Doug: The Journey

Dear Reader,

So, big news. I am the proud owner of a new laptop. It is a HP Pavillion dv9000, and can only be described by these two words: "Bitchin' Sweet." I'm rather pleased with it, despite it's lack of Microsoft Office, and occasional glitchyness, which I'm rather sure has to do with the sound system, which I'm going to adjust at the earliest opportunity.

But now on to more important things.

September 1st was my nineteenth birthday. For those of you wondering why I'm so much older than my peers, it seems that I was born about 13 hours too late to make the cutoff line for being in the school grade ahead of the one I'm in now. In other words, I was fashionably late. (sorry for the extra 13 hours of labor, mom, it had to be done).

I like birthdays, they're normally an excuse to throw a party and acquire excessive amounts of swag. However, this birthday was not normal.

Precisely three days before my birthday, (Aug 28) my construction fellows and I started on what I like to call a "Shock and Awe" job. The basics of this are thus: The homeowner commissions us to remodel a part of their home, I.E. kitchen, bedroom, whatever. The homeowner then proceeds to go out of town and the day they leave, we move in, demolish whatever we need to demolish, fix whatever damage we've done on accident, remodel whatever it is we were supposed to, throw some paint on, and then have it all done by the time the homeowners get back from their vacation.

My boss really likes shock and awes. Before he got sucked into doing three jobs at the same time due to circumstances not under his control, he did quite a few of them. They're quick, they're easy, and best of all, they make lots of money. My boss likes money, and hey, who doesn't? And we, as workers, like shock and awes too. They aren't particularly hard, they make plenty of money, and if you don't like what you're doing, in about thirty minutes you'll have something else to do. My work is like that.

Back to the S&A. Abe and I were working on taking out tile, and, we were discussing our previous adventure to Arizona. Yeah. The one where we went and saw Haylee Williams and Paramore play. We drove nearly a thousand miles in two days, got pulled over by the State Police, and saw quite possibly the greatest band in the history of pop music play. Not only that, but we ended up right on the fence, and I caught the bass player's pick. We also technically stole his parents car to pull the trip off, and bad things happened because of it. Moral of this story: Tell your parents what you want to do, as opposed to lying to them about it and doing it anyway.

So we, since we obviously don't learn from our mistakes, were discussing various alibis we could use on our parents, mine especially (all hypothetical of course), and our discussion took what we thought to be at the time to be a turn for the absurd when we mentioned my impending birthday.

Abe: Well, we've already used sleeping over at someones house. Plus, I don't really have a house anymore.

Me: I'm sure the people you're staying with wouldn't care.

Abe: Probably not. What should we do for your birthday?

Me: Something cool.

Abe: Really? Great thinkin' there.

Me: Yeah I know, Fuck me right?

Abe: Exactly.

Me: Something cool... Bike to Santa Fe.

Abe: (pause for a beat) Dude, you're a genius.

Me: I wasn't serious.

Abe: I am. Let's do it.

Me: That's a long way, like 60 miles. Think we can?

Abe: Of course. I'm awesome and you're Iron Man.

Me: Okay. Let's do it.

Three days later I found myself waking up at 5, Abe by my side, my dad dropped us off in Tijeras, and we were off. That's right, we come up with an idea and we just do it. That's just how we roll.

The route is called Highway 14 on state maps, but this series of letters and numbers doesn't even begin to adequately describe the beauty that Abe and I found on what is called on biking maps "The Turquoise Trail".

We start off with a long climb to the crest of a series of hills that makes up the back of the Sandia Mountains. This climb is mildly difficult, but since it is at the beginning of the ride, it seems almost easy. Abe and I took these hills and made them submit to our will, riding up and down them with cries of "Get Some!" and "Tiger Style!", the opening words to one of our pump up songs, "Wu-Tang Clan ain't nothin' to fuck with".

We rode through a cloud, which was, due to our altitude, more like fog. This is a magical experience, disturbingly beautiful. Visibility is reduced to something like 200 meters, which, compared to the sweeping vistas we had been encountering before this, turns the world into a cave. Sound is muffled. While biking at 7,000 ft, all you can normally hear is your own labored breathing, the sound your bike makes as it moves, but when you stop, the normal sounds of the road take over. When we stopped in the cloud, nothing seemed to move, there was dead silence, and Abe and I took a few moments to savor it.

We biked about fifteen miles before we began to see the light at the end of the cloud. In a twenty minute period, which seems like a second while biking, we broke through the last murky vestiges to brilliant morning sunlight. We realized once again that it was no later than 8 in the morning, biking in the cloud we had entered a sort of twilight land, where time had no meaning whatsoever, and the universe had seemingly stopped itself on our will.

