Biking in this would have been next to impossible. The winds are blowing about 30 to 40mph right now. And of course, directly against me if I were on the road... So I'm staying here in Arco for the day, very glad for the shelter I have. It's hard to explain what this "almost desert" wind is like and what it does to my head. I exposed myself to it fully for only a brief period while walking to the gas station to use the restroom and eat and then coming back.
You have to hold your arm in front of your face to not get slapped with the endless dust being kicked up as though there were nothing holding the earth together, as though it's the air around you that is solid and unremitting and the ground beneath fleeting and intangible. Tumbleweeds roll past wherever you go, and every stalk of grass is just clinging desperately to the fleeting ground for its brief life before it suffers the same fate and sails off into the emptiness. The sound of the wind is like a raging animal ripping through some invisible fabric that you had thought could hold everything together. And you couldn't be happier to be sitting in the back of a rapidly rocking vehicle that smells of dirt and dog because within that space you feel "inside", where you're separate, a person, not just another stalk of life that's bound to blow away.
I want nothing to do with the outside right now. Much of me wishes I were that 90 miles on in Fairfield, showering off the dust clinging to my skin and laundering all my dirty clothes, able to feel clean. While there my host is sitting at his table out front of his mobile home with his dog listening to pop music on the stereo as though all this were normalcy... But then, he's an army vet who's seen a drill instructor blow his hand off with a grenade and then participate in the morning run right after, and himself been hit by vehicle, stabbed more than once, accidentally shot, and bitten clear around the calf by a German Shepherd... I'm just a man with a bicycle and trailer who can pedal up mountains, but is stopped in his tracks by a bit of wind and dust. And you know, that's okay. I know just what my limits are, and I'm comfortable with them.
You have to hold your arm in front of your face to not get slapped with the endless dust being kicked up as though there were nothing holding the earth together, as though it's the air around you that is solid and unremitting and the ground beneath fleeting and intangible. Tumbleweeds roll past wherever you go, and every stalk of grass is just clinging desperately to the fleeting ground for its brief life before it suffers the same fate and sails off into the emptiness. The sound of the wind is like a raging animal ripping through some invisible fabric that you had thought could hold everything together. And you couldn't be happier to be sitting in the back of a rapidly rocking vehicle that smells of dirt and dog because within that space you feel "inside", where you're separate, a person, not just another stalk of life that's bound to blow away.
I want nothing to do with the outside right now. Much of me wishes I were that 90 miles on in Fairfield, showering off the dust clinging to my skin and laundering all my dirty clothes, able to feel clean. While there my host is sitting at his table out front of his mobile home with his dog listening to pop music on the stereo as though all this were normalcy... But then, he's an army vet who's seen a drill instructor blow his hand off with a grenade and then participate in the morning run right after, and himself been hit by vehicle, stabbed more than once, accidentally shot, and bitten clear around the calf by a German Shepherd... I'm just a man with a bicycle and trailer who can pedal up mountains, but is stopped in his tracks by a bit of wind and dust. And you know, that's okay. I know just what my limits are, and I'm comfortable with them.
Wind, man, wind... The heat, the cold, the rain, the mud, the mountains, the bad shoulders, none of it is anything compared to the high wind. It makes me think back to my first trial run where I went half as far as I wanted because of winds not so fierce as these. It's been more than 1100 miles of biking since then. It all changes and it all stays the same.
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