Wednesday, October 16, 2002

Last Ride

It is the end of summer here, and fall is actually Fall. After living in Tucson for the last 5 years where there were 2 seasons - hot and not so hot, I am loving fall. Joey-the-Kid wrote about his fall motorcycle ride while living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I thought you might enjoy it.

...The dusk begins to gather
and the twisting road,
still glimmering faintly,
blurs over and is gone.
-Antonio Machado

It is the last ride of Summer, or is it Fall? You pull on your Red Wing boots, the black ones with the steel toes and the upteen laces that crawl halfway up your leg. They are dusty, scuffed, broken-in. At the beginning of the season you polished them each time you rode, it was part of the special ritual you had invented, along with cleaning the bike. Then you got careless, indifferent - the riding was more important.

You pick up Todd, he will soon be leaving Santa Fe for a new job in Denver. The phrase "Last Rides" echoes in your helmet. You lead down the winding 2-laner out of El Dorado, by Lamy junction, and then a hard right turn towards Galisteo. It is afternoon, and the scrubby Southwestern desert is bone dry. But in your mind the grass flowers, green, the Chamisa yellow once again. The road is wet - you think it is the long delayed Summer rains, yet you are also here, in Fall. You notice the chill in the air, but the wind rushing across your face feels gentle, filled with implicit meaning, poignant with memories. In the churning of your soul Spring and Fall become mixed up, and you are riding RavenStar towards Tombstone and Bisbee, Arizona, and you are merely out for coffee in Madrid, New Mexico.

You slow down in the little Spanish village of Galisteo, adobe houses of muted earth, then a hard right on the dirt road to Madrid. A few miles, and the haunting landscape stretches before you. There is pinon and juniper smoke in the air, and to the west the mountains are hazy and blue. You remember the ineffable sunsets over mountains like these, as you rode side by side in a zone of power with your double, through miles of lengthening summer shadows. You now ride through a kaleidoscope of memories, 12,000 miles of summer intensity of wind, sun, and highway, all swirling and overlaying themselves on this simple and present late October day.

You remember that special evening of Grace, on an empty road similar to this one, when in the center of your onrushing motion everything became supernaturally still, and your head opened to receive the downfalling sacrament of sky, and then, holy twilight. You remember that magestic sunset as you came down the San Andres Mountains on your way to Alamagordo; shafts of light playing across the broad valley before you, an Ansel Adams photograph become three-dimensional.

Waiting out the Colorado rain in Durango you met Joey-the Kid, and Mary Annabelle, and you danced with the shadows all across the twisty passes. Experience and memories flood your body, as if latent circuits have been activated, and your mind flowers as you once again ride through lush green valleys along the Rio Grande, and through the smoke of a fiery Questa, and pristine Angel Fire.

But the signs were there - the sun laying horizontal in the sky, redder somehow, the ravens flying lower and more slowly in front of you, the road reflecting the light differently. In Ouray on a Sunday morning you woke up to the first snow of the season; it lay lightly across the tops of all the peaks, pure and radiant against the march of golden aspens at lower altitudes. And today you feel it in the effortless way you melded with your ride, the road humming so easily under your wheels just so...

Yes, the signs were there, and as you rolled into the old ghost town of Madrid for a late lunch at the Mineshaft Tavern, and a cappucino at Java Junction, you felt very lucky, and very blessed. On your way back to Santa Fe you found the sky clearing, the sun lighting up the countryside once again, and your memories coalescing into the still point on the horizon before you. You knew it was the end of the season. You have entered Holographic Mind.

5:39:02 PM