DAY 40: Mountains, rain

CORTEZ, COLORADO | Sunday, April 18, 2010 | Sand Canyon National 9 Inn, Room No. 7 | 301 W. Main Street 

We've hit the mountains now. From West Texas north through most of New Mexico, the road managed to skirt the climbs, to find valleys to wind through. We were flying through the flats, pushing 65 mph at times, just shy of the 80 mph posted speed limits. Oh, faithful Yellow Truck, designed nearly thirty years ago, when 55 was plenty. 

In the mountains, we slow to a crawl. The 2.2 liter heart feels all of its 230,000 miles, feels the force of gravity, the dizziness of the elevation taking its guts, all of the forces push against its rings and seals, testing its ability to compress the fuel and the air into tires rolling forward, up and up. Down from fifth gear into fourth, the road slowing, our moving picture lurching nearly to a halt, the needle falling, the momentum sucked away, and then at 35 mph, into third gear, the cars roaring by in the passing lane. 

Nothing I can do. I'm listening to the motor. With the gas pedal I try not to hurry Yellow, I try to stay back from his max output, to maintain what is doable. On the lobsterboat, Jack never stressed his diesel, the Jennifer Joan, a snouty, poky Canadian Novi. Going the distance, there has to be an understanding. There has to be a reserve that is never touched. An acceptance of limitations if nothing more. You can smell the violation of this place in some of the cars passing, in their exhaust. I've told Adrienne about it by now. She knows it. It's the acridity of singed oil, the engine pushed too far, unable to contain its own forces, the engineers allowing it in the design, the engine beginning to burn itself up, too quickly, too soon.

So we are down to 35 mph. But we're still climbing. Yellow's temp is up, slightly, but not bad. His rpms sound good, steady, thrumming. And some of the biggest trucks are barely going faster, struggling too. The mountains rear up. We slow. I listen as best I can, like a doctor not wanting to lose a patient, coaxing the life to continue, to eek on just a little bit more through this difficult moment, there will be rest at the hill's crest. Come on, Yellow. There's a place on the dash. I pat the dash there, hold my hand to the black vinyl skin pulled over the engine firewall and all the dials, still uncracked after all these years. I pat the dash, trying to send comfort to the three of us.

*


In Chaco Canyon, we perused ruins from the 9th century. We had passed four chow dogs, a mother and three younger, tending goats on a dirt road off of Rt. 550, near Negeezi, New Mexico. At the ruins, we walked on a ground plane compiled by wind and time after the people had all left. The buildings filled with blowing sand, vegetation took root and was covered over, over thousands of years, abandoned, reclaimed and finally buried. They've only been partially excavated. So you walk through at the second floor as though it is ground, another story buried below you, like you are able to float. But you have to imagine the two additional stories that would have been above you when the place was thriving, when the stone work was smoohtly plastered and the perfect corners were radial, rounded soft. The work of the stone masons is amazingly precise. The lintels over the windows are mostly juniper, neat, small, their lightness, the juice of sap totally gone, understood with a fingertip. Twelve hundred years ago, with stone tools these people, Pueblos, built a four-story urban center in a canyon, came and went.


At Mesa Verde, the touring was more controlled. The narration was provided by rangers in hard, flat-brimmed hats. The crowds knew what they were after and the sun was out. There were families here, children yelling, babies crying in giant backpacks. The buildings are better preserved here, from the 12th century. The famous cliff dwellings. They were stunningly beautiful, instantly understandable, the connection of a building to a landscape.


None of this translates into photographs, although we take them obviously, I do anyway, Adrienne mostly films, and the pictures do the job admirably. Everything is digital these days. Accessible so quickly. We begin to take it for granted. It is enough. It conveys. Therefore it is. But then you begin to go to these places, you get some vacation, you go and confront, i.e. look at firsthand, these things, and they make you hungry for more, as you walk past them and they revolve, emerge, recede. You see how round the world really is, still.

*


At Chaco Canyon, where it never rains, it rained for us. We'd made our signature chili dish. Or Adrienne had. I'd put up the tent. And coffee. We'd made the coffee next to the chili on the stove. We were hungering for decent coffee. So we had our coffee cups filled with actual coffee, clutched in our fists, content.

All day the storm had been coming, darkening the sky, dropping down skeins of rain along the horizon, thundering. But over us, the sky was blue. The clouds were puffed up white and sweet and not at all portending. Adrienne wanted the rain, I don't remember why. But she had been excited for it ever since we'd heard there was a sixty percent chance for thundershowers. By late afternoon though, it seemed like it wouldn't fall near us, had passed us by, and she was disappointed, in an excited way, still hopeful. People were mostly back to their campsites, standing around the firepits, sitting in fold-out chairs. A little girl in a pink jumper was running through the sparse weeds, back and forth between her family's two sites. Another girl clomped to the restrooms in what were clearly her father's boots, scuffing the earth. The sky was darkening again. The ravens, who soar and float along the canyon walls, own the place really, were sitting now, on the outcroppings above us campers, croaking.


Finally the rain began to hit the sand, in scattered spatters first. For a little while. Just teasing. Enough so that I'd had time to make a space in the truck bed for the cooler and box of cooking things, everything was ready to heave under cover. Adrienne had tucked the firewood under a rock pile. We had our coffee. The chili was ready, but it seemed like we shouldn't eat. We'd have to wait. And then it came. One of those skeins opened up over us and the big drops just started coming down. Adrienne remembered the movie cam, as soon as we'd scrambled up to a ledge under an outcropping. I ran for the truck, got it from the glovebox. Ran back, scrambled up, back under cover. Others were also hurrying to their tents. I could see the little girl in pink making a beeline for her tent, her hood up now. As I got the camera flipped open she ducked out of sight. Just tents. Everyone gone, zipped inside. Just Adrienne and I, dry under a bulge of rock, drinking our coffee. The rain came down hard. We sat there. Our toes got a little wet. Our arms too. There was just enough room, our heads bowed to hunch in deep enough, two birds in the rain.