Day 27: Near Magdalena, NM to near Carrizozo, NM

March 21, 2013

It's a bad night for tents on the Magdalena Flats.

Every day so far the wind has konked out around 8:00 p.m., leaving a quiet, still, cold night that's perfect for resting legs and shoulders and necks turned tired from riding all day. Not this time. As 8:00 becomes 9:00 and then 10:00, strong winds stay strong and the gusts raise a ruckus. I also notice that dirt from around the tent starts to blow inside and coat every surface facing to the west in a light layer of brown.

And then things get so much worse. All night the winds have made a slow, steady shift, so that instead of hitting the corner of the tent they strike straight on the side. With the gusts reaching 30 that was uncomfortable but it worked. The 40s and 50s that I never expected but nonetheless follow around 2:30 a.m. make for a different story entirely. The first blast bows in the side of the tent on which I'm sleeping, so that instead of standing vertical it lays down and sticks hard against my ribs at an angle approaching 45 degrees. The rest of the tent dances and sways and whips back and forth in response. It seems like only a matter of time until the poles start to snap under the tension.

The side of the tent collapsing down onto me isn't a one-time thing. Every one of the hundreds of gusts that follow cause the mesh and rain fly to pin me down again. Not long after the madness starts it feels like the tent's windward corners have become unstaked, because each blast starts to tug up on them. And so, to keep everything I own from tipping over or blowing across the plains until it collides with a wandering steer, I wedge my sleeping pad and sleeping bag into the corner of the tent and use the weight of my feet and head to try and hold my world together. All the while, the dusting of windblown dirt that had sprinkled inside in the earlier hours starts to come in sheets and waves. It coats every exposed surface enough to obscure its original color and sandpapers my eyes and my nose.

It's fucking hell.

The fury starts to ease just around the time I need to pack up and head off the private grazing land on which I've been beaten up all night. It eases, but that just means 20-mile-per-hour sustained winds. That makes breaking camp a tightly choreographed dance of packing up bags and then using them to weigh down various tent parts so they don't blow away. I also wipe a thick, almost black layer of dirt from my panniers, water bottles, jacket, and the surfaces and channels of my helmet. It's a ridiculous end to a ridiculous night.

With the first pinks and oranges leaking into the eastern sky above the mountains, I close the cattle gate behind me and return to the road. For all the aggravation the wind caused during the night, when I start to pedal again it becomes the most glorious tailwind. As I head over the crest of a hill not far down the highway, the wind pushes me around a curve without a touch of the pedals and sends me on my way to a winding descent where I hit 42 miles per hour with zero effort.

In what seems to take no longer than a snap of the fingers I've dropped 14 miles into Socorro. In a cafe I pick peppers out of a cheese omelette — everything comes with peppers in New Mexico — and try to figure out what to do next. It's rare for a touring biker to look at the forecast, see huge tailwinds, and do anything except run for the door and hitch on for the ride. But I've been shivering all morning, I'm running on three hours of sleep, and I'm surrounded by a brownish dirt halo. After a few minutes of debate, a voice in my head tells me to get over it and push on, because the road ahead can't be any worse than spending a full day of my life in Socorro.

The feelings come back on the ride south to San Antonio. The road feeds me a steady diet of rollers, angry dogs give chase, and I head past the markers of extreme poverty I remember from Eastern Kentucky: yards piled high with old cars and RVs, mobile homes that look abandoned and then someone walks out the front door, building additions that seem like they should have fallen down in the wind last night, and cars with locks on the gas tank door to keep out thieves. And I'm still hungry and tired.

But San Antonio is a butt crack of a freeway town where most of the vehicles don't have tires on their rusted rims. And besides, the most memorable experiences on these kinds of trips come when I push myself beyond what's easy or expected. So I decide to hang a left, head east, and fuck the rest. I load up on food and water and rocket fuel/Mountain Dew, cross the bone dry Rio Grande, and set out once again for the mountains.

The landscape out here looks much like yesterday, with broad expanses of yellow grass and green bushes and tumbleweeds stretching out for dozens of miles before running into steep mountain faces that rise up from the floor of the plains like a wave that's building strength but hasn't yet crested.

