An aspiring writer's tiny existence in New York City while chasing a dream, and hoping that somehow this crazy, random thing called "life" all works out.
For sending inspiration and/or fanmail, please use: scottkurttila@hotmail.com
With that, I'm setting out into the toughest part of the ride to come but I'm looking forward to whatever it might bring in terms of making this trip an even richer experience. Lastly, if there's one word of advice I could give any of you, it's "pursue one dream next year, no matter how big or how small it is, just go and do it."
I woke up and packed up and headed to the far end of Van Horn to find breakfast. I feel like I'm dragging against the headwinds that are threatening to plague me again today. They are supposed to be 30 mph. I can handle that, especially after knowing I was in 65 mph+ winds for 6 hours at night. 30 mph during the day is nothing. I find a truck stop cafe and pull in despite feeling like I was dragging for two miles wondering how on earth I was going to go all day when the trailer felt so heavy after the previous day's long miles. I check my brakes as I ride to make sure they're not rubbing. Nope. I must just be tired. As I park my bike, I notice that Bob the trailer, aka "Professor Robert F. Jacknife" as I started to call him after so many falls has his first flat. Just yesterday I was in awe that he had not gone flat. I have to remember not to think about the stuff that "hasn't" happened because that seems to cause it to happen.
I eat then change out the tire tube on Bob which of course is in the bottom of the second bag which means I have to unpack EVERYTHING to get to it. I leave by noon but am determined to get 100 miles in today no matter what. As I head out of Van Horn, I'm met with strong winds in the face and un uphill climb. I start climbing. Word must be getting around from the few truckers I've met about my ride as I told one trucker at a table near me the night before during a late night breakfast that I wished more of them would honk. Now, trucks are beeping at me and waving from both directions, oncoming and passing. I'm smiling and giggling and waving at all of them. I feel so encouraged by it all...something so simple brings so much joy to me when I'm out here for so long constantly pushing my legs and hands and back to the limits and sometimes further it seems. I climb and climb and climb and then I see it...THE MOUNTAIN TIME ZONE SIGN!!! I stop and take a picture and thrust my fists into the air in a victory symbol. A couple of trucks honk congratulations as they pass. They know why I'm standing there jumping up and down like Rocky. I continue on, climbing, climbing, climbing and then I get a short descent into an enormous plains. Road construction is ahead. I opt for a side service road off the main freeway. Then I see that the closed lanes are perfect smooth new black top. I go around the cones and have my own virgin freeway for mile up mile. It makes fighting the headwinds a joy. I ride all day long and then have another uphill climb. I go and go and go and finally make it. It's getting dark and late and dangerous as I had to get back onto the shoulder of I-10 which has now become narrow. The passing cars and trucks only have one lane lined with concrete barriers so they are driving partly on my three foot shoulder and several close passes cause me to start riding on the highly angled loose gravel. I can't keep going like this but then providence shines on me and I hit an exit which is the cut off to a long side road through another small desert. There is a truck stop there complete with real tiger cubs and two adults. I've never been so close to a tiger. I take photos of the amazing cats as they fight over something they are eating at 1 a.m.
Time to press on. I ride out and out and out, total darkness except for the moon into the middle of nowhere. I then turn right and can see that I'm parallelling the freeway a couple miles away. I think about Mississippi again...but I know I'll be okay in Texas...this is MY Texas and I love it here. Whenever I take a short break to stop, the sand along side the road is soft to walk in. The roadway is mostly smooth and the winds have let up a bit but it's cold...26 F. My hands are cold, my feet are cold and I have to keep stopping to warm up but then my sweat on my body chills my core down. It's a catch 22 but I'm determined to keep going. I've gone 76 miles and I'm going to make 100. I keep riding and riding and riding and riding. Finally, around 5 a.m. I hit the small town of Fabens. I simply don't have any more in me so I make my way through the town looking for camping or a motel to rest a bit. The motel is full. I'm near I-10 again. There's been an accident and cars are taking highway 20 that I've been riding on as detour. I can't ride on I-10 because it's closed so I camp near the on ramp on a perfect pad of cement that was once a gas station but is now the home of an upside down burned out car. I wake up around 9, pack up and head into town. I find McD's for breakfast but I'm too late so have to opt for lunch. I notice a cell phone store next door and lo and behold they've got the battery for my cell phone that is three years old. I know have my cell phone working again after about five days. I'll be able to look up numbers in my phone book and make calls for Christmas. I head back to highway 20 and ride west to El Paso. The wind is light to nil. Finally. The smells of the farms remind me of my childhood as I go through a small farming community for mile up mile. I pass pecan orchards and take the time to stop and pick pecans off a limb. Wow. I have picked my first real pecans. I put three of them into my bag as souvenirs to give to my sister and friends I've been sending seashells. They fit neatly next to the crystals I found a few days earlier. I keep going. Yes, I keep saying that but what else do you say except "I keep going."
