The prez is coming to town today, but he hasn’t texted me, so I don’t suppose he wants to hang out, maybe go for a bike ride, drop a hint or two about the cell he’s having prepared for The Defendant on Gitmo.
His motorcade is likely to play hell with the already-chaotic Duck! City traffic, which resembles nothing so much as a fire-ant colony remodeled by M-80.
Maybe his SS detail can thin this perpetually stampeding herd of road-ragers during the presidential visit. They could probably use the target practice, and for sure we could use fewer hotheads with lead feet.
You think you’re living on the edge, miles from home with a cargo area full of perishable groceries in early June and the low-fuel warning light giving you an orange mal de ojo from the dash.
Until you get passed by someone driving on the rim.
So there I was, motoring back from the Wholeazon Amafoods with a week’s worth of grub, and I knew my low-fuel light was on. It flashed me before I even got to the store to offload a hunk of my Socialist Insecurity entitlement funding on tasty bits of this and that.
Ah, bugger it, I thought. I still have a couple gallons in the tank. Shit, I could probably make it to Santa Fe for an early lunch at La Choza, if I had a cooler and some ice for all this chow. But it’s probably smarter to head for home, refrigerate the perishables, and gas up the next time out.
Thus I’m in the left lane on Wyoming, getting set to hang a left on Comanche, when I hear this hideous racket coming up fast in the middle lane.
I figure it’s the Devil finally come to collect, or maybe just some poor workingman’s beater truck fixin’ to retire before he does, and in some spectacular fashion, too. But it sounds even worse than either of those possibilities, about like three Terminators dry-humping an Alien in a junkyard full of feral cats.
As I make the left lane I glance right and screeching past shudders some shitbag sedan with the left front tire completely gone and the driver either deaf, drunk, or some combination of the two, ’cause he ain’t making any effort to get out of that middle lane and over to some safe place where he can maybe figure out why the hell all these assholes are staring at him and how come he can’t hear the radio goddamnit?
This may or may not be a metaphor for politics in 2023.
Some of us are low on gas, but we’re aware of the situation and hope to address it at our earliest possible opportunity.
Some others are gonna just drive it right into the ground and Dog help you if you’re standing anywhere near where the wreckage skids to a stop.
The good news is, you can hear it coming a long ways off.
Mostly winter, with a hint of spring at lower right.
The weather is a tad confused. Is it spring? Winter?
Maybe we should call this between-times season “Sprinter.” I’ve been seeing a lot of its four-wheeled namesakes lately.
And while ordinarily this would lead me to reflect that this violates O’Grady’s First Law of Economics — “Anybody who makes more money than me makes too fucking much!” — I don’t really care.
I don’t have lust in my heart for a Sprinter. Even if I did, I have no place to park one. Anyway, I live in New Mexico, where nobody knows how to drive but plenty of people know how to steal.
Maybe once a Sprinter collects a few whiskey dents, parking-lot sidewipes, and improvised cardboard windows it becomes a less attractive target? Who knows?
A sampling of the APD’s Twatter feed.
Not me, Skeeter. My RV is a scratched-and-scraped 18-year-old ’Roo with a tent, sleeping bag, and two-burner Coleman in the back. Also, and too, AWD for when the weather finally makes up its mind and decides it’s winter again.
Which it was, on Wednesday and Thursday. And I only went outdoors to broom snow and buy soup fixin’s. No cycling, not even running.
But on Friday Herself and I managed a couple miles of jogging along the foothills trails — not too cold, but squishy underfoot — and yesterday I sacked up, dragged out a bike with fat tires and fenders, and went for a 90-minute spin.
I’m always amused to see The Duck! City’s response to a few inches of snow. God love ’em, the road crews spread more sand on one day than Bibleburg has used since my family moved there in 1967.
And of course it all winds up on the shoulder, in the bike lane. Hence the fat tires and fenders.
It must be frustrating, trying to save Burqueños from themselves. The road crews know these people can’t drive a straight line on dry roads at high noon on a sunny day. Building speed humps and roundabouts, installing traffic cameras and radar trailers, spreading sand over ice and snow … this is like trying to teach a bullfrog to sing “Ave Maria.”