Now we were facing a series of rolling hills, and these were not willing to submit like our previous dirt piles. At this point, we were flagging, we made it up several of these hills, but, like all great warriors, met with our greatest challenge at the last one. We toiled up it, making it to top winded, but unscathed.

I'm lying, that hill kicked our asses up one side, but we beat it down on the other. At the top we were greeted by a startling view of the valley below us. It seemed as though the whole world was stretched out before us, going on forever and ever until it grew hazy with the distance. Though we didn't know it, it was almost all downhill from here.

We stopped for brunch in Madrid, a tiny town that was originally intended for mining. Now it serves as a smaller, and far more intimate version of Santa Fe itself. Small shops sell jewelry and art, and the town was just coming alive as we entered it.

We ate at Jezebel's, a tiny cafe near town center. A small card located on our table gave us a brief, but fascinating history of Jezebel, the queen the cafe was named for.

Jezebel was a pagan ambassador to Ahab, King of the Israelites. She was princess of the Pagan nation of Phoenicia, and the two countries were at war. During peace negotiations she and Ahab fell in love, and she converted him to the pagan religion. This resulted in civil war, and naturally, since the winners write the history books, she was subsequently demonized. Although there is no evidence she was ever an adulteress, the name Jezebel has come to be synonymous with whore, or slut. Too bad, it's a pretty name.

After a tasty lunch we were on the road again. Our host at Jezebel's had informed us that it was mostly downhill to the outskirts of Santa Fe from here, and we enjoyed smooth sailing. We encountered an abandoned Chevy Bel Air (2 actually) in front of a trading post. A tiny kids version of a Corvette lay just two hundred meters down the road. This is all on the downhill slope on the other side of the hills we just rose above, leading down into rolling plains.

We hit the plains and it was smooth sailing from there, we covered well over twenty miles at an easy pace, riding side by side, chatting and looking at the scenery. New Mexico is one of the most beautiful lands I have ever had the privilege of seeing, my continued time spent outdoors has underscored that in the most magnificent way possible.

At last, after about an hour and a half of plains riding, we reached the intersection of I-25 and Highway 14. This is a mere twenty minutes outside of the Santa Fe city limits. Those twenty minutes seemed like seconds.

It was odd coming back to the city after riding in the wilderness for so long. Cars roared around us, and inside the city proper, it was difficult to get around, almost to the point of frustration. Due to poor planning and neglect, the city's sidewalks are almost impassible by bike, forcing us to walk the 6 miles into the city proper in just over two hours, stopping for a smoothie on the way to our final destination, a church in Santa Fe old town. After making almost twenty miles an hour on the highway, this was more than frustrating, it was infuriating.

Finally, we made our way to the church and were greeted by our ladies, Sarah and Jasmine, who we'd asked to pick us up in Sarah's truck.

There is nothing quite like being reunited with someone who cares about you after an adventure, I enveloped Jasmine in a bear hug as Sarah rushed to embrace Abe. We'd done something we hadn't known for sure that we could do, and these two were here to support us. That means something, something more than just your average friendship.

I had picked the church as the final destination for two reasons. First, it was a landmark that is not only easily recognized and not particularly hard to find, but also well known to me. The second reason is personal and has to do with a ritual I have established on previous trips to Santa Fe. After reuniting with the girls, we made our way into the church, paid our respects, and left.

As we left the city of Santa Fe I pondered the meaning of adventure. To go on an adventure is to set forth with a destination in mind, and to reach that destination. It is often said in regards to adventure that it is not the destination that matters, but rather the journey.

I hold with the thought that perhaps there is a middle ground. Perhaps the journey is only part of the story. Perhaps, at journey's close lies not another ending, but the beginning of another adventure. This journey ended at a church, with friends and loved ones close, and, despite reaching the end of this one, I feel that in doing so I may have discovered the beginning of another.

I am nineteen now. Many friends of mine have rather jokingly called me old. I know that seems like a joke to adults, if a nineteen year old is old then what is a 45 or 50 year old? Exipirienced is what they'd like to hear me say. Still, this age brought to mind questions I didn't think I'd be asking myself a year ago. I feel that things mean more as you get older. Learning isn't quite so much an effort as a habbit. I feel older, not old, just older. It occurs to me that all of this is a rather grand journey, many adventures, with many destinations in between.

So, Dear Reader, good friends, lovers, family, to the journey, and the destination, may it be all we hoped, and far, far more than we bargained for.


-Doug

"My pants are sticky... I'll give you one guess as to why."
Rayne, Least I Could Do