day 11 -- big bend to el paso (embellished)

and then off again...repacked the bike for the trip north. this is one of the less liberating aspects of the ride. the new bike has large saddlebags and I've kept the gear limited enough. but the arrangement is still slightly complicated. I have a bike-specific framed bag that fits over the rear backrest and sits on the back seat. that's simple enough, but to it I've lashed the hiking backpack, which is suspended over the back fender. ideally I'd have a luggage rack to support it, but as it is is rests on top of the license plate. the whole deal is stable enough, but of course it's hard not to glance in the rearview to check it once in a while on a 350-mile ride. inevitably it's not perfectly centered, and it's easy to get a touch obsessive about it. but this ride was stunning enough to distract me from the rearview...long empty roads from the edge of the park north to alpine and then from marfa to van horn. another six or seven storm systems to dodge...by this point I'd realized that no matter how much I wanted to I didn't have any control over the situation. but it was fun to pretend, even if it took away some of the sit back and relax vibe. climbing into the first town above the desert (alpine) there was even a towering dust devil visible from a mile away, a wispy dust column that probably wouldn't have been too fun to ride through. but it spun off harmlessly. crossing west from alpine into marfa, though, there was a solid wall of purple grey that was more than the two minute splashes I'd ridden through so far. they were without fail rain under sunny skies, so sparkling pavement and big drops but no risk of a long-term soak. this was different...a slow-moving giant. enough to have me scanning escape routes...best bet was a pavilion built from which people can gather to watch the mysterious 'marfa lights' (moonlight reflecting off mica? highway lights? swamp gas?). I could just squeeze by the barriers and pull into the broad bay of the men's bathroom. but of course the highway veered off to the north just enough to skirt the edge.

I thought about tarrying in marfa for a while since an eccentric high school friend lived there for a while, but the storm kept me moving onto the 'no services for 75 miles' stretch into van horn. opened up on this dead straight stretch, an immense plain between low ridges, grassy scrub with a handful of cattle herds. plus a possible explanation for the 'marfa lights' -- a USAF experimental dirigible station with a huge white unmanned blimp tethered next to the road. absolutely breathtaking and impossible to capture with a camera...exactly the landscape that this trip is about. nobody around for miles, just the bike and the mountains and the grass. and occasional jackrabbits, once close enough to see one have to drop his ears to squeeze through a barbed wire fence. after a late lunch of carnitas at chuy's in van horn, which heavily advertised the fact that it's a regular stop on john madden's bus trips along I-10, I turned north toward the guadalupe mountains and then one more long stretch into el paso. and here one more thing to worry about. for the first time I was in a gasoline situation. 4.9 gallon tank, getting about 50 mpg for most of the trip. 135 miles since the last fill up, so though I'd never really pushed it to empty, all the way to el paso was out of range. but there were a couple of towns on the map, so I figured it was fine. 14 miles to salt fork, then another 23 to cornudas. salt fork was nothing more than a greyhound bus stop cafe -- charming in itself because that's the kind of place where people always board the greyhound in movies...but I'd never seen one. dusty highway, one shop, no visible population center. I think I had just missed its opening hours since I'd seen a greyhound roll by at the last intersection. figured that cornudas might look the same, and google-text confirmed that. so it was either backtrack to pine spring at the guadalupe national park or take a shot with dell city -- 35 miles out of the way. I was in press-on mode, so I hated the detour, but the serendipity was perfect in the end. past salt flats and then into the 'city,' population 415, now very much a transient community of migrant workers. that at this time of evening was under a cloud of irrigation spray. just as I pulled into the only gas station, manuel was closing up and walking toward home. incredible timing again...without this I would have had to backtrack another 40 miles (and hope). I think it was evident that I was desperate, though, given the unlikelihood that anyone would randomly visit dell city. he had shut everything down, so we went exact change, which was just $6 since I didn't have anything else smaller than $20. (in retrospect I should have filled up and offered the change in thanks). enough for a couple of gallons. looped back to the highway on another road, which of course led to a lone gas station that I would have found had I pressed on another couple of miles. ah, but no hurry. long ride into the blinding sunset in el paso and the shock of the strip malls and traffic of a big city. ugh.

day 10 -- big bend

pulled into the park headquarters after a rolling ride across the tip of the chihuahua desert that's protected here. as oklahoma territory faded into an empty landscape along the washita it felt like I was at the edge of the earth, but this, this was even more so. knowing the road ended in the park, that this land wasn't protected from much of anything now that no one would try to scratch a living from it (though of course they had at some point) gave it a sense of finality. it's not on the way to anything, but at least in theory was the sort of desert desperate immigrants cross in hopes of finding work farther north -- hence the border checkpoints placed some 40 miles up the road on both US385 and SR 118. in the off chance that you'd survived the desert and found a ride (often no cars either way for 20 miles), you were out of luck just when you thought you'd made it. big bend is a huge park with four scattered campgrounds, three main roads radiating from the central 'panther junction,' and dozens of miles of jeep roads. and though it looks relatively benign...lots of low scrub, cactuses, green hillsides, there's no water anywhere. so there are only a few miles of trails cut into the wilderness around the main campground at chisos basin, enough for a couple days' hike but not much more since carrying water farther would get a bit heavy. all this means there's not a whole lot to do here but camp out, watch for bears and mountain lions, and take drives in the summer heat. it's relatively quiet this time of year because of that last point, though really I didn't find it that opressive...105 degrees at lower elevations, 90s at the 5400' of the basin.