Burqueños have better things to do. And they will do them while they are driving.
Some leadfoot passed me at warp factor five or so on Juan Tabo the other day. In the right lane. The right turn lane, to be precise.
I saw him coming up fast in the passenger-side mirror and thought, “OK, here we go. …” And sure enough, my man rocketed straight through the intersection at Montgomery and just kept on keepin’ on. I kept the mirror on, but only just.
No idea what the rush was. The liquor stores weren’t about to close, and nobody was chasing him that I could see. No sirens, no gunfire. Maybe he’d just stolen the SUV from the Lowe’s parking lot and wanted to see what it could do.
One hopes he got a chance to test-drive the air bags and found them inadequate. And by “one,” I mean “me.”
So, yeah. No Sprinter for Your Humble Narrator. I know in my heart of hearts that as I was driving the shiny beast off the lot with the dealer plates still on I would hear a thunderous bang at the rear, pull over and stop to see what the actual fuck, and find a stolen Honda Civic parked on my sofa bed, leaking oil all over the Pendleton White Sands quilt.
The driver would be polishing off a tallboy and a text while his lady friend had a wee in the toilet-shower combo. Tugging a Sig Sauer from his waistband, he would mumble, “Shit, out of beer. Take us to the liquor store. There’s something wrong with this car.”
Hoo, the sun hits the deck fast in the afternoons come January.
I burned the best part of today’s daylight doing chores. Sue Baroo the Fearsome Furster needed her registration renewed, which means she needed an emissions check, and we oldsters don’t like going to the doctor if nothing is visibly broken and/or leaking crucial fluid. One suspects a fishing expedition.
The clouds were headed one way and the sun the other.
Nevertheless, we went, and she got a clean bill of health and two years’ worth of driving privileges in The Great State of New Mexico and wherever its plates are honored.
Then I rang up our HVAC people to discuss some repairs to the combo unit on the roof at El Rancho Pendejo, and it turned out that they could handle the job right then and there rather than next week. So, yeah, by all means, take my money, please, we like being warm in winter.
The work completed, and the ugly topic of money and its distribution having arisen, Herself and I discussed some pressing financial matters. Then it was lunchtime, after which Miss Mia Sopaipilla required some light entertainment, and before you could say, “Sun’s getting a little low in the sky there, Skeeter,” it was a quarter after three in the peeyem and I had taken no exercise. None. Zee-ro.
I almost blew it off. Almost. But Herself had just told me a horrific tale about someone’s 70-something mom who was in a state of collapse and bound for The Home if she couldn’t walk 10 steps, and those financial matters we had been discussing concerned who gets what when I croak.
Not today, goddamnit. I got my 10 steps in before sundown. The Home ain’t getting me today, and neither is the Devil.
• Editor’s note: It’s a gray, gloomy day here at El Rancho Pendejo, and Hal Walter’s road-trip tale has put me in mind of my own meditation from the spring of 2000, when the vile Crusty County weather had me thinking about snorting that long white line to wherever.
“I have been buggered to near death by the clock.”— Jim Harrison in “The Beige Dolorosa,” from the novella collection “Julip”
“How do I shut this alarm off?” my wife asked some years back. Her sports watch was cheeping incessantly, like a baby bird in a sack of crack.
“Like this,” I replied, snatching the watch from her, placing it on the kitchen floor and pounding it into a flattened silence with a claw hammer. We both laughed, but warily; killing time just isn’t that easy.
Still, when you see time limping along like it does in a snowbound April in the Colorado mountains, scraping the slush off its boots on the welcome mat of spring, there arises a murderous desire to put it out of its misery. So Shannon has begun hiding the hammers as I glare at the clock, as if I could will its crawling hands into picking up the pace, spinning me up some sunshine.
• • •
“We’re going to be late,” I warned my friends Hal and Mary as we dawdled first over stout, then over coffee, in a succession of Bibleburg bistros. It was my 46th birthday, and we were headed to Colorado College for a poetry reading by one of my favorite authors, Jim Harrison. Harrison seems the sort to bark at nitwits who interrupt his work, and I wanted his autograph, not his antipathy.
