Bike Odyssey 2014 – Day 15 (Saturday May 31) – Amarillo to Albuquerque

America the Beautiful is truly beautiful (the landscape, that is – and the people in their kindness). Today we had no sad towns to confront, just the Texas plains and the New Mexico scrub, and their glorious skies. 300 miles – a terrific day’s biking. We’re both wrecked – my right leg feels like I’ve rented it – but happy. Nearly 3000 miles completed since we began. We headed north in ABQ, as Albuqerque is known, towards Santa Fe, and found our ‘Kampsite’ without having to ask for directions. We didn’t attempt to seek out a meal at the Cheeecken Brothers, only to find (as we surely would have done) that no enterprising businessman has yet thought to open a Los Pollos Hermanos – the name of the fictitious franchise in Breaking Bad, whose owner peddles not only chicken but crystal meth. Surely someone will be smart enough to do so. (To do both, my daughter Chiara suggested, tongue in cheek, on the phone this evening.) Are there Breaking Bad tours in the ‘Duke City’ yet?… the landscape is horribly familiar to those who have been addicted to the TV serial.

Note that we found our ‘Kampsite’ without having to ask for directions: this is probably why we found our campsite. Neither I nor well-traveled Joe have ever known a place where the natives found it so difficult to direct a person, even to a house 4 buildings away, or to a restaurant in the next street. The number of bum steers we’ve received matches the cattle (not many, admittedly) we saw on the bleak range today. You may remember our attempt to locate a neighborhood in Asheville, asking 8 successive people who proved unaware that the neighborhood we sought was the very one they were in. This is the heart of the American difficulty, which lies less in directing others than in knowing where they themselves are. The old joke about the Irishman who, on being asked for directions, muses awhile before declaring, ‘Well, I wouldn’t start from here,’ needs modifying to feature an American whose answer would be, ‘Where are we now, exactly?’ 3 weeks ago I came across a friend patiently repeating into his cellphone the words, ‘Where are you?’ – clearly unable to extract an answer. Not ‘Who are you?’ or ‘How are you?’, both of which would have been easier to answer, but ‘Where are you?’ Topography is the American nightmare: since other places do not exist clearly in the mind, neither can the place where you are.

Texas is part Hispanic, but its roots in the Republic of Texas (could we have that nation back, please?) are race-decisive. Just step 10 feet into Nuevo – New Mexico – and you know you’re in New Spain. The different air, the different light, the arroyos… I heard myself singing a refrain I should have kept for California, but it wouldn’t wait: I hear with my heart / What she says with her eyes with / Good evening, Manuel or Manuel, por favor / Or The carriage, Manuel or Manuel, close the door. (The wife of the rancher Don Carlos Cantrel…!) Ah, The Kingston Trio. This really dates me.

There sits Joe, the best, most easygoing traveling companion a chap ever had. Tomorrow we’ll explore a little. ABQ is another place to – forgive me, Albuquerquenos – get out of. Up into the old mining settlements, where 30 years ago I bought a still treasured piece of pottery off the artist herself; or to Sante Fe, to Taos, into the shadow of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. Our 300 mile ride today has earned us a day’s rest, then I plan the first sidebar of our trip, up to Taos to worship at the presence (her house today enshrined as a B&B) of the one of the great women of American history, Mabel Dodge Luhan, who tried so hard – along with her coterie including Carl Jung, Aldous Huxley, and D H Lawrence – to tell and to show America what it could be; to make America understand that it could never locate its soul until it came to terms with its genocidal roots.