My Hipster Measurement Device

March 5, 2016

Train horn blasts wake me up throughout the night. Each time, my instinct drives me to roll over and reach for Kristen. Each time all I find is an empty half of a bed.

I get on the road early. The longer I stay in Alpine, the greater chance I decide to buy a small chunk of land in the hills north of town and settle down here forever. Beyond the microbrewery at its west edge it's back to mountains and mesas and the unconcerned calls of the doves. At the end of a gated ranch road two yellow dogs lie on the ground and wait with focused calm for their person to return from town. I think about the stalled car I passed a few miles earlier, the one with a Mississippi license plate. It reminds me how a month ago I was riding through there and how different that experience was from what it's like out here. Then I think, Jesus, I rode all the way to West Texas from Florida. It's easy to lose sight of that on a long trip like this, especially a trip that's ending earlier than I thought, where my tendency is to focus on what I haven't accomplished instead of what I have.

With the end date known, my mind wanders toward thoughts of work and family and Portland and Seattle as if drawn by magnetic force. I try instead to look at all the different shapes and sizes in which the juniper trees come. I watch the steel windmills that spin fast but silent in the breeze that gives me a good push toward Marfa. I look up at the vultures who leapt into flight when my approach startled them and wait for me to leave so they can get back to picking apart the dead jackrabbit that lies on its side in the middle of the shoulder. I spit at the little round plastic reflectors mounted on top of thin steel posts at the edge of the road and cheer out loud whenever I hit one square. But no matter how much I want to avoid thinking about settled life while I'm riding the force is too strong for me to overcome.

Beyond the little crest that a historical placard beside the road calls Paisano Pass the landscape opens up before me. The train tracks stretch out to the horizon. Antelopes in the huge plains of yellow watch me pass with curious looks on their narrow faces. Tumbleweeds blow across the highway from right to left before lodging themselves in the barbed wire fence. I become very aware of how little space I occupy out here, and by extension how vast and incomprehensible the amount of area that exists on this planet we all call home must be.

Marfa is all frosted glass, sans-serif fonts, and reclaimed buildings left in rough condition on purpose. It's sleek, boxy, modern hotels alongside historic-looking restored hotels from the twenties or thirties. The campgrounds are the kinds of places where you can rent Airstream trailers or sleep in a teepee or a yurt. It's the only 2,000-person town I know of with a public radio station housed in its own artfully remodeled building. It may have more art galleries per capita than anywhere else in America.

Having seen all this it comes as no surprise that the place is thick with long hipster beards, thick black hipster glasses, and the kind of trucker-hat-and-skinny-jeans combo you can only wear without irony if you are in fact a hipster. It's also thick with standard-issue tourists. I thought that in Marfa I'd find a smaller version of Alpine, but at least as far as the center of town goes the genuine, unpretentious soul that drew me to Alpine has gone missing.

And then my hipster measurement device busts altogether. I see coming up ahead of me and off to the right a group of about ten people, all mid-twenties or younger, all skinny as hell, all in tight clothes meant to look worn out with expensive haircuts and even more expensive designer sunglasses. They're standing around an old Lincoln convertible from the sixties, watching with crossed arms a photo shoot that involves some thin blonde girl slouching and looking away from the camera with a look of dispassionate cool on her face. I don't know what they're trying to sell from all this calculated vanity but the unintentional comic value is off the charts.

Where all these people eat I have no idea. Even at eleven in the morning on a Saturday I can't find a restaurant or cafe that's open. The food trucks made from old buses or delivery vans are all closed up too. And so I ride toward the edge of town, away from the galleries and boutiques, past auto parts stores and little one-story homes and a Dairy Queen and a Subway. Here I find a Mexican restaurant in the vein of most small-town Mexican restaurants, with good, basic food and free chips and neon signs for Bud Light and Michelob Ultra casting a bluish-white glow down onto the blade of the black plastic-handled fork on the table. The simplicity of the place and the ritual of mashing the separate sides of rice and refried beans together in one massive pile at the center of my plate bring me comfort.

Marfa even has hipster-approved vehicles.

I head northwest out of Marfa on the wide, rough shoulder of a highway so empty it seems like I might never see a car again. It's also so long and straight that it has the look of a road that might never turn again. It's just me, my thoughts, the row of dead-looking creosote bushes off to my right, and the subtle push of the wind that's still working in my favor. With the sparse country surrounding me on all sides I decide to let those thoughts run where they will, whether it's toward the road ahead or Kristen or websites that have yet to be built.

I crank relaxed and free at twelve or thirteen miles per hour. A short Amtrak train eastbound toward San Antonio appears over the subtle crest of a hill. Half an hour later I get a pair of whistle blows from the engineer of a Union Pacific train eastbound toward who knows where. That same weird Border Patrol blimp I saw yesterday is still hanging around doing its blimp thing. There's no one around to crack jokes or talk about interesting things with and already I miss that so much.

