These are the people and things that are lately a part of my life.
Be well.
– SAWK
Shiprock is a lava plug – the throat of an old volcano now eroded – that rises 1,500-feet out of the northwestern New Mexico desert. It’s a very important place, religiously and culturally, for the Navajo people here. In the Diné language, it is called Tsé Bit’a’í, which translates to something like “winged rock,” I think. It is an amazing sight, and the image and presence of it sticks with you as you fly down NM 64. All at once, it lifts out of the ground, floating strong and sharp above the horizon. The bilagáanas (that’s us white folk) are the ones that thought it looked like a ship, which is ironic considering its dead-dry – however beautiful – location. The poor guys must have been hallucinating, seeing mirages.
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At Camp Mighty, we had to choose five things from our life list (or six, in my case) that we wanted to focus on and accomplish throughout the next year. One of my to-do items was to run another half-marathon.
T-minus three weeks until it happens, and Shiprock is where I’ll be running it.
Today was my nine-mile run. I’ve been trying to practice on asphalt – the Shiprock half being a road race when I am used to dirt and rocks and gravel – and so I’ve been taking my weekly long runs along NM 124, old Route 66. From the steps of my trailer to the defunct, abandoned Whiting Brothers’ complex near McCartys is three miles. The pavement runs towards the sunset at the bottom of the mesas at the foot of Mount Taylor. There isn’t much traffic, there are no feral dogs in that direction, and it’s pretty.
Unless, of course, your particular stretch of highway is experiencing wind speeds up to 55 mph. Then – running into a headwind, uphill, dirt and sand blasting your shins – it’s rather unpleasant.
The sign to the Whiting Brothers’ gas station near McCartys – most of what is left.
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I’ve been running off and on since middle school (let’s face it: mostly off), and I am loathe to consider myself a “runner.” I just don’t have that drive, the one that compels you to be faster faster faster, going longer longer longer, as you grit your teeth and try to maintain even a minimal sex appeal while sweating buckets in clothes that are shiny and spandex. I’m not in that league, not yet, anyway.
The first half-marathon I completed was two summers ago, and that was it – I completed it. No bells, no whistles, no great aplomb, only shin splints, blisters, and the knowledge that if necessary, I could move 13.1 miles between two points without dropping dead.
This time, my life is totally different, I am totally different, and it means more to me. I’m not sure why.
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At mile 4, the wall of oncoming white blown from the west overtook the big mesa south of Acomita. It was at this point that I realized the cold spittle intermittently hitting my cheeks and chest was not, in fact, a funky spray flung at me by the wind from the mouths of rancid beer bottles all along the road, but was, in fact, snow.
I gave up trying to figure out the weather patterns of this desert I love long ago, but tiny, stinging chunks of bitter crystals of ice – zooming straight into your face at 35 miles per hour when you’re not even halfway through a nine-mile run – will always be an unpleasant realization, I think. I was living for the little, blaring ring from my watch telling me that another mile was complete, that I had one less mile to go.
Near the five-mile turnaround, a bunch of horses grazing on brown grass in a field all looked up at me with expressions of seeming sympathy, us being in the same rocking, windy boat. Until I did the 180 to head back east, the wind was so strong that certain gusts would literally stop me from moving. “Huh,” I would think. “This is weird – my legs and arms are pumping, but I’m not technically going anywhere . . .”
The relief of having the breeze at my back once I turned around was such a sweet sensation. Miles 6, 7, and 8 went by in the pleasant thought that I was almost done, I was no longer running towards freezing weather, but away from it, and the sun was shining and glowing everywhere. With the whiteness all around and the bright flecks of snow blazing past from behind me, it seemed like I was in a photograph all blown out – bright and consumed by light.
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No matter if you are slow, round, and have a defeatist inner monologue that pathetically advises you to just “Lie down, why don’t you? – at the top of that next hill .. . Just do it. You’ll never make it nine whole miles anyway, and plus, it’s really windy. Nobody will blame you. Just give up, OK? – We’re square. You tried, A+ for effort, yadda yadda . . . WHO ARE YOU KIDDING? – JUST TURN AROUND! I WANT TO DIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEE” . . .
