The Last Leg Sticks Out...

I made it. I can hardly believe it, but I made it. In one piece, even.

New Mexico is a hot, arid state - not one in which you'd want to break down. The northern part of the state is distinct from the southern part in both topography and attitude; the former is sparsely populated, moister and pleasingly rough, while the latter is more densely populated, drier and rather flat. All parts of the state, however, are beautiful and the people are prone to asking you if you want your burrito topped with red, green or 'christmas' chilies (I generally choose green).



After a night or two of hanging out with my friend Keith and getting far too drunk, he and I hiked out into Chaco Canyon, an anthropologically interesting chunk of New Mexico that the Pueblo Indians have held sacred for millennia. These same indians built massive, multi-story buildings there thousands of years ago for purposes of worship and pilgrimage. Most of the foundations of these buildings still stand and are intact enough to scramble over and get a sense how grand they used to be. One can still find the odd potsherd here and there, even, as evidence of the previous centuries of religious activity. One can also find caravan after caravan of elderly, pasty white folks there to take in all the splendor of their native land's history and heritage at the expense of a few footfalls of disrespect to the former inhabitant's idea of inviolable sacrament.



I was there to add to the footprints and see what had been described to me as the Pueblo Indian's Mecca. Mecca of a sort it may be, but a Mecca less used by the devoted and more ambled over by the retired. Keith and I took his dog, Cricket, up to the top of the mesa above the regularly visited pueblos and visited the farthest and least accessible sight - Pueblo Alto. The trip was indeed the destination, as Pueblo Alto is nothing more than a pile of rocks. I did, however, find a potsherd, which made me giddy all over. It was a taxing hike, but well worth the effort. The views of the canyon from the top of the mesa were splendid.

I left Albuquerque early in the morning and headed out through the high desert again, stopping in Cuba, New Mexico to grab a breakfast burrito and a coffee. Two cops in the cafe eyed me suspiciously for the entirety of my meal, mostly as a result of a fat black fly that kept buzzing around my head while I ate. I kept swatting at the fly when it got too close and I'm sure the cops were sitting too far away from me to see the little guy, which made me look like I was swearing periodically and batting at thin air. Happily, they were too busy to bother with a drifter nut like me and left me alone. Still, I left the cafe after they did, careful to make sure they'd driven well away before I started up.



I rode for a few hours before getting into Arizona and some of the weirdest country I've ever been to. Large red rocks that looked like petrified tidal waves bulged out from either side of the road in some areas. In others, nothing but flat chaparral plain rolled away to the horizon, broken only by massive spiky rocks that looked like castles made by some malign Colossi. It was hot, I'll say that for Arizona, and dry. Eventually I got to the famous Four Corners Monument, which is the very definition of a tourist trap. There is literally nothing at all there other than the monument itself. State flags form a ring around a squat chunk of granite with a plaque on it telling you that you are in the only place in the lower 48 where you can see four states all at once. That's it. The trouble with this arrangement is that the parts of the four states you can see all look exactly the same. I challenge the park ranger himself to identify one state from the other after being blindfolded, forced to drink four beers and spun around a few times. He'd be stymied. Anyway, it costs three bucks to get in. Skip it.

Carrying on through the desert for hundreds upon hundreds of miles I found one thing to be true of the American west - If the pioneers weren't driven crazy driving their wagons through the monotony of Oklahoma, then the weakest of the hardy souls who did make it through might easily have succumbed to the almost unimaginably inhospitable and difficult to traverse southwest. If the landscape wasn't busy whipping between flat plain and steep arroyos, it was churning itself up into cyclopean spasms of geography too bizarre to imagine, let alone drag a wagon across. And if your wagon was strong enough to hold together over that stuff, you were almost certain to die of thirst or exposure. If you were tough enough to endure the topography, the climate and the company of your fellow travelers, you were about as likely as not to be attacked and killed by indians. Crossing this part of the country gave me a new appreciation for the amazing people who crossed it before I did, and made the western portion of the US what it is. Tough sons-of-bitches, those.

I stopped over at Lake Powell Dam, a stately dam that holds back an inviting blue lake that sprawls it's way improbably through the vast arid expanse that is Arizona. I pulled off my helmet and got out my camera and had a brief and unsatisfying chat with the only other motorcycle riders I saw there; the only unfriendly Australians I've ever met. They were both fat and old and sweaty and may not have been in the best of moods after riding under the sun all day. Still, they still struck me as clipped in conversation and tart in disposition and seemed to be having a terrible time on their ride. I shortly excused myself from the conversation, took a few pictures and left, riding out toward Zion National Monument.

After the dam the countryside just kept getting weirder and weirder, larger and larger. I skipped across the terrain, waving to the odd motorcycle rider going the other way, and occasionally bumping into the same fellas now and again. Two of them were from Mississippi, near where I'd lived when I was 17. They were a couple of buddies riding out to the Colorado River to take a two-week white-water camping trip with a bunch of their friends. I chatted with them for about an hour under a gas station awning while I let the Cricket (my bike) cool down, then bid them farewell as I shot off to Utah and they rode off toward the Grand Canyon.



