by these drops running one way or the other.
And so many microwave towers on top of the mesas and they are so ugly and they connect everything in the world whether or not they want to, or should be, connected. The radio lands on an Indian language station. I cannot understand a thing, it sounds like the Beatles when they went through their "play the record backward" phase, think the end of "Strawberry Fields Forever." Then I hear the DJ tell a joke and I get the rhythm and the timing – the set up has the same feel, the punch line does, too. And then the laugh. And that is just the same everywhere.
Why did the snake slither across the road? Thump, thump. Dead now. We'll never know.
Bloomfield and then Farmington and later Shiprock and water in a river which is rare, and another Baptist Church which is not, and a racetrack and casino, bigger and newer than Hinsdale - thirty acres of parking and a double deck grandstand, and a Halliburton building right along the road nestled between real estate businesses, liquor stores and pawn shops, and a massive "Jesus Is Watching You" billboard ten yards beyond and high above a GIANT adult video store and later another billboard – "Pro Se Divorces $250" - next to the "Adult Couples Mega Store." Everyone fishing where the fish are.
There are many signs along the road for fresh-killed mutton and the first newly killed dog of the trip lies bloody and torn in the breakdown lane.
An Indian man walks across a bridge and he's dressed how I imagine a cowboy would dress - in a broad white cowboy hat and tight pressed blue jeans with a fresh white linen shirt and pointy-shiny cowboy boots and mirrored sunglasses and a big silver buckle holding in only the lower half of his rolling belly.
Local radio news on the Indian station (in English): "The school board decided last night that alternatives to evolution must be taught in all schools in the county." Do they mean Lakota and Hopi and Navajo and Hindu and Muslim and Buddhist and more? Probably not. Probably just Baptist.
National radio news: President Bush is in Idaho on vacation from his Crawford vacation and evangelical TV preacher Pat Robertson said we should assassinate the President of Venezuela.
Hamburger joint: "God Bless America and Breakfast Burritos to go."