I love the scents of the farm area. When I was growing up and had moved back to Seattle, I considered small dusty towns like these "dirty" and backwards. I now think of them as "earthy" unencumbered by all the cement upon cement of big cities. You can be in touch with the planet here rather than walking over the thick and hard man-made skin of sidewalks and skyscrapers. Eventually, I hit El Paso and ride through it for what seems like endless miles. I get a bit lost as I've missed one of the turns offs on my bike map but I make my way through. Eventually, I try to get back onto the map route but find myself headed right across the border to Mexico...again. I stop and talk to Border Patrol Officer "Lou" who makes my day. He's a young guy, bright smile and he has a great personality. He directs me over a dirt road to Delta Drive and as I depart, he makes my day by saying "Kick THAT MULE!" which is a term I instantly took to heart and will use incessantly throughout the rest of this trip when it gets steep or windy. I smile for several miles saying "KICK THAT MULE" out loud and laughing. I fear I may be going insane. (no, I'm not really but have always wanted to say that in a journal.)
It begins to get dark and I've done about 40 miles through to what I thought was the edge of El Paso. I'm taking a new route and then see the cut off to the bike map route. I ride down and across a valley and up the other side. I'm now riding along in the dark, on an unlit road but El Paso is filling the night with miles of sparkling lights on the hem of the skirt of the mountains behind her. It begins to snow a bit, then it turns to rain. The shoulder of the backroad disappears and cars are now driving home from a day of Holiday shopping. People are starting to get close and honk rudely now. I'm in New Mexico though...a major milestone. I've also crossed over 2650 miles and I've got less than 1,000 miles to go...right around 950 or so. I've reached several big mental milestones today. But the rain is too much, the cars are too much, the dark, bumpy and pitted shoulderless road is too much. I'm going to play it safe and find a motel. I ask at a gas station and I've actually got to ride back over the border to Texas into El Paso for a motel. Ug. I feel like I'm going backwards, stopping short with just 54 miles for the day but I'm not going to ride wet for hours for 45 miles to Las Cruces. It's just not smart. I get a motel and some. My clothes and bags are covered in mud and I had accidentally left Winnie The Pooh strapped to the top of my bag instead of putting him away. He looks peeved and I apologize and wash him off before I pass out for the night. Hopefully he'll forgive me as I've began talking to him as if he were my dog, Axl through out the trip.
So now I log off and will head out of El Paso. My goal is to make Scott Peak in New Mexico by Christmas near the Gila mountain dwellings where 7 natural caves host 40 rooms where a people called the "Salado" survived for several hundred years. It's a couple of hundred miles away and on the other side of 8,228 foot Emory Pass. Oh, almost forgot. I ran into "Martin" two days ago, a Scotsman headed the other direction. We chatted a bit and he told me how brutal the mountains are. Oddly, it was his 37th day, too and he told me that it's 10 below at times in the mountains. How on earth will I survive that and I can't believe that I might actually have another 37 days to go????? I do the math and realize he's doing less than 30 miles per day to this point. He must be taking time to tour the sights or something. I know I have a 13 mile climb, straight up coming in the next 200 miles....but really...30 miles per day from here on out? And 10 below? I ponder that and hope that he's talking Celsius and not Farenheit. Luckily, I found the Crazy Cat Cyclery where Lawrence helped me out with a good set of thick, warm gloves (hope these do the trick) and a thorn proof tube for Bob. They threw in a free water bottle for me and gave me a 15% discount to boot. Great place, great people. I'm going to miss you, Texas but the Pacific is calling my name.
After making my last update, I started talking to a guy named Rich at the desk of the library in Fort Davis, TX. He turned out to be a kindred spirit of the adventurous sort and I wished I could've spent hours hanging out with him hearing about the things he's done. He introduced me to Mike, the owner of Murphy's restaurant where I had an amazing spaghetti dinner on the house. I ended up talking with "Jim and Johnnie" an extremely nice couple who "RV" it in Alpine for several months out of the year. They were a nice couple and I showed them things all over my bike from the lights to the trailer, etc. Johnnie asked me if I was a Christian and I said "absolutely" then she asked what denomination I was. I wasn't sure how to respond to that as God has been one of those mysterious things for me my entire life. I've never quite understood why there are so many ways to "worship" but perhaps it's because there are so many different personalities and ways to walk in life that each of us just needs to find our own way.
If there's one thing I can say about God, it's that he's omnipresent on my trip. There's not a blade of grass, a flower, a cliff, a desert, an ocean or a starry night that I don't feel dwarfed and awed by the power that created this universe. Sure, man makes things like bike tires, roads and tall buildings, but heck, we don't even really know why when you put a seed in the ground some cells know how to go down and become roots while others reach for the sky and become a trunk, branches and leaves. People are like that, too. It seems some of us are roots to feed the others that reach upward as high as we can. It takes all types working together to grow.
