July 8, Socorro to Carrizozo, New Mexico

Plotting my east-bound course on my New Mexico road map, I noticed that one selection, US 380, came within a few miles of a red square on the map marking the first atomic bomb detonation. Setting out the morning I expected to pass closest to that red marker, I was contemplative. Recalling Helen in Stephen Paulus' opera The Woman at Otowi Crossing, waking from a vision of a preternatural mushroom with poison spores blowing from the earth the morning the test bomb went off, my musing was tinged with melancholy on the climb from the alfalfa-lined Rio Grande Valley. What would it be like in the open air so nigh where this incandescent mushroom sprang

The road leveled, revealing a wide expanse. A rocky ridge bordered it to the west. A white dome in the distance, flanked by antenna towers and dishes, protruded like a mammoth puffball from a finger of the ridge. A state highway to the White Sands Missile Range Visitors' Center broke off toward that puffball. Erected at the junction, a highway monument was missing its script. Opposite its blank face, a map located other monuments on the region's highways. I continued east, watching my odometer for the point I reckoned closest to that red blip on the map. Between overtaking cars and trucks, I heard the lisping of horned larks, saw jackrabbits sprint for sparse cover, and aeromotor water-pumping windmills here and there. I wondered whether these antique pumps, many still drawing, had witnessed that morning when a red glow proclaimed the earth scorched with something like the sun but was part of the earth itself blown asunder. And I wondered if, this once, instead of facing whatever seasonal wind prevailed, aeromotors dotting this expanse had all faced that glaring point among them, their vanes radiating from it, furiously cranking up water only to be tainted by the lurid cloud whose self-generated winds bade them pump. Or would the blast have sucked wind past the windmills to feed its glaring mushroom, drawing their vanes toward it like spokes to a hub?

And I thought of poisons that followed this one radioactive cloudburst: the fears of one nation that another might stockpile greater annihilation, the fears of being left behind in a race to grab, use, and discard earth's treasure. I recalled the pronghorn I had seen yesternoon on a similar plain west of the Rio Grande, another one at sunset two days past below Horse Mountain while the mountain and a cloud conversed in galvanic tongues. And I wondered how many such creatures the blast had immolated and how many more survived and bred misborn offspring. Still I marveled at how little the sparse grass and shrubs of the plain appeared to remember it. Some healing force must have been active the decades hence.

Beyond a couple wayside tables, the highway jogged onto increasing slopes. Not far up, my odometer registered what appeared my closest approach. I stopped for a photo. I stopped to reflect. But both commemorations seemed far shy of sharing whatever healing force had awakened from the plain as much thriving as I would expect of so parched a land. I imagined the glowing mushroom cloud among the abrupt rock ridges extending southward from my vantage and tried vainly to recall whether the encyclopedia photo I once saw of this first blast showed any such salient landforms behind the cloud.

Around another bend, I neared a white VW Rabbit on the shoulder. A man with silvering hair leaned against the rear left fender, contemplatively smoking. He hailed me as I drew even. "What on earth are you doing out here?"

Wary of the stranger's intentions, I nonetheless pulled off the road to explain my plan of riding east, maybe as far as the Gulf of Mexico. Flinging the cigarette down, the man excused himself to disconnect a bypass circuit that kept the Rabbit's radiator fan droning. "You're doing something no one else would do," he resumed in the restored silence.

"You'll notice my bags are mass-produced," I chuckled, pointing to my front panniers, "There've got to be other people crazy enough to do this sort of ride for there to be a market for such." I mentioned other cycle tourists I had seen on this trip.

"Yes, but you're out here," He recalled the distances between even small towns. "You don't have anybody going in front of you shaking the snakes out of the grass. You're on your own far from any beaten path. Why?"

The question gave me a pause. I wanted to say something about my desire to show (although plenty other cyclists had likewise shown) the possibilities of human-powered travel. "I want to prove to myself I can still cover such distances eight years since the last time I did," I said. "There's also a measure of pride to it. I'm doing it partly to have something to brag about."

"You appear to have your wits about you. When I was coming up behind you, I couldn't figure out what was up there. I thought maybe you were an Indian, but when I got closer, and I saw you were riding a bike, I really started to wonder.... But you're sane. You even sound like an educated person."

"Well, I would expect, after finishing a master's degree this spring, I'd give some evidence of education. This trip's partly a celebration of my graduation."

"So you're bright. You're certainly capable of earning money. So why did you choose to be out here facing who knows what instead of being comfortable someplace and going to work every morning?"