Jim Harrison laid his Jim Hancock on my copy of “Warlock,” though it was not among his favorite works.
As it turned out, we were right on time, and Harrison was late. A student of Zen Buddhism with his own temporal compulsions, Harrison announced: “I’m not a long reader. This will be exactly 52 minutes.” A koan for a birthday present.
Frankly, I’d have settled for a little less light and a little more warmth. Spring brings Colorado the heavy snows that we used to get in winter like everybody else, and the way my mental batteries were running down under the gray-flannel skies had me convinced that I was solar-powered.
My last escape attempt, a mid-March road trip to a cycling festival in California, was too short and not nearly sweet enough. I’ve been contemplating another to someplace where the locals’ knowledge of snow is limited to what they’ve been able to glean from the Encyclopedia Britannica, but you can’t pilot a Toyota truck to the Virgin Islands, not even in four-wheel drive.
And then there’s the expense. The rising price of gasoline aside, it’s not always possible or desirable to sleep in a pickup, which lacks certain amenities — like a toilet, shower, sink, stove, furnace and elbow room, especially when the camper shell is stuffed fore to aft with a bicycle, a cooler full of beer and a day pack crammed with computer gear and drawing tools.
Even if you pack camping gear and spend your nights outside the truck, you’re doomed to an occasional Motel 666 if for no other reason than hygiene, an impulse that will cost you anywhere from $30 to $60 a pop, depending upon your ZIP code at the time.
So lately I’ve been eyeballing used RVs and wondering whether I’m old enough to own one. This is not unlike like cigar-smoking; you have to be of a certain age to pull it off without looking ridiculous.
Too, as a cyclist who has played mirror-tag with many a blue-haired land-yacht captain over the years, the notion leaves me feeling a little like a Lakota warrior applying to join Custer’s 7th Cavalry.
And the entry fee for the RV lifestyle is a high curb to hop — even an elderly, smallish Toyota RV can run from five to ten large, while free-lance cycling journalism pays on the small side.
• • •
In the essay “Going Places,” from his collection “Just Before Dark,” Harrison advises: “Do not scorn day trips. You can use them to avoid nervous collapse.” So with a light snow falling and the promise of more on the way, I jumped into my ’83 Toyota 4WD and headed north to talk to a guy who had a used, slide-in, pop-up camper for sale.
As I bounced crazily down our steep, corrugated goat path to the county road — this truck, which under a previous owner carried a camper, has springs apparently salvaged from a buckboard — I realized I’d forgotten my watch. A moment of dismay, then satori; I had more than enough time to make the noon appointment, and there was nothing of pressing urgency requiring a timepiece, so screw it.
So, after checking out the camper — affordable and nicely minimalist, with a cabover bed, a small sink and stove, a pedestal table and bench, and a furnace — I spent the afternoon idling around downtown Bibleburg, where it was not snowing, the roads were paved, and distractions were available in variety.
Drank a pint of Guinness and ate a burger in Jack Quinn’s; looked for Harrison books in the cavernous used-book store Gateways; sipped a tall Americano in a Starbucks staffed by two pleasant young women chattering away like magpies. Then I took my sweet time getting home, and not just because I was following a snowplow and an 18-wheeler up a slushy Hardscrabble Cañon.
Again, Harrison, in “The Beige Dolorosa” from “Julip”: “The clock is the weapon with which we butcher our lives.”
The character who writes this line on an index card — an academic rebelling against the tyranny of the clock as he comes to terms with a vastly altered life — then wraps his watch around the cord of his Big Ben electric clock and dangles both in the toilet, flushing and laughing.
He continues: “The damnable watch still worked. I put it on the floor, stepped up on the toilet seat and jumped, smashing the watch to bits. It occurred to me that I was getting a little excitable, so I took the remnants of the two timepieces outside and peed on them to complete the scene appropriately. I reached back in the cabin and turned off the light, the better to see the stars. They were so dense they made the sky look flossy, almost a fog of stars which had drawn infinitely closer to me than ever before, as if my destruction of time had made me a friendlier object for their indeterminate powers.”
Smash your watches. Pee on your clocks. Go look at the stars.
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