Zion National Park is a beautiful place. The country gets big just south of it, and as you enter from the east the mountains on either side of you shoot up through the sky in a gorgeous tapestry of geological strata. The roads are well manicured and wind through the park in such a way that you get a pretty good look at the amazing peaks all around you. Then suddenly the road dips into a tunnel that takes you right through the middle of a mountain. Upon exiting the bowels of this mountain you are spewed back out onto a winding series of switchbacks that wend their way down the mountain and are the perfect place to take a snapshot or two of the even more amazing sights that now surround you. Many of your fellow travelers get the same idea, so you spend some part of the trip trying not to run over the breathless pack of Germans in the middle of the road, but I guess that adds to the charm some. On the west side of the park is a little pocket of wealthy-tourist shops and RV parks. It seemed like a bit of an incongruous ending to a trip of such stunning natural beauty and the campgrounds were all full anyway, so I left Zion, shooting down toward Las Vegas and the Valley of Fire.



I read a community weblog a lot that is just chocked full of good people who post interesting things all the time (link), and I'd asked some people on there if there would be any places I shouldn't miss seeing on this trip. One person made me promise to visit the Valley of Fire, and I can report here that I was not disappointed by doing so. Like many places in the American West, the Valley of Fire is composed mostly of interesting formations of unusual rocks, so if you're not into geology or vast expanses of tremendous emptiness broken only by landscapes that look like they sprang directly from the mind of Hieronymus Bosch then maybe you should stick to the cities. If you are floored by natural splendor and the inexplicable randomness of this amazing planet we live on, then visit the Valley of Fire. One note, it is so dry there that hoards of bees will descend upon any moisture they can find. It's true - I poured a small amount of water on the ground and within four minutes it was covered by about thirty bees. Amazing. Oh, I saw an owl in the desert, too.



I camped at the Valley of Fire (our National Park Service does an amazing job, by the way) and in the morning shot out to Vegas and the Hoover Dam. I used to hang out in Las Vegas once in a while when I was a kid (it's a skateboarding paradise), and because of proximity I've been there as an adult enough to know that it's kind of a creepy place, but one thing I've never done there is see the Hoover Dam. It's an engineering marvel that is just crawling with tourists. There is a vehicle check as you enter and tour groups that leave the top of the dam at regular intervals. I don't want to front here so I'll admit that I just snapped a few pix and left, but I will definitely go back for the tour at a later date. That thing is massive and has been out there forever.

Another thing I've somehow managed to avoid my entire life is Death Valley. Illustrations in an old Funk and Wagnals Picture Encyclopedia I had as a child had an entry for Death Valley under a picture of a desiccated pioneer leaning up against a rock and gripping an empty water bag. That picture has always lingered in my head somewhere, waiting for the mention of its association, so I guess I've subconsciously avoided the place out of fear. If there's any time to throw caution to the wind and confront your fears, though, it's on a cross-country motorcycle trip, so I stood in a gas station at a crossroads that lead to Las Vegas, Area 51 and Death Valley, planning a course through Death Valley and taking nervous sips from a bottle of sun-heated water.



Death Valley's fucking hot. Hot as fuck. Let me repeat here, just to be clear - Holy Fuck, Death Valley's hot. Like opening an oven set to 'broil' and jamming your head in there with the fan on. Hot and drier than anywhere you've ever been and more barren than any place you can imagine and harrowingly devoid of life - even plant life. Everyone knows that the pit of Death Valley is a couple of hundred feet below sea level, but as you descend into that lifeless basin, passing withered shrubs and chasms of arid rock and signs that warn you of severe heat damage in the valley ahead of you, warn you to pull over if you need to stop lest your tires melt into the unimaginably hot pavement, your mind flits through your list of supplies, trying to make sure you have enough water to survive even an hour of helplessness in this unimaginable heat barren. The floor of Death Valley is strewn with black rocks and sand. In the center of the valley are sand dunes a hundred feet high. The heat is unendurable, withering in the shade and more intense than anything you have ever known. Once you climb the hill out of the valley, thanking God for seeing you through one of the most trying episodes of your trip, you immediately descend into another God-damned (literally, seemingly) valley, and your heart sinks in your chest in a way you didn't know it could. Mine did, and I'll bet you a dollar that if you rode through Death Valley on a motorbike yours would, too.

In the middle of Death Valley, right in the center of this seemingly extra-terrine expanse, is a fucking adobe house. Remember those intrepid pioneers I wrote about earlier? Well, this is evidence of the craziest of them. Someone a couple of hundred years ago saw fit to build a house in the middle of Death Valley. They must have thought that if things had gotten this bad by this point, they were probably only going to get worse from here on out. Who could blame them after Oklahoma? But, Jesus - to build a house? Turn back, man! Get out of there!

