Where's Your Ferrari?

March 9, 2016

With the time zone change it's now light enough to ride when I wake up at quarter past six. But the cafe doesn't open until eight, and I want a warm breakfast this morning about as bad as anything I've wanted on this trip, so I lay awake and stare at the roof of the tent for an hour lost in thought. Then I pack up, push the bike out in front of the cafe, sit on a bench, and resume my stare-into-the-distance game for the next half hour as semi-trucks roar past.

The LED Open sign clicks on a few minutes before eight and I'm through the front door a moment later. It's like stepping into the platonic ideal of a roadside restaurant on a minor highway in the middle of nowhere. The tablecloths are made of clear vinyl-type stuff and have all kinds of pictures and notes and business cards from passing travelers stuck under them. The menus are handwritten on brown paper bags. There are rolls of paper towels at the center of each table instead of napkins. Water comes in a handled mason jar with a lime wedge stuck along the lip. Every square foot of wall space is covered with something that's for sale, from candy bars and aspirin to plastic jewelry and bumper stickers and an ad from a local septic tank installation company.

The attached building is full of so much random stuff I'm not sure there exists a word to describe it. It's racecar-themed ceiling fans alongside huge rolls of shiny wrapping paper, framed art prints of horses and flowers and Western scenes, and those wooden signs with messages printed on them like, "My aim is to keep this bathroom clean. Your aim will help." By the time I've finished processing everything breakfast has arrived. It's a wild spread: a huge omelette paired with toast and potatoes and a short stack of pancakes that's bigger than any stack of pancakes I've had since Jeffrey City, Wyoming five years ago. And it's all every bit as good as it is large.

The place is called May's Cafe. It's named after May, the old woman in the apron who does the cooking. She's a stout, gruff, silver-haired bulldog of a woman who throughout my hour in the place gives her daughter, the waitress, an unending line of shit for not answering her phone this morning. The daughter's far more pleasant. She's the one who works the cash register.

"And how much do I owe you for setting up the tent back there last night?" I ask her after she tells me the total.

"Nothing."

"You sure?"

"Yep, we never charge bikers. Unless ya break a water line with a tent peg or somethin'. Then ya gotta pay to have it fixed."

"Well, thank you so much. And thanks for the wonderful breakfast. I'm so thankful that a place like this exists out here."

"You know, there used to be eight businesses between El Paso and the national park at Carlsbad Caverns. This is the only one that's left now."

"It seemed like the same sort of thing was happening in Sierra Blanca, with all the closed-down businesses. You could see how they used to have movie theater and all of those stores but now it's almost nothing."

"Oh, those people are crazy down there. McDonald's and bunch of other chains have tried to come in over the years, but they keep shutting them down. They say they don't want them there."

And in an instant my respect for that strange, little, contrarian town alongside Interstate 10 grows by leaps and bounds. Thirty-four miles to the east Van Horn is a mess of chain fast food, chain motels, and chain truck stops. Sierra Blanca might not be as busy, but it's owned by locals and the profits stay in the community and they've committed to stewarding the future of their town on their own terms. I've seen so little of that on this long ride across America. It makes me happy to know that communities like this still exist, especially when they leave money on the table to stick to their principles.

As we're talking, a convoy of three or four vans rolls up in the parking lot. About a dozen Mennonite women, all in dresses and bonnets and most of them no taller than five feet, stream out and make their way toward the front door. Outside I talk to one of the van drivers. He's an older guy, also a Mennonite, very clearly a Texan but still with a thick German accent because I'm sure that's what he speaks at home.

"You have to change tires?" he asks when he finds out how far I've come, in the way that all older men ask that question when they find out how far I've come.

"Nah, I've got these good German tires," I say, pointing to the Schwalbe on my front rim.

He smiles a big smile and laughs a big laugh.

