An Arrival

Crescit Eundo

Having never met New Mexico, my expectations of the place were not well-informed.  They were guided solely by the state flag, sobriquets, and the I-10 signage, all of which seemed like clues to an eccentric mystery.  The flag itself is striking, but not showy.  It’s quite unlike neighboring Arizona, whose central star radiates out like the opening credits to a television show from the 70s.  And it’s an apple to Texas’ orange, which is essentially the American flag distilled to a single verse, or maybe a loud chant.  The New Mexican flag requires that you come closer and wonder, what the fuck is that little emblem there in the middle?  It doesn’t aim to evoke Big Dick American Energy.  It doesn’t harken back to a time of the ever-expanding Muscular Wild West.  It prefers to remain somewhat native and anonymous.  It wishes to simply enjoy its cryptic and politically uninvolved 16 red candles dressed in a festive mustard yellow.

The official motto of New Mexico is “Crescit Eundo,” which means, “It grows as it grows.”  If that isn’t the last thing you hear out of a shaman’s mouth before your consciousness slips into a state of Psychedelia Obscura after your third swallow of Peyote, then I don’t know what is.

Arizona’s state motto is “Ditat Deus” - “God Enriches.”  Which seems neutral enough unless you know about the rancid stench that engulfs the bulk of I-8 from Tucson to Yuma.  I’m not sure how the motto applies, unless they were referring to the literal soil enriching properties of rotting cow carcasses and chicken shit.

New Mexico refers to itself as the “Land of Enchantment,” which seemed outrageously flattering to me at first.  I couldn’t tell whether this was another euphemism or an honest shot at the truth.  I’d lost faith in an area’s ability to speak for itself back in El Paso when I spotted the roadside proclamation that read, “El Paso. The All-American Town,” which seems a little caught-red-handed when you realize that 90% of the background landscape is el barrios of Ciudad Juárez.  How about something more manageable, like “El Paso. Technically Not Mexico,” or, “El Paso. It’s Not What It Looks Like.”

Arizona calls itself the “Grand Canyon State,” which is fair.  There’s no disputing it - the Grand Canyon lives here.  But I’m not at all surprised to find the word Grand in it’s nickname, canyon or no.  Let’s not forget, this is the state that when called out for its Saharan temperatures retorts with delusional sincerity, “But it’s a dry heat!”

I was dizzy from all the gas-lighting.

Before embarking on my first road trip, I didn’t know about the bespoke interstate signage made to warn drivers of weather patterns and implore conscious choices behind the wheel.  It’s a world unto itself.  It’s a peak behind a curtain you’d never get if you’d chosen the blind convenience of air travel.  The phrasing of the statements betrayed the attitude of the towns and seemed to confirm the stereotypes you loved to indulge.  We counted hundreds of roadside LED signs in Texas that blinked, “Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself,” and the famously verbless, “Texas Strong.”  Bulky, half-witted, what you’d expect from a high school linebacker.  More surprising was, “Be Friendly the Texas Way,” which seemed to me to be two completely unrelated ideas until I found out that the state motto is “Friendship.”  Is that allowed?  Can a single noun be a motto?  And can that noun be Friendship when we’re talking about one of the most southern-fried seceed-iest states in the union?  Meanwhile in Arizona, we discovered oddly spaced partially formed thoughts that left you in suspense for a quarter of a mile at a time.

“In a Dust Storm...”

              “...Pull Off Roadway...”

                            “...Turn Vehicle Off...”

                                            “...Feet Off Breaks...”

                                                           “...Stay Buckled...”

All we were missing was Don LaFontaine’s voice on a loudspeaker and we would’ve had ourselves a pretty enticing trailer for the next Terminator film.  New Mexico had a different, more contemplative approach.

“Sandstorms May Exist.”

“Zero Visibility Possible.”

After passing about a gazillion of these signs, I started to feel like a young grasshopper reciting a Zen Koan.  I was beginning to embrace the Buddha Nature.  I was becoming One.  Non-duality was taking over and giving way to pure inspiration.  What else might exist out there?  What dreams were possible that I hadn’t even considered?