(It is appropriate to note here that I got to San Francisco the same day that I crossed Death Valley, and I weighed myself as soon as I got in the apartment - I'd lost 10 pounds. 10 pounds of moisture, evaporated straight off my body by the unremitting sun of that blasted abyss. Poof! - Gone. Terrifying.)

I called Halima from Bishop, California, to tell her that I'd made it through Death Valley and would be camping in Yosemite that night. She said she was glad I was safe and that she was looking forward to seeing me. We hung up and I had an almost uncontrollable urge to drink five coffees and drive all the way to Oakland as fast as I could. I had another tug from my hot-as-Hades water bottle and headed out again.

I'd intended to camp out in Yosemite for the night, but once I'd gotten there I found every campsite in the park completely full. It was the last week of summer for California college students, something I hadn't even thought about at the beginning of my trip, and I guess this was last-gasp camping for much of the student body. Yosemite has some of the most stunning scenery that I've ever seen, anywhere, and is strangely well built up for camping, hiking and even shopping. The visitor's center is like a mall - a mall by a river under the most gorgeous waterfall you've ever seen in your life. Really, Yosemite is a place I'll be visiting again now that I live so close to it - Yay! - but while I was on my trip it was kind of a bust.

To explain; it was eight o'clock at night, all the campgrounds were full and I was 120 miles from my girl - a girl I love more than anything and who I hadn't seen in two frikkin' weeks. I felt a compelling desire to just suck it up and make the trip the rest of the way out to the coast, you know?

To explain further; riding a motorcycle cross-country is a lot harder than you think. Whether you have visions of Jack Nicholson grinning from the back of a chopper piloted by Peter Fonda, or that dirty biker-assassin from Raising Arizona grimacing as he barrels through the Arizona heat, or Ewan McGregor and Charlie Borman mugging from a train in Siberia, riding a motorcycle long-distance is a grueling endeavor and is much harder that popular images portray it to be. The best advice I got was to take an Advil in the morning and wear earplugs all day, both of which I did - but there is nothing you can do about the inevitable pain you will get in your ass from sitting on a vibrating, shambling, lurching, woefully unpadded machine atop of which you can't move too awfully much. It's hard on your ass and ears, yes, but it's also pretty hard on your inner thighs and neck, as the wind tries to whip them around as much as it can while you try your damnedest to not let it. Anyway, it's hard.

So there I was, exhausted, ten pounds lighter from my trip through the Cursed Earth and not fed since New Mexico,trying to wager the risk of riding in that condition against my desire to see my girl and sleep in a bed with my arms wrapped around her for the first time in weeks. True to my dim-witted nature, I chose to press on.

I almost died. Northwestern California is a rugged and topographically varied countryside, chocked full of curves in the road you can't see until you're upon them and drivers who know the terrain so much better than you do that they ride your rear wheel, hard, until you get out of their way. I'm sure the daylight ride is stunning, but at night this stretch of road is a bit less than inviting to the uninitiated. I almost hit a deer, I almost shot off the road at sixty miles an hour because I didn't see the curve coming until almost too late, I almost fell asleep on a straight patch and narrowly avoided swerving under an 18-wheeler, I almost rode off a cliff I didn't see until the last moment, I almost ran over a group of drunken hotties in a little town among the sequoias and I nearly got lost on a poorly marked bundle of highways outside of Oakland. The upshot of all this was that when I rode up the street that led to my girl's place, the apartment of a friend of hers who'd been good enough to let her stay there for the previous week and a half, she heard me coming. I parked the Cricket, pulled my rusty bones off of it and brushed the dust from my now sun-bleached jacket, and yanked off my bug-encrusted helmet just in time to see Halima running up the street to me, squealing and holding her arms out. We hugged for what felt like an hour and I felt the bones in my back creak with relief. I pulled out my flask of Laphroig, which I'd saved for just this moment, and we toasted our reunion, then we took a walk around the neighborhood and filled each other in on what had been going through our minds for the past two weeks. I went to bed that night happy to be with her again and ever so slightly tipsy.

I'd be lying if I said that I was glad the trip was over, however. As uncomfortable as it could be riding that bike, as tiny and insignificant as the massive country in which I live could make me feel at times, as gloomy as the weather and topography could occasionally get, I had an amazing time on the road. I will look back on this experience as one of the best of my life, and hope to do more, harder and longer trips from this point on. I'm so glad that I've done this - it's like a challenge met that I never have to think about again (though I'm sure I will).

So, at this point Halima and I have been in San Francisco proper for about a week and a half. I've done a few days work for a skipper I helped build a boat back in St. Augustine several years ago, and he's been good enough to put us up in his place for a couple of weeks while we look for an apartment. I've reconnected with an old friend or two, seen a couple of shows and begun to get a general sense of the lay of the land. Too much has gone on already to write about, really, until I have time to digest a little and make sense of it all. I will write here that San Francisco is a massive and amazing city, and I can see myslef being happy here for a very long time. that's a pretty bland thing to write, I know, so I promise you here, friends, that I will get much more detailed later on. Suffice to say for the time being, however, that I made it and am well.

Thank you so much for reading this. More to come soon, I promise you.