Day Sixty One: Ja, Ja, La Junta
Distance: 37 mi.
Lizzie’s final “rest” day is compromised by 104-degree heat lessened only by occasional headwinds. Lizzie feels better but is sapped of full power — “my arms feel like soaked cardboard tubes.” We push our Warm Showers stay in Pueblo back one day and ride ~37 miles to La Junta.
La Junta was home to Native Americans of the same name over 1,000 years ago, as evidenced by fossilized bison herded into ancient arroyos; later resettled by migratory plainland tribes, both Apache and Canadian Blood; finally a silver mining and trading route in the early 20th century before the mines dried out in the 1950's. Industrial inroads give way to tilted and unkempt wood framed homes, lawns often littered with engnes, farm equipment, rusted tricycles or steel frames. The hill-sloped streets and stucco homes still appear ephemeral, as if haphazardly placed by transient people who never intended to stay put but were demurred by the strains of further migration.
We creak into the homely diner on Columbus Street, one leg already kicked over saddle as we approach; bikes plunk against caulked glass siding (more caulk than glass at this stage) and we enter. Meet Dominique, a long-haired weary California drifter who abandoned California once drifing became too pricey, now resigned to drowsy drags through waterless canyon beds and daily humdrum of chatter with passers-by in the diner. Enthused to have bikers in his establishment, or maybe by simpler fact we aren’t aged and jaded (we aren’t exactly peppy), he imparts some advice about how to spend a day in the town and quickly refills my iced tea and Lizzie’s water several times, prideful about how his water is double-filtered and colder and cleaner than what we’d find anywhere else in town. He fills all seven of our bottles before we pay and leave.
Eyeing options for camping, I spot an abandoned machining garage near the train tracks…but the sun beats thick waves of heat onto me and one look at Lizzie is enough to see a motel is what she needs to seal the deal on her recovery and welcome in a fuller day of biking in the morning. She’s asleep by 2PM. I wander out into a cafe playing soft country music, it’s an hour before closing and I fall into a plush sofa to read two adventuring books from the 90's, one about mountain biking and the other rock climbing.
Reading these books I see poignantly, painfully, how in America we’re grown boring; so much more boring than we were before two decades of endless, unspoken war; before splintered memories of falling towers shook away our ability to see where we went wrong in the 1990's, a wrong turn already presaged by wrongness in the 70's and 80's; to rock climb is now “dangerous”, to ride a bicycle is “crazy”; whereas ossified wars and racial hatred are safe; class divide worsens but thinking about it is unpopular, according to Google.
Here in La Junta it’s like I’m back in the 1990's, where Colorado still means “colored people”, which is what it actually means, where the hotels aren’t “American owned”, and nobody cares about Google or Apple.
Thank you to everyone who’s still trying.
