Road Trip (2): Liberal, Kansas to Gallup, New Mexico

 Road Trip (2): Liberal, Kansas to Gallup, New Mexico

1.

A little past sleep’s boundaries, on the outskirts of dream, a lonesome train whistle blows.  Something shudders over rough tracks.  Then, I’m awake.  Numbers glowing on a clock tell me its half-past three.  There’s no retreat from this promontory back into sleep and, so, I prepare for the day.

22 degrees outside.  I’m on the highway driving at 5:15 am.  High Plains Radio broadcasting from studios in Amarillo, Texas has a clear signal on the llano estacado (‘the staked plains’).

Someone first used llano estacado to describe this land, flat terrain that slopes upward to the west at a rate of 10 feet per mile traveled in that direction.  Some geographers think that the term refers to buttes and mesas in the west part of the area, sheer-walled escarpments with stone palisades that look a bit like forts or stockades.  Others believe that the vast area was once marked with stakes or stone pillars driven into the earth to delineate paths across the featureless country that was, in fact, a sort of labyrinth.  If everything looks the same, the place is a maze without direction except that imposed by the sun and stars overhead.  

2.

I cross the Oklahoma border at 5:26, also not much of an accomplishment since you can look into that neighboring state from Liberal.  Texhoma is on the border between Texas and Oklahoma.  I pass through that place at 6:21.  The roads are empty and run mostly arrow-straight, rational thoroughfares with passing lanes at six mile intervals – it’s smooth, fast travel.  The trucks are mostly asleep at this hour.

Dalhart, Texas is a regional trade center.  The sun is rising but the day remains dim.  Enormous feed lots line the speedway of the road and there’s a stench in the air, acres of black cattle standing in the shadow of mountains of dung.  

3.

When I drove this way a couple years ago, I came upon a lonesome giant, a big Texan standing next to the south shoulder on the road.  Big Tex is a gunfighter wearing a ten-gallon hat and he looms up over the wasteland like Ozymandias, twenty feet tall.  When I came upon the place, I stopped and took some pictures.  A steak-house that Big Tex had once advertised was reduced to rubble and charred timber.  Across from the giant, a grain elevator stood in icy repose.  (In this part of Texas and Oklahoma, you pass one grain elevator with white columns and a blunt pale tower only to see another such facility rising above the horizon ten miles farther down the road – grain elevator succeeds grain elevator on this road to nowhere.)

The giant is still in place, leaning a little over the two-lane highway and the iceberg of the grain elevator, columns like a classical temple, stands across the road.  The ruins of the steakhouse have been bulldozed into the ground.  The difference between now and then is that four semi-trucks are gathered here on the side of the road, slumbering giants themselves.  It used to be that over-the-road truckers stopped at truck or rest stops to spend the night.  Now, the trucks just pull onto the side of the road anywhere that there is enough shoulder to accommodate a resting semi.  For instance, the pull-offs for roadside historical markers are lined with trucks, so many tractor-trailers that you can’t reach the monument concealed somewhere behind the vehicles.  Many off- and on-ramps on the freeways are lined with parked trucks and, at the rest stops, semis in procession extend for a quarter-mile in both directions from the roadside amenity.  It’s puzzling because this phenomenon didn’t exist even three years ago.  Is it a sign of more semi-tractor-trailers on the road or some kind of endemic lawlessness?

I swoop past Big Tex.  The little conclave of trucks around the figure of the giant gunfighter seems to be intentional, some sort of perverse community.

4.

The sun rises without announcing itself.  As the light spreads across the plain, I cn see that I am traversing a grey-brown prairie dotted with sage brush.  It is completely flat and the horizons in all directions are marked with grain elevators seen from an immense distance, small pale rivets at the edge of the world.

5.

I reach New Mexico at 7:37, crossing the border into the ghost town of Nara Vista.  This looks like bad luck place, snake-bit: the community center, a brick building with a ruined portico, has lost more than half of its roof – skeletal beams span parts of the roof where the shingles are torn away.  A storm seems to have wrecked the place, scattering shattered debris around the hulking structure.  No viable houses remain upright although there are some plywood shacks collapsing into themselves at the center of empty lots near the road.  On the margins, a couple of trailer houses that might still be occupied stand half-uprooted in the dust.  Mesquite trees line a dilapidated fence-line and some cattle loading pens made from rusting iron pipe with ramps and enclosures of battered, splintery timber mark the center of a scatter of what were once commercial buildings.  The little adobe huts are abandoned, although some of them still proclaim that they were once cafes or souvenir shops or bars in faded letters on their walls.  It looks like a bomb exploded here, a neutron weapon that left the humble, low-slung buildings standing but killed all of the people.  Not a single window in town is intact, broken glass glints around the wrecked shacks.  At the edge of town, there’s a motel that looks like a movie prop – it seems to be fashioned of brown corrugated cardboard.  