The question was such tempting bait. I talked about my increasing conviction that acquiring the things that money makes easy would not amount to happiness for me, that I had a difficult time finding remunerative work that I didn't chafe at, that I wanted to do things with my life that scarcely ever yielded a consumer's living. And I believed that I was far more likely to find latitude for what I wanted to do through thrift than through maximizing my income.

"Yeah, that makes sense," he said, lighting another cigarette. A tractor-trailer rumbled past. "Now if you were driving that rig, you'd want to come home to a certain brand of scotch, a certain kind of music on a fine sound system..., but all that costs money. There'd be no letup from more driving."

He pursued the subject of professions. "You know, I once wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to help people. But I learned that unless your dad was a doctor, you scarcely stood a chance to get into medical school. It looked to me more like cutting people out than helping people." My interlocutor chose a trade, installing and repairing heating and air conditioning.

I agreed with his estimation of degrees, "A degree doesn't mean s*** if the person with it has no heart."

"This country likes to talk about its freedom," he went on. "But it's really about controlling people. You think you're free being out here like this. But just wait till somebody in the FBI wants you. Won't take 'em long once they call up your social security number."

"You're right. We're so self-righteous about how free we are. But the people we pushed aside to build this nation didn't need jails. Look how crazy we are for building more jails."

He told me he had been traveling in Arizona to learn more of indigenous ways, and now he was heading home to Florida. The Indians had, he believed, discovered what really mattered in a human experience: begetting and nurturing. The western notion of accumulating distracts from what really satisfies and liberates. The culture that weighed its members' status by what and how much they owned had, in his estimation, strayed grossly.

"I've rather enjoyed making do with what I can carry on my bike," I rejoined. "But when I finish this ride and rent a place again, I'll pull a whole U-Haul truckload of household goods out of storage. Sure be good to learn to live with less of it."

We chatted on who cares how much longer: half, three quarters of an hour?-- all too brief as we continued to tally points of agreement. I discovered that his unhappy taste of exclusive education had not dulled his appreciation of books. Before separating, I dug into my pannier for a pad to note a title he had mentioned a couple times and his address. I was sad that my stubbornness to proceed under my own power precluded Dick's invitation, as we closed, to stash my bike in the back of his car and ride along a few hours. After I returned my notebook and pen to their places and checked the road behind for traffic, I confronted a most flabbergasting impulse of his. He opened his wallet and extended a few folded bills toward me.

"It's a tip for you."

I was angry, having stopped voluntarily and reveling in the acquaintance. How dare he sully our encounter as though I had participated from any motive other than friendship? I said I didn't want it.

"It's my way of showing I don't give a s*** for it," he pleaded, nodding at the bills.

I can't second guess whether his gesture was premeditated. If it were merely an ill-forethought expression, a conscious design could not have been more instructive. I grasped the situation's opportunity: he didn't care about the money, and I had claimed to agree with him. People's worth shouldn't be based on how many such bills they could muster. "I don't give a s*** for it either," I reached for my own wallet. Not counting, I pulled out some bills of my own. "So why don't we both toss some to the wind. I won't look at how much you're throwing, and you don't look at how much I throw. On the count of three. One. Two. Three."

His wrist flicked but thumb and forefinger stopped short. My bills tumbled. He saw I meant the insanity I had proposed, and in an instant he had tossed his as well. A puff from the south caught the liberated notes and swept them across the broken yellow center line. Following one behind the other, a pair of westbound cars swept them into a dither behind, their drivers as oblivious of what they disturbed as if the notes had been--as infinitely more spangled as they are more common in roadside eddies--dismembered butterfly wings. The wind drove the bills among rocks and vegetation north of the highway.

"You know in Revelations the Bible said people would do that," commented my friend as we watched the money flap away.

I said good-bye with heightened regret. Half a minute after I pushed off and snapped my shoe's cleat into its pedal, that emotional tide had fully reversed: now I was ready to celebrate what the two of us had achieved. A second-generation advanced degree holder, I had, with someone repelled by the system conferring that degree, found common ground whose solidarity rivaled any I'd found with university colleagues.

By throwing currency to the wind, we had each paid a premium for our having discovered shared convictions. I howled my jubilation, "Owww! Owwwww! OWWW!" In my rearview, I watched the white car pull onto the macadam and, as it neared, raised my hand in farewell. A salute within and a blast of the horn whisked my conspirator toward the looming ridge, over a secondary rise and out of sight.

Only in arrogance might I suppose that this episode finally healed the rents opened by that false sunrise more than half a century past that illuminated, too, the red faces of sandstone where I presently climbed. But I am dead sure that, for its seekers, a healing genius exists. And my encounter with that genius, so near where the human urge to dominate other humans through fear first convoked powers theretofore reserved for stars, ranks among my life's most exuberant fulfillments.