The north wind is a cold wind. But the road leading away from Cornudas rises before me in long, gentle steps, so it only takes fifteen minutes of pedaling before the sharp edge of the cold is gone. There's a lot more traffic than on the quiet ranch road I took yesterday, but with a huge shoulder we exist in two separate worlds. At least half the cars that pass me have New Mexico license plates. It's still two days away, but the end of Texas draws ever closer.

I crunch over the remains of tumbleweeds that exploded into a hundred pieces after a direct hit from the grill of a passing truck. I spit out in front of me to gauge the angle of the wind. I watch as a herd of antelope see me coming and then decide to head the same direction I'm going, not so much trotting but bouncing along as if they have springs in their hooves. For who knows what reason my mind goes back into my mental record collection circa 1991 and I find myself out in the sprawling high desert of West Texas singing Boyz II Men songs out loud to an audience of no one.

When the clouds burn off around mid-day the landscape comes alive under skies of deep blue and puffy clouds with pure white on top that fades toward a light gray on their undersides. They cast dark shadows that dance their way across the folds of the earth where the grasses shine pale green and the bushes and trees a deeper shade of the same. I start to see the oddly angled stubs of what look like Joshua trees. Everything looks healthy and alive after the recent rains.

But through all of it I keep coming back to the same thought: I wish Kristen was here because she would love this. She revels in the riding that takes us through wide open places like this, where the land appears much as it always has, where the power and beauty of untouched nature are just a glance away. There are few women who travel by bicycle at all. Fewer still prefer this kind of remote country. But she's one of them: tough, unique, special. Nothing I'm going to find out here by myself can fill the void her absence has left behind.

With the help of a good tailwind I crank past a Border Patrol checkpoint, little groups of houses too small to be known as proper towns or to have any services, and a green sign that tells me it's just seventy-three miles to Las Cruces. Good god, I could be there tomorrow, I think to myself. Then it's down, down, down, into a narrow canyon with tall walls that sends me coasting into El Paso County, the last one in Texas I'll ride in.

About twelve miles from the edge of the city of El Paso I hang a right and leave the highway behind. I'm planning to ride eight miles to a state park and camp there, but the first sign I see says Hueco Tanks State Park, Campground Full. A little research reveals that it's just, you know, one of the best places in the entire world to go bouldering, which is like rock climbing but doesn't take you so high in the air that you need ropes. During the winter its small camping area is full every day. Only a fool would show up without having reserved a spot months in advance or knowing someone who did.

But it seems like a lot of boulderers are degenerate cheap-asses just like a lot of cycle-tourists, so there's a cheap-ass private campground just outside the entrance to the park that saves me. For a tent spot, wifi, power outlets in front of the office, and a bathroom it's two dollars. Two! After confirming I haven't teleported back to 1974 I ask the guy behind the counter if he made a mistake, but he didn't. I pass the late afternoon in peace and quiet out in the desert, laid out on my air mattress, warmed by the heat of the sun low in the western sky and cooled by the breeze blowing in from the northeast. I spend a couple of hours listening to old songs from Oasis, the band that I listed as my favorite from about age thirteen until they nosedived into irrelevance somewhere in the early 2000s.

It takes me back to listening to those same songs during middle school and high school in Edmonds, Washington. I think about what my life was like back then and how I thought my adult life would turn out when I was fifteen or sixteen or seventeen. Had he known the outcome up to this point, Teenage Jeff probably would have scrunched up his face and thought, What? That's it? Riding bikes? Where's your Ferrari? Where's your million dollars in the bank? I wonder how he'd feel if he knew that the million dollars in the bank wouldn't be worth the hazard to his soul the earning of it would cause. I wonder what he'd think, knowing how that realization would bring his life more freedom than great amounts of cash ever could. I mean, he'd probably just say something dismissive while avoiding eye contact and trying to weasel out of the conversation, but whatever, screw that little know-it-all.

Today's ride: 43 miles (69 km)
Total: 2,257 miles (3,632 km)

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