Then I roll down a hill and into the heart of an area that contributed to the greatest expression of evil and vengeance that the United States has ever known. At 5:30 in the morning on July 16, 1945, just 15 miles south of where I stand along the road's edge in the Jornada del Muerto desert, within what's now called the White Sands Missile Range, the Army set off the first nuclear device in history. Known as the Trinity test, it involved a bomb referred to as The Gadget, which was raised to the top of a 100-foot steel tower and then detonated to simulate how the device would react when dropped from an airplane. No one could say with certainty what that reaction would be. A few scientists feared that the test would ignite the Earth's atmosphere and in the process kill every form of life on the planet. This concern was expressed, but they went ahead with the test anyway. Others thought that outcome was unlikely, but that it wasn't unreasonable to believe that New Mexico would cease to exist afterward. Again, this was a known possibility, and they did the test anyway.

Thankfully for the good folks of New Mexico and all future bicycle tourists, the results were far less severe — although still beyond insane. The blast left behind a crater ten feet deep and 1,100 feet wide. People watching the test at the base camp ten miles away reported that the mountains were lit up brighter than during the day time, and that the heat from the explosion felt as hot as an oven. It alternated in a range of colors, including purple and green and white, and sent out a shock wave felt more than a hundred miles away. The mushroom cloud it left behind soared seven-and-a-half miles into the sky. One newspaper article quoted a blind woman who lived 150 miles from the blast site that asked someone in the room with her, "What's that brilliant light?"

Just after the explosion, the test director — a guy named Kenneth Bainbridge — put the results in context with eloquence: "Now we are all sons of bitches." Quoting the Bhagavad Gita, a piece of Hindu scripture, the so-called Father of the Atomic Bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, expressed something similar: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Both were pretty much spot-on.

Ten days later, the Allies issued the Potsdam Declaration, which listed the terms of surrender for Japan in World War II. It was presented as an ultimatum and stated in clear terms that if the Japanese did not surrender, the result would be "the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and just as inevitably the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland." The message was received, but within two days rejected. And so, less than two weeks later, the United States dropped atomic bombs on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, generating massive explosions that produced effects much like those seen in the desert of New Mexico. Over a span of just four days, as many as 245,000 people were either killed in an instant or shoved down a short path toward death.

The tailwind kicks in strong as I leave the basin behind and begin a long, slow climb over the mountains I've been watching all afternoon. The bike is so heavy that I don't notice the wind much when I'm pedaling, but when I stop I realize it's always blowing at least 25 miles per hour and gusting up as high as 40. The weather out here is crazy; all I can do is shake my head in disbelief. I'm happy I'm not headed west, but nervous that if the wind stays awake all night I'll be useless in the morning.

The climb goes in typical New Mexico fashion: slow and steady, with level spots mixed in, so that it feels like I'm working my way over the mountain on the world's biggest staircase. It makes the climb seem like a much less monumental event.

The downhill on the other side helps me remember why it's good to be alive. With the tailwind shoving me on, I pedal about three-tenths of a mile during a drop that lasts almost 12. I fly easily at 30 to 40 miles per hour, and with the wind behind all I hear are the whine of narrow rubber tires on blacktop and the click-click-click of the front reflector as it spins on the wheel like mad. Along the way, Joint Strike Fighters in a training exercise scream overhead and disappear into the clouds. A few minutes later I hear the boom and feel the muted concussion of a missile strike far in the distance. It's an unforgettable experience.

After a short climb that steals away the last of my energy, I head six miles down another no-pedal drop into a valley where dark mountains stand guard beyond the basin. Their peaks tower thousands of feet above and make everything below seem miniature. It's so grand and so inspiring and I couldn't be happier that I didn't call it quits on today and that I'm here to take it all in.

The shine of an amazing 89-mile day comes off a bit when I unroll the tent and sleeping bag and sleeping pad at the campground and find piles of dirt spread across my shoes. But then I notice that the constant whoosh of the last two days is gone. All that's left is a quiet, windless evening. It's the best gift I could have asked for.

Today's ride: 89 miles (143 km)
Total: 1,273 miles (2,049 km)

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