March 19, 2013
Day 25: Quemado, NM to Pie Town, NM
I negotiate a late checkout time and then walk across the street for a lazy lunch. I don't leave Quemado until after noon. After a long string of waking up at or before first light, taking to the road with the sun straight above my head feels like an amazing gift. By mid-day the wind is howling again — 15 to 20 miles per hour from the west. But today that's awesome, because I'm headed due east the whole way.
I'm out of the mountains and into the rolling hills of range land. The 20 miles that follow bring three houses, a passing car every four or five minutes, the smell of smoke from a controlled burn, one startled llama, and the rustling of dry yellow grass against the wind. The most notable landmark is the optimistically named Catron County Heliport, which has one concrete pad, some blue lights, and a red windsock surrounded by nothing at all.
Even though the sun shines, the wind brings with it a biting cold. It isn't hard to remember that even though the road is flatter I'm still riding at 7,500 feet.
I roll into Pie Town in the middle of the afternoon. I grab a second lunch at the cafe — the only open business — where the other four customers are all real deal cowboys: big tan hats, dirty blue jeans, and leather boots that run up to just below the knee and jingle when they walk because of the spurs attached to the heels.
Besides a need to sleep in and rest tired legs, the reason I started the day so late is because of a place in Pie Town called the Toaster House. It's a house set aside only for hikers and bikers, and it exists out here because the town sits within a short distance of trails that follow the length of the Continental Divide. When I pay the bill I ask the waitress if she can tell me how to find it.
"Yeah, it's not far," she says. "Just head back down the hill ya come up, hang the first left, and it'll be the third or fourth house on the right."
"Ya can't miss it!" she laughs. "It's the one with all the toasters hangin' on the front!"
And it is. It's also the place with the empty beer cans piled high in buckets in the yard and giant stacks of used shoes and boots that sit in a mountain on the front porch. The sign on the door says that no one lives here but I should go in anyway, so I do. I've been to a couple of hiker/biker houses like this one — The Cookie Lady's in Afton, Virginia and The Place in Damascus, Virginia — and the Toaster House fits right in. It's got the musty-dirty-well-used-but-not-well-cleaned smell and feel that comes with taking in a few hundred people a year, all of whom are gross in some moderate to severe way. But mixed in with the cupboard full of dehydrated food, stacks of old audio cassettes, reams of creased trail maps, and the sink full of dirty dishes are the undeniable soul and good feelings that come with a place opened to tired travelers simply out of the goodness of one person's heart.
I head upstairs to a room wrapped with windows that a cardboard sign that's fallen to the floor calls The Penthouse. There I set up shop on a bed four feet above the floor and do nothing harder than write or nap or tap on a keyboard for the next eight hours. It's too early in the season for hikers and bikers doing the full Divide route, and the woman who owns the house isn't in town, so I have the place to myself.
The combination of camping and long riding days have put me into a routine of starting at first light and settling down around dark. It's a great way to experience the West in full, but it comes with an always-on, go-go-go feeling. So it's with a relaxed mind that I break the cycle and lounge around with no thoughts of wind or hills or how much longer the sun will stay above the horizon.
Today's ride: 23 miles (37 km)
Total: 1,112 miles (1,790 km)
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