Twenty miles down the road, the concrete ribbon passing through gravel arroyos and conical heaps of clay – a kind of humble, dull malpais – I see the buttes rising over Tucumcari.  The route here becomes a little complex, country lanes with stop signs next to auto salvage yards and ag implement graveyards.  Big buttes rise over the town, sheer-walled heights lined along the top with pine trees.

I’m in Mountain Time, an hour earlier, so that it is now 7:20.  I buy breakfast and some gas and merge onto Interstate 40.  

This is butte country with long escarpments frowning down on the freeway.  The edges of the escarpments are rock cliffs fluted where the stone faces are fractured.  

6.

I stop for toilets at a place called Cline’s Corner.  There’s a chill wind gushing from the canyons.  This is an old souvenir and rest stop on Route 66.  The place is huge and archaic, full of faux-Navajo blankets, turquoise jewels inset in silver, and colorful pots.  Slaughtered antelope are mounted on the walls and the walkway to the toilet passes a curved wall built from semi-translucent blocks of glass, a way of building that reminds me of my childhood – no one has erected a barrier of opaque glass blocks like this for fifty years or more.  Does anyone even make these milky bricks any longer?

The toilets are accessed through an arcade where there are five mechanical automatons, all of them, fortune-tellers named “Zoltan”, confined in glass boxes.  One of the Zoltans is an Indian chief with a florid, feathered headdress; another is a Turk wearing a purplish turban.  The other three fortune-tellers are extraterrestrials, Zoltans from outer-space, with grey-green flesh and dark almond-shaped eyes with reptilian jaws.  In the rest-room, there are 20 heavy urinals, drizzling water down their pale breasts and flooding parts of the floor.  There must be a dozen metal stalls, although I don’t count them.  

West of Cline’s Corner, I-40 crosses a rocky high plain toward the Sandia Mountains.  The mountains are really just a single elongated dome of rock, black with forests at higher elevations.  The Sandias are set in a sort of bathtub-shaped depression and the freeway snakes down steep 6% grade hillsides, twisting and turning through landscape that looks like a furnace, all broken rock and burnt slopes.  On the other side of the mountains, skirted by I-40 running in slots south of the main ridge, Albuquerque fills the valley (the west side of the bathtub shaped depression that holds the mountain range).  The freeway is briefly congested.  Signs advertise shysters specializing in motor vehicle collisions: “Hurt? Call Bert!”, “Get the Law GIANT!” a burly guy in a suit waves his fist in the air: “Call the GORILLA!”.  A couple of lawyers on a billboard flash toothy smiles next to the legend: “One Billion recovered for Clients!”  

The freeway rises out of the depression where the city is heaped-up, some skyscrapers scattered here and there on a hump crowded with little glass and brick buildings.  The way west is over enormous waves of land that crest with rocky summits, then, fall again into troughs, the next wave following on immediately as the terrain rises again.  Each valley’s floor is a little big higher than the preceding trough between the stony ridges and, so, this somewhat schematic landscape – up, down, up, then, down again but not as far down as before, and so on – carries the interstate west under the shadow of the big tree-clad mountain at Grant, New Mexico, past the exits to the Acoma sky city pueblo, past lava fields of crumpled black stone so rough and jagged that it hurts the eye to behold them, and, then, along the red rock ridges to Gallup.  

7.

Gallup lies in a groove between mesas fused together to form continuous, east-west running ridges.  The town bills itself “the Indian capitol of the world” –it lies midway between the Pueblo and Acoma country to the east and the immense Navajo reservation to the west.  Zuni pueblos are to the south and the Hopi on their three mesas live northwest of town.  These people gather, with representatives of other First Nations, at the great Intertribal Powwow held at Gallup’s Red Rock Park each August.  The park is about a mile and a half north of I-40 on the outskirts of town.  Battleship-sized prows of smooth red rock jut from the steep mesa escarpment with its cliffs above the slickrock mostly comprised of chalky, pale heights studded with boulders.  Atop the mesa, horn-shaped pillars rise over the valley – there are two peaks of this sort in Red Rocks Park: Church Rock and the Pyramid.  

The powwow grounds, empty in late February, consist of some one-way loop roads, big parade-grounds covered with scuffed sand and dust, rows of mesquite trees and metal arcades where food vendors and regalia traders apparently ply their trade at the festival.  Beyond a wall and courtyard, a wing of buildings crouches with their back walls up against the big fin of smooth stone colored like scarlet coral at the bottom of the sea.  These are administrative offices for the powwow and a dim, gloomy museum with haphazard galleries arranged around a dark central corridor.  In glass cases, I can see some dull-looking pottery, bows and arrows, and garments decorated with feathers and beadwork fringes dangling from the buckskin tunics.  The galleries are open but entirely empty.  A woman at the desk describes for me some hiking trails that lead up into the red rock canyons.  You can walk uphill to the Pyramid or follow a loop trail that circles the Church Rock.  I ask the woman which route is easiest and she says, without much hesitation, that the Church Rock route is best.  

