A Genuine Exchange
New Mexico sunsets can be flamboyant, colorful and evocative and changing and evolving with the decreasing angle of illumination. The chaotic swirls of weather add the day’s flavor — sometimes cap clouds pouring off the cliffs of the high Sandias, other times whole 50,000-foot cirrus crops being ripped apart by jet stream winds like cotton candy tossed into a clothes dryer. Surely, every place on earth endures a unique set of climatic circumstances but just as surely there are incredible vistas available to anyone with sufficient attention span to plainly notice. But the clarity of the light here in New Mexico, the sidewaysness of it, shining with substance and volume — it shouts quietly, illuminating our juniper bushes and red minerals and the serrated knife edges of the high country like God causing a ruckus, imploring us imbeciles to perk up and expand the frequencies of our perception.
At the tipping point between autumn and winter is where we’re situated now, our parched autumn extending the dry as our daylight dwindles. Ninety-degree light at sunrise and sunset, casts a harsh, clear, golden light on our palette of reds and browns and greens and yellows, crepuscular beams cutting thirty-thousand foot columns between the meagre clouds and the tired earth. A late seasonal storm — a real gullywasher — freshened up our locale early this week, dropping a saturating couple inches of cold rain on every surface, but the high desert soaks this up like a spanking new sponge. Each arroyo runs, cascades of muddy water ripping stone from sediment and bringing the ghostly roar of elsewhere’s rivers to the silence and slow-motion stasis of our red dirt world. So immaculate, these storms are, and at first light the mornings after the world looks quantifiably brighter, the birds vocally enthused, the jackrabbits higher strung and energetic. Refreshed. Sated, but always seeking a bit more. The cacti plump up, the junipers with their million nodules glisten and drip, scrub jays and grackles zoom and squawk and the footfalls of trail-running devotees like myself land more softly, the usual scritching of outsoles on sand, gravel and stone muted as a springy traction is suddenly abundant.
There’s a loop I do to test myself. Run me hard enough like a petulant, caustic pre-teen and I become my better self. Pushed through the rigor of pure effort, heart rate climbing toward the anaerobic, stress shattered by the abrupt piercing of my negative feedback loop, I apply myself to the terrain: willful, lactic, masochistic. I synchronize my runs and rides this time of year to coincide dually with the geologic slope of the Sandia foothills and my reckoning of peak sunset. Nothing finer than charging westbound and down those slopes into horizontal light, losing elevation and three-quarters throttle: among my goals each day is to maximize the sensual in my labor.
Today, uphill, approaching aerobic threshold on my ascents, I’m always looking up at the changing majesty of the rugged peak, orienting myself off its flanks and prows. Across the flats, crossing the foothills on well-trod single track between juniper and cholla, I step intentionally in the frequent coyote scats on trail to disperse them and accelerate the entropy which turns granite to dust and our scant loam. I pause at a couple of points each time, looking across the broad Rio Grande Valley, up to the ancient, volcanic Jemez, the mesas and the weird nipple-shaped plug distant in the West: Cabezon. I pause at these spots to give my thanks to the earth for accommodating me, for giving me escape and diversion and the solitude inherent in pushing from within myself against its surface, unrelenting.
Today, I thundered down the track, long habituated to the treachery of loose rocks, baby-heads, freed cactus pads, four footfalls to every measured breath, the rhythm of my pace rising and falling with the dynamic geology. I play back in my mind my few moments of personal athletic achievement as marginal motivation — storming the last quarter mile of my only Ironman on the wings of a narcotic flood of dopamine and adrenaline, the squat and sprint routine in the closing meters of my fastest marathon, the beastial effort I somehow summoned when I deadlifted twice-and-change my body weight. Down the last quarter mile of smooth, wide path I pump my arms, legs following and sparking off a froth of excitement and testosterone, and I cross the last flat in view of the trailhead in a mixed emotional state: grateful the push is nearly over, half-sad the hard solitude running affords me is over, but satisfied. I slapped the post marking the terminus of the trail and breathe hard as I stride slowly through the dirt lot.
Around the corner of a Jeep, I see a grey mop of hair, a man I recognize in the absence of true familiarity. Older and always with the curious look in his eyes of someone with a long history of recreational chemical consumption, I’m not wary of him but rather nod in greeting, knowing that he and I are tuned differently.
Slowly, without looking up from his hands he speaks.
“Did you get… what you need?”
“Yah,” I exult and gush through my recovering respiratory rate, “the rain makes the land smell so aromatic, and the traction on the trails is just right, and I watched three hundred and sixty degrees of a spectacular sunset develop over an hour… and until seeing you, I didn’t come across another person.”
“The rain makes the trails soft and springy underfoot…” he says knowingly. “And it didn’t cost you a single dollar.”
I blink and smile as I recover, the adrenaline fading and giving way to the satisfied glow of doing something hard. “What a day and what a place,” I say — to him, to the desert and arroyos and trees and mountain, but also to no one at all.
He faced west, wizened face lit up all golden and red by the last light of the day, took a deep breath in as if sucking up as much sweet, moist air as he could hold and he repeated to me:
“What a day. And what a place.”
I’m a lucky man to have this at my doorstep, this solitude and genuine beauty. Thankful to the individual plants and animals, to the terrain for its difficulty and to the clouds for sharing their wealth with our dry landscape I am; satisfied that I chose the difficult, effortful thing instead of the passive, the deep warmth from my quadriceps slowly fading and my soaked shirt growing clammy in the evening cool, I rested. Firing up my worn, dusty, squeaking pickup I pointed homeward, thrilled and grateful for the mundane daily reality of how and where I live, and already plotting my tomorrow adventure.
