The metamorphosing beauty of the southwest USA for me has no peer in this wide world. I’m imprinted to my essential cords on its canyons, peaks, plateaus, far away sky. It is spatial, it is food, it is cultural proximity to Mexico and enveloping heat. It is the mythology of desert and West and moon scraping cactus land and coyote howlings across starpierced dark and imagination. These earthly coordinates have made my sight most whole, they are where I hear the rest of the cosmos.
Colorado. Utah. Arizona. New Mexico is, I think, often named last of the four corners. The others are anchored synesthetically, there is no better enactment of pedaling than in those places. But NM is abstract, austere, a beauty more divine than corporeal, a windy stasis, an adobe silence, a silhouette sunset, snowfall in word over image. New Mexico is the syllogistic proof of aesthetic contentment, something more Platonic than the showy perfection of the others. So maybe it’s met with a hesitation, however fundamentally confused that may be.
I had bikepacked before in New Mexico, a hilarious sideways perpendicular trip with Lael, Cass, and Nick in 2012 and then again with Cass a few years later around Sante Fe. One of those times Cass and I shared a pyramid style tent and talked about the metaphysics of friendship until we fell asleep.
This time around, on the heels of riding the Black Canyon Trail, Willie and I drove to Las Cruces to meet up with Emily and Miles. Our agenda was to ride an early iteration of the Monumental Loop, a creation of Matt Mason as a tribute of open spaces in southern NM. The entirety of my conception is to recover the calm simplicity of being under the firmament with friends, to stop partitioning and assessing the now, just to tick over the cranks, burn in the winter sun, sear away thoughts.
Las Cruces is a revelation. I’d passed plenty through it since my days living in Tucson, but the transactional unseeing passing of attending to somewhere else. Here, now, in the barrio: shabby unhidden majesty. It shoves back against any romanticization, but equally there’s no tolerance for anyone blind to its enchantment. Las Cruces maybe doesn’t make anyone’s destination list, a reductio ad absurdum on lists, to hell with witless premonitions.
Mandatory Mexican restaurant dinner, resupply, gear check. Miles and I have done this so many time together, it’s wordless ease. And like a power outage that lets you see, we four are beyond the city limits. Rows of pecan trees, the torn crags now on our shoulders, crackling sift through knobby tires, sometimes Willie hollers and I holler back to keep from holding our breath at the sheer facts of it.
We camp in the vee cut of a canyon. Hike to explore right to where it narrows to a slab of boulders and trees at the terminus. The headwaters, as it were, of cracked earth. Willie climbs to the top and I expect him to beat his chest and yawp, in my version he even does.
Southern New Mexico was intended to be an escape from winter, but a cold front tonight has us deep in our bags, I’m in maximum clothing fetal position until the quilt warms sufficiently for my toes to thaw. I camp with my head at the foot of a yucca, may it step into my dreams.
Days like this, then. The northern lobe of the ML—we’ll find ourselves back in Las Cruces mid-journey—is remote feeling, intimations of cultivated uncertainty. Thread through tall rock walls, over passes with cattle gates at the very top, a sort of threshold between ascent and descent. There’s a downhill where I am at the hardtail limits of abandon, Willie sails by, all I register is his grin.
Distance unspooling riding alongside Emily, trading ideas of goodness, teaching, freedom, of tomorrow. Another night we’re within the sound and smell radius of a cattle ranch, it’s a frosty confrontation with will. At least my mat is on soft sand that I made conform to my body, looking up at uncountable twinkles, my breath clouding into the Milky Way. There is no where we ought to be, just where we are.