Just ignore it, and keep going, because eventually, when your watch beeps for nine miles, you will realize that you have run nine miles, and the quiet elation you feel trumps the fact that once you stop – stiff and jerky – you look like a straight-legged Barbie learning to walk and bend her knees for the first time.
Be well.
– SAWK
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There are tiny, fragrant yellow flowers blooming on bushes along the road I’ve walked a hundred times. In the strong, spring wind they bustle about, and their scent – something like jasmine and lilac combined, but more pungent, punched with desert – intoxicates you until there is only summer and mountain crests and the sound of warm air rushing past your ears.
Or until the dogs yank you, arms flailing, into the ditch alongside the road, crashing your reverie to pieces as a baby jackrabbit twitches its ears and makes a break to escape.
Move further up the loop.
There are wary horses all over San Fidel, and they wander away from you into the sage and cholla nibbling all the while, sometimes seeking shade or shelter among the branches of the gnarled, scrubby Gambel oaks. In the sweet light, a bag of old, grizzled baby carrots helps if you want to lure them out of hiding, eyes blinking, as they inch closer to treats and shutter clicks.
The grey one is cautious, but personable, once you get to know him. The paints don’t mind you unless you hinder dinner. The sweet chestnut with the bridle will let you scratch its nose.
The little brown foal with the white hourglass on his face – christened “Lucky” after cheating death at the hands of your friend’s large, red Toyota one sunrise – ducks behind his mother to avert the gaze of the camera, then forgets to be afraid when he finally finds a sweet, orange bite on the ground – maybe his first one ever.
Everyone gets familiar, as you all occupy the same space, vast and windy though it is.
Be well.
– SAWK
. . . No matter how many times I’ve walked or run or hiked the 3.3 miles of the loop road in San Fidel, there is always something new I discover.
Yesterday, I took the dogs up the east side of the loop (less populated, more wild, and with a better view of the mountain and mesas at its feet). We veered through an opening in the fence along the road, and followed a lava-strewn, rocky track first eastwards and then up and north, topping out on a hill with a dilapidated carcass of a couch and its gutted counterpart of an old truck. Phonebooks, an old tube of toothpaste, and someone’s old baby blanket added to the detritus.
To the west, a white wall of coming snow-clouds shrouded the humps and outlines of the landscape, speeding nearer and nearer. To the south, heavier clouds – darker and thicker than their western cousins – raced towards us on the wind.
(March is the start of the windy season here. It is windy often, but March takes it to a whole new level. Most days it blows dust into your eyes at 30 mph or more, gusting almost double that. You never really get used to it. It is the great equalizer, and everyone complains about it.)
We turned to head back, and all of a sudden the wind was in our faces. A great gust of bitter cold blasted me in the throat, stealing my voice as I tried in vain to yell at Annie for chewing on chunks of cow pies. She never heard my choked correction, ate the turd, and proceeded to hack it up, it being full of thistles and other itchy, scratchy undigestibles.
The three companions, blowing about, barreled down the hill as the southern and western storms converged on us. With every other burst of wind, a quick, cold smell of rain would linger for a second before the next blow blew it away.
At the bottom, back on the road, the spattering of rain began. Icy drop here, icy drop there. The dogs shook it off every ten feet, the water getting in their ears as the wind forced them upright. Plastic bags hooked on barbwire and rustling erratically in the strong breeze caused Boon to go on alert and foof at me in low, warning barks. (My dad calls this noise “schtroumpfing”, as it sounds like les schtroumpfs, the French word for Smurfs). I hurried them along, down and up, across the arroyo, running over the cattle-guard into our fenced enclosure just as thunder crackled overhead and the rain began to fall in earnest.
In just the nick of time, we plowed up the steps and into the back door as a clatter of tiny frozen spheres of ice began pelting the roof and ground in a cold, stinging fury.
Then I warmed, and the dogs slept, and we waited for snow that never really came.
Be well. – SAWK
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But here are some photos from drives and swims and walks and windy, lazy Sundays.
Be well.
– SAWK
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