March 11, 2016
An America That Runs Parallel to Mine
I don't have many proper rules for cycle-touring, but one of the things I always try to do is end a trip with a short, easy day. I want to wake up when I'm ready, pack as slow as I want, ride easy, stop if there's reason to stop, and get to where I'm going without feeling exhausted from all the work it took to get there. It's the last gasp of the freedom of the road before the demands of settled life return. And so it goes this morning. I sleep in, write, shave, shower, take my time loading up the bike, and try to push away the thoughts of home that keep slipping into my mind.
The side streets west of the motel send me through a tract housing development where every home is some slightly different shade of tan. Great, more suburbs. That's my default reaction to these kinds of places. But soon I hook a left and find myself staring into the jagged mountains that tower over the city of Juarez in Mexico to the south. And in that moment the gently sloping driveways and little patches of lawn and garbage cans standing guard on the curbs all of a sudden make perfect sense. This place is clean and ordered and safe. It's predictable. It's comfortable. It's supported by good wages, electricity that's always available, clean drinking water, modern health care, sprawling grocery stores, good schools, and low crime. It's so many things that life in much of the world – and even parts of America that we've seen on this trip – is not. And it makes me realize how lucky I am to have grown up in a place like this, surrounded by this kind of comfort, and to know that I've worked hard enough that it's always something I can fall back on should I grow tired of the traveling lifestyle.
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El Paso gives me sidewalk riding as a goodbye gift. But soon enough I pick up a path that runs along the Rio Grande. The name conjures up images of a broad, mighty, swift-moving river, but the effects of long-term drought have turned into something more like the Rio Sand. It's hard to imagine the river ever having run here. The path I ride on sits just a few feet above the riverbed and it's lined with benches. Businesses line the opposite bank and sit at the same level. A couple of roadrunners stare at me but don't in fact run away as I ride by. I also go past one surly old man on a bike who gives a half-assed wave and says nothing in response to my wave and hello. But otherwise I make my escape from the city all alone and charge to the north with the help of a good tailwind.
And then, without a sign or a marker or even a change in pavement color I leave behind Texas and enter New Mexico.
I head north on Highway 28, which has a narrow shoulder and enough traffic that I know I need to keep my attention on both the road ahead and behind. But no matter how hard I try to focus, all my mind wants is to wander away. I think about how in just over twenty-four hours I'll see Kristen again. I think about upcoming work projects that wait for me back at home. I think, Shit, man, this is it for this bike. Over the summer I'll be building the replacement for my Novara Randonee, the bicycle that has carried me more than 20,000 miles since I bought it in 2008, the bicycle upon which the direction and quality of my life were forever changed. I think about how I wish Kristen was here and we were going to continue on toward Arizona and California and the Pacific Ocean together. I ride surrounded by fields – some fallow, others dark green and thriving and looking so out of place against the tans and browns and pale greens of the desert. Sunlight glints off windows and chromed semi-truck trailers as they crawl along the interstate miles to the east. I only half-notice all of it.
I roll into the little town of La Mesa and up to the door of Chope's Bar & Grill with seven minutes to spare before they stop serving lunch. I walk in, take a seat, and look around at walls covered with ads for Montejo, Victoria, Tecate, Corona, and Modelo and neon signs for Bud Light and Coors Light and Dos Equis. I ask for sweet tea but they don't have any. Now I know for sure that Texas is behind me. The place is alive with the excited chatter of six competing conversations on this Friday afternoon with at least fifteen people filling the place out, most of them on wooden stools at the bar. The noise is enough to drown out the drone of the TV that shows the opening round of March Madness.
Chope's is this broad mix of people: young and old, cowboy boots and tennis shoes, friends and work buddies, Budweiser tallboys and mixed drinks, white and black and Latino. There are silver-haired Harley riders, a white-haired eighty-year-old man in a black leather vest, and a small crew of retirees in pastel-colored polo shirts. The guy at the end of the bar closest to me is certifiably drunk at 1:45 in the afternoon. When one group leaves another steps in to take their place. A sign on the back wall reads Employees ONLY behind the bar. It's not far from the sign that says the last forty-ouncer will be sold at 8:30 Tuesday through Thursday and 9:00 on Friday and Saturday. Behind that bar there's a young woman in a cutoff shirt and short shorts who's bubbly and all smiles. There's also an older woman in a hip-length t-shirt and blue jeans who's more serious and reserved. In the second I see the future version of the first.