Of course I can only speak to the merits of I-10 and the small area we visited.  I am told that the charm doesn’t extend to Historic Route 66.  According to a friend, driving through Albuquerque gives you the feeling that at any moment you could be abducted and eaten by people with hair lips.  I was emphatically warned by Old Bill, a park steward at Walnut Canyon in Arizona, to avoid Gallup, New Mexico, which I later discovered underwent an extensive rebrand in early 2017 from the factually accurate, “Native American Capital of the World,” to, “Gallup.  Real True.”  A city’s catchphrase shouldn’t have everything to do with proving its own existence.

“We’re not planning to go there,” I assured him.

He took me by the shoulders and looked pleadingly into my eyes, “DO. NOT. GO. TO. GALLUP. NEW MEXICO.”

A New Mexican Sunset

The sunset smeared every conceivable pastel across a panorama that looked like a cotton candy calamity to my concrete-city fed eyes.  I never predicted that a small town in New Mexico would become my Shangri-La.  We’d been to so many places - Surf City, St. Augustine, Grayton Beach, New Orleans, Galveston, San Antonio, Fort Davis - and more to go before we hit our West Coast Terminus.  But getting to Silver City felt like an arrival.  A fortnight into our journey on the road, and I finally had the feeling of being there.  In part I owed this new sensation to the fact that I’d been encouraged, implored really, by one of my dear friends, Robin, to stop in on Silver City and say hello to everyone and everything in it for her.  And because I love Robin the way that I do, it was a Destination with a capital D.

I met Robin at a food co-op, which is the correct place to meet someone like Robin.  The only odd thing about it was that we met at the socialist dictatorship that is the Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn, New York, and not a bohemian granola-swap somewhere in the Southwest.  A few of Robin’s favorite things are bathing her vagina in the moonlight, true thrifting where nothing costs more than $7, tight-knit community (the kind that shares clothes and watches your baby when you have a doctor’s appointment), and never really having to work for money.  Brooklyn isn’t a complete desert for these things, but you have to pan through a lot of shit before you find your gems.

Silver City was a different story.  It was an Olde West Town with a subtle shellack of modern hippie commercialism.  It came complete with a rock shop (actual rocks, not the music genre), a yarn store, a talisman outpost called Metal Mysterium, and a few competing trading companies where you could get your turquoise belt buckles and your bolo ties.  We didn’t see a single person who hadn’t spent some significant amount of time at a pottery wheel.

While most pioneer towns folded after the frenzy of whatever precious metals or minerals promised them pay dirt, Silver City and neighboring Pinos Altos kept hitting it.  Digging for copper in the Chino Mine is still one of the most coveted jobs in town.  The building facades hadn’t shifted too much over two centuries.  The hints of adobe accents seemed like new additions meant to evoke old traditions, but other than that, the archival photos in the museum look pretty much identical to the present-day view on Bullard and Broadway.  Instead of pointing to a movie theatre and saying to yourself, I bet that’s where the saloon used to be, you’re actually looking at the original Buckhorn Saloon.

A New Mexican Wolf Moon

After we collected a few essentials from the modest Silver City Co-op, Sean and I made the climb to the foothills of the Gila National Forest where we’d sleep in a cozy cabin under the stars and pines.  The full wolf moon leapt out at us over the tree line.  It was the size of a flapjack and as yellow as the state flag.  It was obscured by a bit of cloud haze, which made it look like a reflection of itself, and not the real thing.  It set the jagged mountains and the shaggy silhouettes of the ponderosas in a soft glow.  Funny how we’re more impressed by the real thing when it looks fake.

A man named Gary was there to greet us in the office, which doubled as the gift shop, and maybe even tripled as his home.  He looked like a wax sculpture of himself, which we found impressive.  He blended in well with the high-gloss finish of the pine reception desk that framed his bust.  There he was, calmly whiling away the last third of his life, for a moderate hourly wage, in an Eddie Bauer vest.  He wore a tan ivy cap and the wire-rimmed glasses of a highschool math teacher.  His long thinning dishwater hair was pulled back in a low ponytail.  His face wasn’t adorned with the robust scruff of a rugged mountaineer, but rather it was partially covered with the eager nondescript scraggles of someone who primarily worked indoors at a mountain motel.  His slight frame and soft hands told us he was someone who likes to read a lot about climbing, but not so much do the climbing.  He was nestled behind a fuck ton of tchotchkes - mugs shaped like hollowed out logs, snow globes with ponderosa panoramas, and dream catchers.  All I wanted to buy was a keychain figurine of Gary.