It’s a quarter mile drive from the buildings jammed up against the five-story rock face to a post-office built in rustic western style and a big field full of trampled white powder that extends toward the cliffs.  At the front of the powdery basin full of sand, a couple of ponies are housed in metal cages, iron cubicles designed to hold livestock used in the rodeo.  

I park my car along the metal corrals and begin to trudge across the field of powdery sand.  Someone shouts at me.  An Indian guy has appeared out of nowhere, either rising up out of the earth itself or the crumpled heap of dark-brown manure next to the corral.

The man tells me that his good friend cut his foot on a broken bottle and that he has to go to the hospital.  He pulls out a half-shredded plastic sack and offers to sell me a coral necklace, tangled in a knot, and a silver medallion.  “Did you enjoy your walk?” the man asks me.  “I haven’t started yet,” I reply.  I tell him that I don’t need to buy his wares but will give him twenty dollars.  So that’s the toll to access these red rock cliffs and steep, eroded hills.

8.

I am accustomed to walk my dog three times daily: 16 blocks early in the morning, eight blocks at noon, and six blocks before supper.  These strolls have misled me into believing that I am a strong and confident walker.  People who mistakenly consider themselves “strong and confident” swimmers end up drowning.  What happens to those mistaken about their stamina and competence as walkers?

The sun is bright and the weather dry, although it remains somewhat cold.  The walk through the powdery dust beyond the corrals saps my strength a little.  Gallup lies at 6500 feet above sea-level and this seems the sort of place where you could get sunburned, and, even, dehydrated, while tramping through the snow.  Beyond the field of white sand, the trail leads upward, in some places a scramble over loose boulders wedged into pebbly funnels in the stone.  For a few hundred yards, the path leads along a box canyon, skirting some unstable-looking ledges over a gulch also full of the same powdery stuff that I have just traversed, drifts and dunes of white dust.  At the head of the canyon, there is a modest pour-off, perhaps, thirty feet high, where the gorge dead-ends against a horseshoe-shaped cliff.  The trail crosses upward above the pour-off, marked by knee-high cairns of stone stacked on inclines of naked rock.  It’s not always obvious where to walk and I feel a bit unsteady on my feet, carefully picking my way up the steep prisms of rock.  At one point, I go astray and end up under an overhang of rock in a slot canyon with no egress.  I retrace my steps and veer left around some big boulders in a chaotic rock-fall.  The way forward is tricky, uphill through narrow ditches scored in the rock faces.  At the top of the stony arroyo, the pinnacles are welded together at the hip, standing stones colored like grey chalk with separate, pencil-shaped tips scoring the blue empty sky.

I clamber out of a hip-deep trench and see that the path ahead of me crosses a tilted rock surface. It’s angled upward 60 degrees and small fist-sized depressions have been chiseled out of the stone to afford footholds. This looks too sketchy for me to navigate and, so, I retrace my steps, slipping and sliding down over the loose gravel in the chutes gouged in the cliffs.  

I’m breathing heavily as I pass the trail head and trudge across the powdery ankle-deep sand filling the basin near the corral.

Walking in this canyon is a very different proposition then piloting my dog over level sidewalks at home.  I’m a little shaken by the unsuccessful hike.

9.

As the sun is setting, I make my way cross-town to a Mexican restaurant called Jerry’s Café.  This place is a well-known eatery in Gallup and, on this Wednesday night, it’s crowded.  A girl-junkie in torn jeans is sitting on the sidewalk a couple storefronts from the little place.  Beyond a fence protecting some parked cars, a muffler giant about 20 feet tall, moored by steel cables stands guard over the shabby neighborhood.  The muffler giant is brother to Big Tex, the gunfighter, looming over the llano estacadero of the Texas panhandle.  He also wears a big ten-gallon hat.   The sun is setting in his armpit and he casts a long shadow over the cars and the street.

Jerry’s Café is a hole in the wall, a long narrow room crowded with people at tables and booths.  The kitchen is hidden in the rear, someplace near the toilets.  The customers are all working-class Hispanic people with a scattering of gringos here and there.  My plate of enchiladas is drowned in a magma-like red sauce that tastes the way I suppose the red rock canyons and the buttes might taste – earthy with a hard spiny backbone of hot spice.  The flavor is harsh but good.  Outside the glass picture window at the front of the café, the sidewalk and street turn blue.  Night has come.  In a trench running through the middle of the town, a train is laboring through the darkness.