I set up camp and wandered up to the lodge to post the days' travels -- no cell phone service anywhere but wifi at the lodge -- and get a meal. I hadn't taken time for a relaxed not-on-the-road meal in a while. ate a burger, slipped out onto the patio to snap sunset photos, and listened to the very european clientele. about half the guests there and in the campground were foreign, which is interesting given the remote location, but it's quieter and much easier to get into without reservations than the grand canyon, I guess. slept in here in the far west of the time zone where the sun comes up late, even later in the basin. the basin itself is one more geological phenomenon...in addition to criss-crossing low folded ranges and the vast ancient sea, this was an isolated volcanic incursion, a high tower of upthrust rock with a slightly better watered basin in the center. dramatic scenery, lively flora and fauna. so after a quick ride down to the river in the afternoon sun, I packed up the tent and set out for a backcountry overnight. I planned a later afternoon start to avoid the heat, but in the event that wasn't an issue. it started raining about ten minutes into the hike, and I took shelter a couple of times in an effort to keep the tent and camera dry. but this was the ethereal, whimsical rain that is desert rain -- big drops and the swoosh of wind and rain through branches but not all that much water. it did pull up a new smell, a damp peppery sage.

the hike climbed to the rim of the basin and then along the south edge with forever views across the river into mexico. reached the campsite next to an outcrop above a 1200' drop around sunset, so I'd hiked through shifting light and the phases of afternoon/evening bug sounds. spent a breezy and solitary night at 7400' and dragged myself out of the tent in time to pack up and catch the sunrise. as I turned back to the campsite to grab food out of the bear locker, I saw a buck nosing through where I had set up the tent. but no bears or mountain lions.

day 9 -- lamesa to big bend NP

I wasn't up for the hoedown after the rodeo, though I'm sure there was square dancing. and kid rock. so an early start instead for big bend NP...not exactly on the way, but the sort of place that's so far out of the way that it's hard to imagine heading back there again. so. back onto the cotton plains, which started to sprout pumpjacks and derricks in the permian basin pretty much at the same time that cultivated fields gave way to low texas scrub. the stench of oil was already in the air as far north as post (one town up from lamesa, founded by the cereal magnate cw post in a cloud-seeding and grain-growing scheme...), but this was now full-on oil country. I wanted to spin through midland, the boom capital of texas oil, and it didn't disappoint. blue glass and concrete and local conglomerate drilling headquarters and banks and health centers, the sort of exurban sprawl that I hadn't seen since cincinnati. the only tinted glass I'd seen was the 'dark glass' car-pimping outfit in pampa...partly because I've avoided cities, but there was nothing like this affluence in similar-sized towns. a truly towering downtown that dwarfed the town itself, so oil-fueled commerce linked into much more than midland. but then onto odessa, midland's much-more-texas twin...that is, where the people who work(ed) on the rigs -- not the bankers and executives -- live. this is all chronicled in bissinger's 'friday night lights,' (the book, not the tv show), and I wanted to see if this is overdrawn. obviously I didn't see enough (that is, see a football game) to confirm it, but it looked about right. I can say that all the down-home breakfast spots I passed up in midland were replaced by a sea of crappy chains in odessa. so I missed breakfast and settled for some greasy fried burritos at a burger joint in the ghost town of ft stockton, a place that bragged of burgers made since 1959 but in a not-so-recently converted subway -- the booths were still yellow, and the stock nyc transit maps were still on the wall.

from odessa started down US 385 to the park. a remarkably shiny new road that didn't lead much of anywhere but the park...even though there's another road that parallels it not far to the west, SR118 out of alpine. signs along it marked US385 as part of a mexican-american freight corridor, but that really wasn't clear given that there are no crossings from the park. it does intersect I-10 and US90, both of which lead east and west to border crossings, so I guess that's it...but odessa/midland are an odd inland destination. in any case, the country was big-sky stunning, especially since I had to calculate some more storm avoiding. I'll skip that one since I've already told that story, but once again that was high excitement...was sore proud that I split two systems this time and outran a third with only five minutes of rain-riding (and no hail, crucially). pretended this was some nifty maneuvering, but with the twists in the road I had no real idea how it would turn out...one moment it looked like I was safely clear, then one turn and I was headed straight for the middle. in anycase it worked out since there was zero cover. this was severely treeless country, the bottom of the immense staircase I descended from pampa downward (or at least that's what I figured). that's one of the grandest aspects of the plains, that there are always swells and rises that afford sweeping panoramas once in a while before you drop back to the flat horizon. the sweet sweet grass of oklahoma and upper texas was replaced by the just plain arid smell of the south, with the first cactus-like plants showing somewhere south of ft stockton. only occasional cows on the ranches now, and infrequently roadrunners. geology galore (pointed out by informative texas historical markers), from appalachian-age ground-down and scarred hills running SW-NE to newer hills folded out of the limestone that had covered the older formation (running perpendiculat from SE-NW) to the most recent volcanic intrusions. in some sense it's surprising that any texas kid would want to be anything but a geologist, meteorologist, or cattleman. the sky is right there, you can see clouds and rain developing constantly...as is witnessed by my enduring fascination with texas rainstorms here. and the broken and upturned rocks of the mountains are right there too, never invisible and impossible to ignore.