The Honda Fit barely made it up the wet gravel arteries of the Bear Creek Lodge, in part because I don’t know how to handle a manual transmission on steep slippery driveways, and partly because the roads in the area are legitimately treacherous and better suited for a lunar rover.  By the time we arrived at Cabin 6, I was frightened and exhausted.  Which means that Sean and I were both a little on edge.

Commotion in Cabin 5

Morale did not improve when we pulled up to our split-level chalet to find a pick-up truck parked in the spot that was designated for us.  Cabin 6 shared a wall with Cabin 5, but if you were at all in your right mind, it was easy to see that the parking spots were plainly indicated.  It only mattered to me because it put us a few perilous strides farther from our cabin door, significantly increasing the risk of an icy slip-and-fall in the pitch black while unloading our two month’s worth of odds and ends.  I had little hope for neighborly relations as this was obviously the move of a Real True asshole.  If you can’t be trusted to read a clearly marked sign, what else can’t you be trusted with?  What other sandstorms might exist?  What else is possible??

SMACK!

The unmistakeable sound of a hand on naked skin stopped us dead in our tracks.  Bags in tow, we teetered for balance on the ice-coated wooden walkway.  Sean and I shhh-ed the night air and listened for more.  The hoot of an owl, a hushed wind through the tall pines, and SMACK!

“SHUT UP,” a woman hollered.

We waited in stillness for the follow-up.

Another SMACK! and a man’s voice broke through what was becoming a rhythm.

“Ow, don’t hit me in the head,” he groaned.  He didn’t sound like he was in total distress - we probably weren’t overhearing a crime in progress - but he was definitely not enjoying himself in any classic sense of the word.

“Shut up shut up go to bed,” a woman’s voice slurred.

Sean and I continued our trips back and forth from the car to the cabin, our attitudes recalibrated from irritation to fascination as their squabble escalated.

“Shut up you biscuit head!”

“Biscuit head??” We mouthed.

“YOU’RE A BISCUIT HEAD!” She confirmed.  Then it struck me like she struck him now and like I’d struck many others in the past.

“Oh my God!!!  I know what this is.  She’s his dominatrix!”

Suddenly all of the pieces fell into place.  Now I could make sense of how these lovely cabins had attracted these most unlovely guests.  These weren’t the kinds of rooms you rent on a drunken whim.  They were pretty spectacular, in fact.  All log, no nails, well-insulated, multiple floors, tucked in the foothills of one of the most gorgeous national forests the world has ever known.  This must have been pre-meditated.  There had to be payment involved.  This would explain the humiliating tones with which she lazily shouted phrases like, “You don’t care about them...or her...”  Classic technique - I use it all the time.  You bring the client’s significant others into the session to really fuck with their heads.

What a small world!  I’d taken a two month sabbatical from my metropolitan hustle as a professional dominatrix to explore the rural lands and savor the natural beauty of these great United States.  And wouldn’t you know it, fetish work is alive and well even in the remote mining towns of the Southwest.  I smiled listening to the their screen door creak open and snap shut.  We could hear the reluctant shuffling of bare feet in the snow all throughout the night.  She had him running laps in his underroos in 15 degree temperatures.  Ruthless.  Good for them.

The Continental Divide

We woke up to 8 or so inches of snow that brought the hunter greens and bark browns of the forest to life.  The view from every window of our cabin was so surrealistically stunning that my brain could only compute it as a fantasy.  It was Disney-esque with a Seussian twist.  Common animals even looked, dare I say, enchanted.  I watched a couple of squirrels squeeze into a bird feeder.  They were closer to the size of kittens, and their coats were flush with siennas and taupes. And the best part was their ear tassels.  The blue birds were not your average blue bird.  Every top feather, eyelash to tail, was an iridescent gradient of sapphire to cobalt to cornflower, and underneath, powdery cerulean culottes.  The sun slashed through the trees and illuminated the ground with a beam-me-up kind of white.