It's this strange collection of time and place and people that will never replicate itself in Seattle or Portland or Los Angeles.
I continue north through tiny towns of small homes with walls of adobe or brick or sheet metal in almost equal measures. In one I make fast friends with a big old bloodhound who lives in a small dirt yard next to a house in such bad shape that it barely seems livable. He climbs up on the fence between us with his massive front paws hanging over the chain links and sniffs the air as I rub the top of his head and scratch behind his thick, floppy ears. He howls and cries for me to come back the moment I swing my leg back over the bike and start to pedal away.
The roads run flat, flat, flat beneath the bare, outstretched arms of the hundreds of pecan trees that crowd the road's edges and stretch away from it farther than I can see. Without much effort the miles left tick down: five, four, three. I cross over the sandy ditch that is the Rio Grande one last time. The highway leads to a side road, then to another highway, then to one last dead end road. Near the end of it a jogger crosses my path and then stops.
"Long ride?" he asks.
"Well, I only have a few hundred feet to go," I tell him. "But I came from Florida, so yeah, I guess so."
Fifteen seconds later the tires still streaked with red clay from the forest roads of 1,500-plus miles ago come to their final stop.
This long ride is over.
But the day itself is only half over. I end up in the driveway of a home known to touring cyclists as the Pecan House. It's owned by Jenia LeFevre Ciomek, who I connected with through Crazy Guy on a Bike. She's been an active part of that community since before I even knew what cycle-touring was, and she's been hosting travelers passing through the Las Cruces area for at least ten years. Today she's joined by her husband Jim, his brother Tim, and Jim's buddy Clay. There are also five or six dogs, who together form a constant flow of sniffing, barking, and tail wagging underfoot.
Over drinks Jenia and I talk of riding bicycles, traveling in Australia, and all of the interesting and troubling things Kristen and I have seen and heard and felt during the last two months on the road. We talk of the fellow travelers we've had the chance to meet and get to know over the year. We talk of the countless ways in which dogs make life better. Jenia is a welcoming, interested, and interesting host. She is every bit as sweet and kind and gracious as I imagined her to be.
But it has to be said: Jim is the undisputed star of the show. To call him a force of nature would not be overstatement. The most obvious thing that stands out about Jim is the fact that he is always and forever armed. Not in the I have a gun safe in the master bedroom of my house kind of way, but in the exact literal meaning of the phrase. Whether he's working in the yard or sitting in his recliner watching Fox News or an old Charlie Sheen movie, he wears a leather gun belt with a holster at the right hip, inside of which sits a revolver. The belt itself is ringed with dozens of copper-colored bullets that glint when the rays from the home's light bulbs catch them.
There are a lot of people who'd be offended if you called them a redneck, but Jim is not one of these people. In fact, he'll go out of his way not just to tell you that he's a redneck, but to explain in great detail all of the reasons why he's a redneck. He likes what Donald Trump is about and he will tell you so. His family has done a lot of stupid and crazy things over the year and he will tell you so. At one point, as if he was a stage performer doing a costume change in the middle of a show, his gun belt and its shiny bullets and revolver are replaced with a big black handgun tucked into a shoulder holster. This makes sure that the grip of the thing is never more than two feet from his trigger finger. This also makes the off-hand comments about what he'd like to do to the people who upset him somehow seem all the more real.
And yet Jim is more devoted to his dogs than almost anyone I've ever met. He's a skilled cook who enjoys making meals for others. Out of nowhere he mentions that he's making a wedding cake for Kristen and me, but also that it isn't ready yet, because he still has to make the frosting and then he has to put on the decorations that he picked up in town. It's no big deal, though, because he says he's made fifty or a hundred cakes in his life. It's like for every stereotype Jim reflects there's another he shoots clean through with a wadcutter.
Later in the evening, well after dark, Jim's brother says that it's time for him to get going. He has to drive a few hours west to Hachita, the town where his mother lives. But he needs to borrow Jim's SUV. And the SUV needs gas if it's going to make it all the way to Hachita and back.
"Wanna come?" Jim asks me. "See the town a little?"
