(Otherwise entitled, "Go east, young man!") I’ve arrived in Santa Fe just in time for monsoon season. Every morning I wake up to the unadulterated blue sky outside the window of whichever friend’s house I’ve chosen to crash at the night before, and when I stumble outside in my shorts into the clear dry air, squinting and scratching the sleep off my bare chest, I can see the tops of the clouds looming over the Sangre de Cristo (“Blood of Christ”) mountains to the east.

The clouds continue piling up behind the mountains, turning grayer and more ominous as the day progresses. Finally in the mid-afternoon they spill over the mountaintops and begin spreading out and dropping succinct downpours over various widely-dispersed parts of the valley. Since I’m reliant on my bicycle for transportation, these periodic storms disrupt my plans from time to time, but New Mexico needs rain as much as a deep-sea diver needs oxygen, so I put my personal preferences on hold and wish the rain-starved hills well while I park under the nearest awning or portale to wait it out.

After riding my bike around town for a few days, I decided to rent my moving truck a day early and use it as an oversized and inconvenient rental car. My jaw dropped when I phoned around town to ask about rates. The cheapest one-way truck I could find to the east coast was U-Haul’s $718 plus taxes and insurance. I was, however, able to garner one unforeseen advantage out of the deal, as a result of the U-Haul clerk’s Santa Fe public school education. The deal included 2043 free miles, just enough to get me to my destination, but not enough to allow any detours or errands. When I asked if she could bump it up just a bit, she said she could give me an extra 50 miles, and heck, she’d throw in the extra seven and round it up to 3000. Due to basic math incompetence, I now have a buffer of 900 free miles, just in case I get lost several times for days at a time along the way. If you know me, you know that when my mind gets a-wanderin’, such things are in fact more likely than not. I plan not to take advantage of these free miles—high gas prices and all, not to mention basic honesty—but it’s nice to know I have them just in case.

So during my days here I have visited the folks who need visiting, trying my best to mend the places in the net that have frayed from inattention during the past year. I have also eaten the burritos, enchiladas, carne adovada, green chiles, and sopapillas necessary to quench my appetite and widen my gut. I have sunned myself on patios and ridden my bike dry-mouthed down the gravel roads among the hummingbirds and goats, chamisa and piñon. Today after meeting my friend Roland for huevos and posole at Tecolote, I headed to the bike shop to buy my second inner tube in three days and ended up chatting for a while with a drunk Blackfoot Indian who hit me up for spare change. He liked me because I stopped to talk to him, he said, explaining that I wasn’t like most white people who always rush from place to place. He saw my Euclid 3:16 shirt and asked me if I’d ever read Kahlil Gibran (I failed to see the connection), then mentioned that he was an American just like I am, that he’d just gotten out of the army two years ago and figured that was his admission ticket. He had a hard time pronouncing all his words, most likely related to the 40 of Bud Light in the bag at his feet, but was mostly lucid. He gave me a name in his language, which I promptly forgot, but it might have been Lapi, and he taught me how to say "This day is a good day," which I repeated once pretty accurately and then promptly forgot as well. Overall, things have been good, and I’m just about ready to throw my many boxes of crap into the truck and spend three or four days geeked out on truckstop coffee and AM country radio, cruising on slick air-smooth highways to the next destination, my home for the next three to ten years, give or take. I’ll drop you a line when I get there.

are you there yet?
are you there yet?
are you there yet?
are you there yet?
are you there yet?
are you there yet?

hee.