We FaceTimed the Jesse Brennans knowing that Kamila was gearing up to birth their progeny, our nephew.  Turns out, there’s not much to say while you’re sitting around waiting for everything to change.

“Alright I’m gonna go shuffle around some more and pretend like I’m doing something.  It’s an amazing feeling of uselessness,” Jesse said.

“Well get used to it, Dad,” Sean ribbed.

“I drove.  I guess that’s useful.  I made french toast this morning.”

“That’s twice the things that Sean can do,” I piped up.

“I don’t think you’re needed for anything until you have to teach him how to tie his shoes, and that’s even something Kamila can do, so what I’m saying is, you’re unnecessary,” Sean teased.

“Have you ever tried to tie someone else’s shoes?  I have to tie Kamila’s sometimes.  It’s really hard.”

“Why don’t you all wear velcro shoes?  A family who wears only velcro shoes, that’ll solve it.”

Kamila was unusually silent during our banter.  She was gazing into the corner of the room, and when she realized we were looking at her, she reconnected with the camera and said calmly with a big grin, “Sorry, I’m just having contractions.”

“Rude!” Sean shouted, and we hung up the call.

That marked our first casual conversation with someone in labor.  I think we nailed it.

We laced up our non-velcro hiking boots to traverse the local segment of the Continental Divide.  If I recall correctly, Gary’s instructions were go straight for a while and take a left somewhere when you see a something.  Adventure!  We crunched along the snow-fleeced road, looking for a turn-out that did not also have signs that screamed, “PRIVATE PROPERTY KEEP OUT.”  After a few misfires and a couple of minor trespasses, we finally made it to a more obvious concentration of trail heads.  But our arrival brought new confusion.

“Gary only mentioned Arrastra, and this sign says ‘Arrastra.’  You would think he would’ve told us about Trail 74 if that’s the path we’re supposed to take.  This is all very New Mexican of him,” I fake complained.

“I think he may have said an arrastra,” Sean pointed to a smaller sign that read, ‘An Arrastra Interpretive Site.’

We looked to our right to find a large circular pit partially paved with stone.  In the center was a tall wooden post with an arm that extended just beyond the edges of the pit.  I started to get the feeling that this was another New Mexican Mystery.  Were we supposed to interpret where the trail was based on these 5 deteriorating placards?  My first guess is that we were looking at a medieval torture device, but evidently an arrastra was a sort of make-shift bare-necessities ore refinery.  According to the placards, all that was missing were a couple of heavy rocks chained to the wooden arm, and a horse to drag it along the paved stone.  And voila - pulverized copper was yours to keep.  But we couldn’t understand how it applied to us.  We circled the primitive refining gear and imagined ourselves as 19th century mules half expecting that on the third rotation, we’d unlock the code to our outdoor escape room and our trailhead would materialize before us.

Finally a man wearing shorts came bounding out of the pines.  We decided to reverse follow him, because there’s no way in hell that a trail-runner wearing shorts in the mountain winter didn’t know exactly what he was doing.  We instantly became grateful for the snow we never asked for.  Without it there to capture recent history, we may have done little more than walk in circles like two phonies very much dressed for a hike, but unable to read a compass or discern between route and woods.  We followed the snowy path edited with the runner’s shoe prints.  This way we wouldn’t be confined to the Continental Divide proper.  Our journey wouldn’t have to be dictated to us by aluminum CDT tokens on trees.  And we wouldn’t have to make the call to arbitrarily double back lest we continue on to Canada.  We could follow in the footsteps of one man instead of millions.

Not only did the snow mean better footprints, but it also meant better footing.  I’m usually a real wuss when it comes to steep climbs.  All I can think about on the way up is how I’m going to have to come back down.  My stomach nearly falls out of my ass every time I lose my tread.  It has all but ruined hikes for us in the past.  But here in the collapsing powder, the soft drift, you could really dig in.  I felt the primal power of my haunches hoisting me up the landscape to a dizzying elevation.