I don't see the hawks passing above me, just their shadows on the pavement a few dozen feet in front of the bike. The late afternoon heat rising up off the road ahead makes it look like I'm forever half a mile away from riding into a shallow, rippling pool of water. Ladybugs land on the legs of my shorts. Tiny wildflowers grow in the grass beyond the road's edge in rich tones of yellow and violet and blue and in rare cases red. At car speed this place seems huge and boring and dead. I know that's true because that's how it felt to me when I drove this stretch yesterday. On a bike it's so different it's almost as if it isn't the same place at all. At thirteen miles per hour it becomes rich and alive and full of so much detail, as long as you're willing to open your eyes and look for it.

Not a thousand feet after crossing the Jeff Davis County line the wind switches 180 degrees, going from a tailwind to a headwind faster than you can say futhermucker. I go from fifteen miles per hour to ten in less than a minute, despite not having changed direction at all. The entire complexion of both the day and the words coming out of my mouth turn in an instant.

Valentine appears on the horizon a good seven miles before I reach its city limit sign. But as the buildings grow to actual size in front of me I can't help but think that city seems a strong word for a place with a population of about 120. There's a small, tidy library at the edge of town but nothing else looks like it was built or restored within the last forty years. For every home that's still lived in there are two that have been abandoned. It's a place of remnants: old cafes, old motels, old stores, old gas stations. I watch actual tumbleweeds roll across the main street. Still, there's a Catholic church at the center of town that cyclists have camped behind. I've already come sixty-plus miles. It's the logical place to stop.

But all day I'd said to myself that if I reached Valentine by four in the afternoon I'd push on toward Van Horn and a hundred-mile day. I check my phone; it's four exactly. At the same time, I thought I'd have a tailwind. Now it's a headwind with thirty-eight miles to Van Horn and just over three hours of daylight left to get there. It's math that just doesn't work. I look at the weather for down the road anyway. It shows east-northeast winds up in Van Horn. With the way the road runs, that would be on the side and not in the face. I know the road trends subtly down most all of the way there. It would make for a hell of a long day, and I'd probably have to finish in darkness, and – ah, fuck it, this is my only chance at riding a century on this trip. I'm going.

There's no reason beyond that. There's no practical benefit to be gained. I'm not even sure it'll be all that fun. But it doesn't matter. I just want to do it. Sometimes that's enough.

For mountain ranges and sprawling basins and endless skies people in cars won't stop to take even one picture. But put up a fake storefront with a luxury brand name splashed across the front and it turns out everyone will stop and whip out their phones or their DSLRs mounted on tripods and take at least a dozen. That's the scene just north of Valentine, where years ago an artist put up a fake Prada storefront out in the middle of the desert. I don't know if revealing what it is that modern Americans find beautiful and novel and worth committing to memory was the point of the installation, but as I ride past vehicles that won't stop again until their drivers have to eat or poop that's the effect it has on me.

I get more robotic the farther I go. It's ride five miles, stop and drink a bunch of water. Ride five miles, eat half a banana. Repeat until your supplies are gone or you reach the campground in Van Horn. In between I have pointless, repetitive conversations with myself about stuff so boring that ten minutes later I can't even remember what they were about. During a lull in these self-chats I notice a line of mountains ahead on the right angling toward the highway and another line of mountains heading toward them from the left. In them I see the fate of my evening about to reveal itself. They'll either give me some kind of relief by deflecting the angle of the wind or kill my spirit by funneling it straight into my face.

The first theory turns out to be true. The closer I get to the mountains on the right the more the wind hits me from the side and sometimes a little on the back of the shoulder. The shadows cast on those mountains by the setting sun cause me to yell out loud in celebration. I do the same when I pass out of Jeff Davis County and into some county that prefers to stay anonymous but gives me the smoothest shoulder I ever could have hoped for. But mostly I just pedal, because the miles aren't coming from anywhere else. After the sun goes behind the tall mountains to the west my adrenaline starts to kick in. The desire not to ride Highway 90 in darkness on a Saturday night, I guess. Whatever it is, a calm sense of purpose takes over.

Eight miles from Van Horn the sparkling lights of the town and I-10 appear in the distance. It's dark enough by this point that I have to turn my headlight on. There's nothing to see and no longer a reason to stop, so I don't. The riding turns into a task to be completed and nothing more.

The darkness fades as I roll up to the Pilot truck stop that sits a few hundred feet off the interstate. From the fluorescent-lit aisles I put together a chid-feast of epic scale. It's pepperoni pizza and a plastic-wrapped pastry and ice cream and beer, all overpriced, none of it all that good, but after 103 miles of riding across West Texas who really gives a shit. Then it's a half-mile backtrack to the same campground Kristen and I stayed at two nights ago, setting up the tent right across from where we slept, but this time tucking into a single sleeping and not a double, talking to her only by way of the phone. I fight off sleep as long as I can, but all those miles and a single tall can of beer combine to knock me right out.

Today's ride: 103 miles (166 km)
Total: 2,130 miles (3,428 km)

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