After chatting with Jim, Johnnie and Mike for a bit, it was time to say goodbye. I had only done 26 miles for the day but Rich had advised against riding at night. Turns out it got extremely cold and I would've been in 12 degree weather had I gone on. As I said goodbye to Johnnie and Jim to ride off, Johnnie asked for my autograph but I declined saying I'd send her an autographed copy of my book when it came out. Then she gave me a hug. I can't remember my last hug and it was such a nice thing to get one. Again, I love meeting someone I've never met and having them somehow brighten my day like that. I told them to make sure they get to Florida and see it since they'd never been.
I made my way to a small motel and checked in for the night. I bought a small pint of chocolate ice cream and read about the McDonald Observatory.I decided I would skip the "cut off" that Rich had told me about the previous day and I would tackle the steep climb and winding hills up to the observatory. I wanted to see what a steep climb would be like. It might add about 47 miles to the trip, but I needed to do that after getting the ride from "Wooly" for the 44 miles two days earlier. It turns out those headwinds that I had battled against later that night were actually 60-65 mph with gusts to 75 mph. No wonder my eyelids were peeling back and I was blown off the road so many times. But I made it and grew a ton of confidence as a result. I loaded up my trailer and bike and made my way to The Drugstore for breakfast. I ordered eggs, sausage and a stack of blueberry pancakes, my latest favorite. Blueberries. Don't know where it came from, but it's replaced the Snickers Ice Cream bars as the thing I crave. I sat at the bar of a real old western cafe complete with a moose on the wall and a "cowboys/cowgirls" sign on the restrooms. There was a perfect Texas Blonde girl there with her parents and our eyes met for a brief instant as they paid their bill at the cash register near me. I thought about how different we were. She was perfectly clean, perfect make up, perfect hair, spotless clothes. My hair was in every direction, scraggly beard, my clothes sport more earth and grease than actual color now and I worry that some folks might steer their children away from this bum at times. When I look in the mirror, I sometimes shock myself at my appearance yet under all of the "miles" I actually think I'm looking younger and healthier than ever.
I set out and rode out of town, waving to each passing car. Texans love to wave to each other on the small back highways. I heard a small metal "clink" at one point and wonder what I'd run over. Then I thought it might've been something falling off my bike. I turned back to check, just in case. It was my beloved buck knife, purple, shiny and the most used tool on this trip. It had fallen out of my pocket. Thank God I had turned back to check. I think I'm finally getting better at all this. I seem to have stopped falling and have not lost any items for awhile, knock on wood. I rode past a herd of about 20 pronghorn antelope and tried taking photos. I marveled at the mountains I was about to tackle. I kept making my way up expecting a long hard day. It was actually easier than I expected and I made every hill without walking. I even saw two large but dead tarantulas along the shoulder. TARANTULAS! I GOT TO SEE TARANTULAS! I think to myself, how cool is it that I'm actually riding through a country with spiders the size of golf balls that are covered with hair?
I make it to the obervatory and am met by a really nice guy who lets me see the solar show for free. The sun is huge and we all witness a solar flare during the show...live. Wow. My mind reels at the fact that we're on a little rock spinning around this monstrous ball of flaming gas. We only have 5 billion years to find another place to live and I ponder how we should probably get our butts in gear considering we can't even get to the next planet, let alone get light years away to a solar system where we could actually find an "earth" replacement when the sun decides to blow up into a Red Giant before collapsing into becoming a white dwarf.
I opt out of staying for the "star party" where I could've looked through telescopes at stars, etc. as that would've lasted until 10 p.m. and I wanted to get some miles in. I rode on, made a few more small hills among a lot of descending and then I eventually was able to just let it run all the way to Kent for the most part. I flew, hitting a new max speed of 30.0 mph at one point. As I came shooting out of the mountains and down a gentle sloping horizon to horizon plain, the sun is glowing as she moves westward to wake up the other side of the planet. Then I see an orange glow on the other horizon. I stop and look. What on earth? I'm going the right way, right? How is the sun glowing over there? It must be a city...no, it's definitely some sort of sunset. I'm lost. Then it hits me...it's a full moon and the orange and pink and purple I'm seeing is a "moon rise" like I've never seen. I'm standing in the middle of an enormous desert plain, mountains at my bike, sunset to my left, exploding pink orange purple moonrise to my right. Life is just a never ending set of miracles and miraculousness if you pick your head up from looking at your puny existence long enough to notice.
I keep riding and eventually hit I-10 and make my way along as far as I can to Van Horn. It's getting really cold, it's about 4 a.m. and I've done 92 miles. I pull into "El Campo" RV park and set up my tent. I gaze at the moon and stars a bit, picking out my favorite constellations before finally passing out in my toasty little home.