We passed succulents that looked prehistoric.  They erected seeding pistons the size of javelins, and they wore collars of white snow.  We found a paw print as big as a baby’s head.  It was the closest to a mountain lion I’d ever been.  A handful of ungulates and jackrabbits had stamped patterns across our path, and we talked endlessly about our soon-to-be-living nephew and how he was, at this very moment, traversing his own continental divide.

When we finally made it to a worthy summit, we sat down on rocks and ate our trail mix while we tried to make sense of our postcard view.  I can barely recall it.  It was too rich for memory.

An Evening Out on the Town

We cleaned up and readied ourselves for an evening about town.  Pulling out of Bear Creek, we noticed - or rather couldn’t miss - a crowd of sheriffs in the lull of an arrest.  The part where the perp has been cuffed and subdued, and it’s mostly paperwork and waiting around.  A civilian was slumped pitifully on the ground.  He was underdressed for the occasion.

We pressed on toward downtown Silver City.  We got ourselves caught up in a real rock-buying frenzy at the local Is-This-Jewelry-Or-Is-This-Something-You-Found-On-The-Ground-And-Gorilla-Glued-To-A-Precious-Metal store.  We rummaged through piles of agates, ammonites, and azurites.  We were on a treasure hunt for anyone in our lives who looked good in turquoise or lapis lazuli, but we were especially in the market for Jesse and Kamila.  We consulted the shop owner.

“Do you have anything that says We’re new parents and we’re still cool... but with rocks, not words?”  

She spoke at the pace of someone who’d suffered a traumatic brain injury, a small one, but a TBI all the same.

“Here are some really nice Navajo pieces.  Oh.  And these are from India.”

“How do you source these things?  Where does it all come from?” I wondered as I did every time I patroned one of these new-aged grab bags.

“Everywhere,” she responded unhelpfully.

“Okay!”  I swear she was looking slightly past me when she spoke.  Any second now I’d catch a little drool escaping the corner of her mouth.

After 45 minutes of panning for pendants, we made our purchase and packed up.  Our bodies were halfway out the door when she shouted, “HEY!”  We turned to find her unmoved from her post.  She blinked a few times and finally said, “Do you want a rock?”

Sean and I gave each other looks that said new catch phrase and responded, “Okay!”

“I found it today... here you can have it.”  We thanked her for the beautiful local artifact, and headed to dinner next door, where the waiter told us that they do have heaters outside, but they’re mostly placebo.

The rock lives in the driver’s side door pocket of the Honda Fit, along with a piece of petrified wood I bought for $2 for restroom rights at a gas station on our way back through the high desert.  The passenger side holds a beach pebble the shape of a heel that looks a lot more interesting when it’s wet.

Benjamin Giyos Brennan

I awoke the next morning to a text that read, “Welcome Benjamin Giyos Brennan!”  When Sean stirred, I asked him if he’d like to see something.  He grinned and nodded and did what he could to shake off his mountain sleep as I handed him the phone.  I watched him take in the news.  He beamed a smile of wonderment and softly uttered, “Whaaaaat,” which was not so much a question as a humble kneeling to that which he could not comprehend.  Life.  Potential.  Legacy.

My period surprised me with an early start.  My body had clearly conspired to release in harmony with Kamila’s.  The onset was more like something you’d see in Labor and Delivery, not in your average lavatory.  Soon after the spotting came a full rush of blood, and my butthole dislodged a diarrhea only Sympathy Prostaglandin could account for.  Cue up the Compassion Contractions, and I’d be facing one hell of a drive.

We packed our things to the rhythm of the woodpeckers banging their heads heroically on our sapless cabin exterior.  I hated this part the most.  Tetris but with consequences.  And heavier.

Check Out

We paid a final visit to Gary for a Bear Creek Lodge commemorative sweatshirt and a heartfelt farewell.

“Was Cabin 5 any quieter last night?”

“Oh yeah yeah, much quieter than Friday,” we agreed.

