March 23, 2013
Day 29: Capitan, NM
The winds already blow strong on the walk across the motel parking lot to breakfast, but they're only getting started. By 11:30, 50-mile-per-hour gusts tear through town, blowing massive clouds of dirt and cardboard boxes and various garbage to the east in a hurry. A few hours later, the blue sky of the morning has been shoved away by the tan haze of airborne dust. With the wind howling and pounding and sending tree branches to the ground by the dozen, walking to the mini-mart and back feels like a great victory.
Capitan bills itself as the home town of the United States Forest Service mascot Smokey Bear. Back in 1950, firefighters rescued a burned black bear cub from a nearby forest fire and named him Smokey, as a sort of real life version of the cartoon icon created half a dozen years earlier. When the bear died at a zoo in Washington D.C. in 1976, they shipped the remains back to Capitan, where tourists can now gawk at a burial marker for a few minutes before waddling back to their cars and hauling ass out of town. The whole thing seems stupid to me. But anyway, if Smokey were alive today, and also capable of walking upright, wearing pants and a hat, and talking about fire safety, this is the kind of day that would make him crap in his bear-sized jeans. With the high winds and land that's bone dry because it's hardly rained in months, the wildfire risk is through the roof.
I spend most of the day inside cleaning up clothes and the bike and cranking this journal back into shape. In between all the work I drink cheap beer and Mountain Dew and eat gas station sandwiches and don't feel bad about any of it. When I take a day off, everything slides.
I also try to figure out why the mini-fridge in my motel room smells like my jockstrap after it goes 12 games without being washed and ends up jammed into the bottom of a cold, wet hockey bag. Later I think about how, with just jeans and a hat — no shirt or shoes — Smokey Bear looks kind of like the rural drunk who would yell shit at passing bicycle riders from the crap-covered front porch of his trailer home in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky.
The forecast calls for way below freezing temperatures to start the morning. I may be rested and ready to go again, but only a fool rushes out into madness like that when they don't have to. I tuck into a warm bed and look forward to another late start.
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