"Sure. Why not?"
And really, why not? Life is a lot more interesting when you say yes to everything.
This turns out to be especially true tonight.
Driving past the campus for New Mexico State University, I see a blaze of red and blue lights blocking the street in front of us. It's a sobriety checkpoint. As part of it, they ask to see each driver's license and insurance. Jim has his license, but after a minute or two of searching we can't find any proof of insurance in the glove box. But it doesn't matter, because Jim was once a firearms instructor at a law enforcement academy in the area, and he's wearing the shirt to prove it. It's like his get out of jail free card. Where anyone else would get hassled, he gets waved on through with a thank you and a have a good night, sir.
Down the road we stop at a gas station. Jim gets out so that he can swipe his credit card in the reader above the pump and Tim can fill up the SUV and get on the road to Hachita. On the other side of the pump sits a car full of teenagers, who can't stop staring at Jim and talking to each other with about the handgun that sits in the holster at the level of his left kidney. Open carry is legal in New Mexico, but it sure isn't common. Of course nothing about Jim's life is common. He tells me how he ended up with beryllium poisoning as a result of working for years as a diesel mechanic in the mines north of here, up near Silver City. He talks about his days as a private-investigator-slash-bounty-hunter tracking down shady people who, once caught, he would ask to kindly come with him and not cause trouble or he would have to shove them into the trunk of his yellow Chevrolet Corvette. He mentions that he used to be in the Army, that he worked on helicopters while he was in the service, and – in kind of an off-hand way – that he was shot by Sandinistas in El Salvador back in the early 1980s. This is also a man who was stabbed over a parking space dispute out in front of a drug store in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Despite the fact that the stab wound left him bleeding, he still went inside the store to take care of his shopping, then dealt with the police officers who showed up after he came back out.
"You've had a hell of a life," I tell him as we bounce down the rough gravel road that leads toward home. I'm not sure what else to say in response to this crazy string of stories.
"Yeah, I guess. People say I should write a book about it. But that's stupid. It's just all this stuff dumb motherfuckers have done to me."
"I think that's the title of the book right there: 'Stuff Dumb Motherfuckers Have Done to Me.'"
A lot of what Jim says makes you think to yourself, What a bunch of bullshit. But back at the house Jenia tells me that it's true, all of it. Like I said, he's a force of nature. There's no other way to put it.
And it just keeps going.
A few minutes later I'm handed an air rifle, told to look through the scope mounted on top of it, and instructed to shoot at the telephone pole at the far end of the yard. I do, and I hit it, square in the middle. There's talk of going out to a shooting range tomorrow, where I'd fire one of Jim's massive rifles, the kind that's so big and powerful that after just two or three shots the recoil of the butt against your shoulder leaves your skin a deep bruised purple and makes your bones ache. Assuming, of course, that it doesn't knock you flat on your ass instead. Not long after that the dogs all start barking because something's out in the yard. In moments Jim charges out the sliding door to the patio with a flashlight in his hand and his .45 raised. I pity the fool that tries to rob this house.
Throughout the evening and into the night I keep coming back to the same thought: it's as if Jim has lived his life in an America that runs parallel to mine. We have the same freedoms and rights and are bound (mostly) by the same laws, and yet the ways in which each of us moves through this country could not be more different. Where some people might look at these differences and see reasons to disagree, today I see magic. I see the magic of what this country is; how your life can become whatever you decide you want it to be. For all of its flaws, the freedom and self-determination America affords all of us who live here has no equal. Every long bicycle trip I've taken through the United States has left me with the this feeling; it's no different this time around. And so it seems somehow fated and perfect that this journey comes to its close at the Pecan House, by way of an experience that is at the same time wonderful and challenging and altogether unexpected.
I'm exhausted by the time I excuse myself and head back to the guest room. I pull back the covers, hop into bed, lean over onto my left elbow, and flip the switch of lamp that sits on the bedside table. The last thing I see before darkness overtakes the room is the cover of the latest copy of the NRA magazine, American Rifleman.
Today's ride: 33 miles (53 km)
Total: 2,338 miles (3,763 km)
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Don't know if you know, but Jenia passed away recently.
And Jim is gone, too.
They were very, very generous folks.
And they sure loved their doggies.
John
8 months ago
8 months ago