“Oh boy and you know they left a huge mess, they were deep into the alcohol,” Gary nodded his head slowly with bulging eyes that said I’m choosing to make a severe understatement because I don’t know if you’re the kind of people who can handle the truth about it, and I need you to invite me to tell you more.

“Oh my God, really?” I leaned forward for more.

“They sounded pretty rowdy,” Sean confirmed.

“Oh boy, there was food everywhere, all over the floor, pizza boxes, empty bottles of booze, and... he took a shit in the tub!” Gary blurted out.

“WHAT?!” we both exclaimed, mostly surprised by the truth and partly surprised by Gary’s use of the word shit.

This was all sounding a little extreme for a BDSM arrangement.

“Yeah you know, and she left in the middle of the night.  Apparently he’s a resident of Silver City and he picked her up somewhere in Kansas City, brought her here, and she paid for everything.  He’s the kinda guy you wanna try to help but you just can’t, he just can’t be helped.  So she took off in the middle of the night - she’d had enough a him!”  We were wrong.  We were so wrong.

“What did they look like?  We’ve been placing bets,” Sean asked.

“Both about mid forties.”

“Okay, yeah, sounds right.  Was she skinny, fat?  I pictured her kind of fat.”  Now that Gary had brought up human excrement, Sean didn’t feel the need to hold back.

“Matter a’ fact, you mighta seen him.  He was out here yesterday afternoon.  We couldn’t get him to leave and we told him we’d have to call the sheriff on him, and they were all out on the corner a’ Main here.  He was on the ground with a bottle of wine goin’ on about, ‘I don’t wanna live anymore I just wanna die I just wanna die.’” Gary elaborated in a you-know-how-they-are tone with a little chuckle on the end.

Gary went on to tell us about a roving band of pranksters who were known to take colossal dumps in all the wrong places at local hotels.  It was their calling card.  Apparently this wasn’t the first time a person had pooped all over the cabins.  So that’s what else is possible...

Contractions and Coyotes

My excitement waned as we settled into another grueling drive, this time to Yuma, Home of a Really Big Denny’s and the Yuma Territorial Prison Park.  The drama of Cabin 5 and the promising new boy all began to fade from view in the scorch of sunlight that had been blasting directly into our eyes since we left St. Augustine.  My Compassion Cramps were unrelenting.  It felt like a tourniquet had been wrapped around my uterus, but unfortunately it was doing little to slow the bleeding.  The longer I let it go on, the more stubborn I became toward the idea of ibuprofen.

“I’m supposed to feel this!” I would bark at Sean every time he looked at me, eyebrows raised, shaking a bottle of NSAIDS.  Though it felt like labor contractions, I imagined it was merely a fraction of what Kamila had experienced all night.  I marched on in solidarity with her.

The physical misery was punctuated by an obscene amount of dead coyotes that had survived the harrowing desert conditions only to be struck down by an F-150.  I couldn’t decide which was the bigger tragedy - that their poor souls left their bodies in a pall of diesel, or that the last thing they saw of this life was a bouquet of truck nuts?

I had become Unwell.  My perspective had tunneled into thoughts of pain and suffering, lack and scarcity.  My mind was on the smaller picture and I could not Tylenol my way out.

We finally arrived at the Saguaro National Park, our respite for the day.  But even the sky-scraping cacti couldn’t quell my menstrual crisis.  We circled the parking lot three times, confused as usual, hoping that an entrance, exit, or bathroom might materialize before us.

I slammed on the brakes.

Something leggy and canyon-colored pranced across our path.  She stopped to sit and peer at us through chrome-yellow unfazed eyes.  Her radar ears assessed the sounds of the Honda Fit.  I cut the engine and stepped out of the car.  I knelt to her level and waited.

The coyote didn’t move.  She was as aloof as I was captivated.

For a brief instant, I didn’t feel any pain.  Nothing in that moment could have said everything is in order like a feral coyote in the parking lot of a national park.  I thought about what Robin had told me years ago: For every coyote that perishes on I-10, thirty more are conceived.  And like that, I was back to life.  Potential.  Legacy.