Day 32: Tatum, NM to Muleshoe, TX

March 26, 2013

It's just nasty when I pop out of the tent. It's 7:45, all of 27 degrees, and the wind already howls from the south. The weather report says that with the wind chill it feels like 17 degrees and I can't argue. The sun shines and the sky is clear, but otherwise it feels like a frigid winter morning.

My plan for today was to head due east along the area's major highway before hanging a left tomorrow and starting a long push to the north that will take me all the way to Nebraska. But even though I spent a lot of time carefully laying out my route, I don't have any problem tossing it into the ditch alongside the cans of Bud and Bud Light. If the winds are going to come from the south all day, I'm heading north. I don't know where I'll end up, but I'll take the easy miles and figure out the rest as it comes.

Within a mile of the direction change I'm flying at 15 or 16 miles per hour instead of eight. Then I get a hand-to-the-head salute from a passing cattle rancher in white Chevy pickup. Soon after, a herd of pronghorn antelope — maybe the same group I saw yesterday — spots me coming and starts to run in stride with the bike on the other side of the fence for awhile. Donkeys wander over as close to me as they can get when I stop. The cows, who may not have seen more than one or two bicycles in their lives, stare in amazement or confusion as I roll past with legs flailing. They stay still until one of them just can't keep it together and starts to walk away from the fence. Then the entire group decides, yeah, you know what, we've had enough of this too, and then in unison they kick up a giant dust cloud and haul ass to the east. All the way I'm passed by no more than one truck every half hour. It's so much the right way to go.

30 miles in, the road curves to the right, the pavement improves, and time jumps forward an hour. I'm in Texas, the Lone Star State. Or as I like to call it, because of the secession nonsense that comes up whenever taxes are raised or a Democrat is elected President, American Quebec. I feel like a lot of Texans would be impossibly offended to be compared to a bunch of French-Canadians, which makes me like the name even more.

The first truck that passes me is the same white Chevy from earlier, headed back the way from which it came. The red flatbed trailer it tows is no longer empty. On the back sits a dead horse laid on its side, with its stiff and outstretched legs moving up and down in time with the bumps of the road, its body held in place by a few thick yellow straps. It seems a bad omen for the start of my fourth state.

Not much farther up the highway I reach Bledsoe, The shell of a two-story brick school building suggests it used to be a thriving town, but those days are long gone. The school buses have been turned into houses and every business except the unmanned gas station is closed. And even though a hundred or so people still look like they live here, in my 20 minutes hanging out in town I don't see a soul outside and hear the barking of just one dog. The wind still blows strong, which causes the metal parts of abandoned buildings to creak and then bang as they sway back and forth. It's about as close as you can come to a ghost town without the town actually being dead. It's a little sad and more than a little creepy.

But dying towns seem to be the rule out here. I reach Morton in the early afternoon. It's the county seat of this 3,700-person county, but it's lost almost 20 percent of its population over the last 12 or 13 years and it's barely holding on. It's at the intersection of two highways, so there are three gas stations. There's also a grocery store, the Family Dollar store that every small town out here is required to have, a courthouse, and a library. (The library has a massive collection of paperback romance novels, including "His Bride for One Night," "Elusive as the Unicorn," "The Cattleman's Special Delivery," "Mistresses and a Million Dollars," and my favorite, "Taken By Her Greek Boss.")

And that's really it. There aren't any restaurants, clothing or hardware stores, and because it's a dry county, no bars. Junked cars, broken glass, and crumbling sidewalks are spread throughout the town. Ends of the back streets run into dirt and grass and look like they're being reclaimed by the plains. Tumbleweeds and dust clouds and bits of yellowed newspaper drift through the empty streets, which at four lanes wide only help to emphasize what a barren place Morton is. It's a small town without the small town soul. Astonishing is the only way I can describe it. Even if there wasn't a giant tailwind I'd head on to somewhere else as soon as I could.

I can judge the strength of the tailwind by feel. When I get above about 22 miles per hour, the silence of the push from behind is replaced by a slight rushing from ahead that lasts until I start to slow down. That's how much help I've been getting all day.

I enjoy eating up all the empty miles, and I'm happy I'm not fighting the weather, but I still ride with feelings of sadness bumping around in my head. I think about Morton and also Enochs, the next town up the road, which has become a post office surrounded by ruins. One name keeps running through my mind: Detroit. The places out here don't have the crime of decaying urban areas, but the depopulation, the emptiness it leaves behind, and the ways in which buildings and vehicles and streets rust and slump and fold themselves back into the ground over time don't seem so different at all.

The tailwind makes the 35 miles after Morton seem almost effortless. In what feels like not time at all I ride into Muleshoe. That's really its name. There has to be a country-western song somewhere about a guy who's had his heart broken by some two-timing woman from Muleshoe, Texas. I grab dinner at Pizza Hut. Not because it's great, but because it's pizza. Eastern Arizona and all of New Mexico are a pizza wasteland, and I can only keep this train rolling for so long on overly spicy Tex-Mex enchiladas.

Full of cheese and grease I pedal feeling sick-but-in-a-good-way to the town's free camping area. It's for RVs, sits about a dozen feet from the highway, and is just down the block from two railroad lines — a real winner. Still, it's better than camping on private range land and waking up in the middle of the night with a rancher's rifle in my face.

Today's ride: 93 miles (150 km)
Total: 1,538 miles (2,475 km)

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