Clovis, New Mexico — Day 9
Odometer: 1606–1885 (279) miles
Listen to: “Storm” — Godspeed You! Black Emperor
Long distance travel on two wheels occasionally trends towards frustration, but that frustration is always followed by beautiful moments that make you regret even considering taking road trips in a car. I’ve had my share of both on the trip, but few days have combined the two in rapid-fire succession like today did.
Let’s start with the worst part: After leaving Albuquerque, I headed up into the mountains to the east of the city. The gas tank was about half full, so I could go for a while before needing to fill up. And given my tendency to try and get every last mile out of a tank, that’s exactly what I did. When I finally pulled up to a station, I reached into my pocket for my wallet and found… nothing. This was a problem. I was about 40 minutes out of the city, and didn’t have enough gas to get back.
After asking the internet for suggestions, I approached a random stranger and asked for a few dollars for a gallon of gas. I figured someone would eventually help out, and given that all I was asking was $3 for the exceptionally small tank in the Vespa, I’m sure I’d just have to ask three or four people before I’d find someone willing to bail me out. Turns out, I was even luckier than that: the first person I spoke with offered me a $10 bill. This was sorta surprising. I asked her if she had PayPal, so I could pay her back, and she told me she didn’t. Given that I couldn’t just take $10, I ran over to the attendant, made change, and gave her back $7. I filled up the tank, ran back to the cafe where I ate breakfast, and I was back on the road.
Unfortunately, the road turned out to be mostly made of dirt. For about 12 miles. As soon as I saw that the dusty road Google directed me down extended out into the horizon and beyond, I pulled over and tried to find an alternate route. Anything else would have added at least 45 minutes to my trip; given I was already running late, I decided to just turn the Vespa towards the dirt road, strap all my stuff down extra tight, and cross my fingers.
This time, the road was snake-free, though it was even rougher than the previous one. There were a couple very confused glances from the drivers of massive F-250 trucks rolling down the dirt road when they saw a guy on a motorscooter coming towards them. I keep hoping one of those was a county commissioner who, in seeing my plight, immediately decided to pave the road, but I highly doubt that was the case.
Also, I googled “Vespa Rallycross” and it turns out the sport doesn’t exist yet, so just want to point out a few things:
- It does now.
- I am the reigning world champion of Vepsa Rallycross
I finally connected with a real paved road, and pulled into a gas station to fill up. As I was trying desperately not to overfill the tank and splash gas everywhere, an older man came up to me and asked where I was riding to. I told him I was taking it to New York. We got to talking a bit, and he told me he and a friend were towing a couple of late-1940s Indian Chief motorcycles out to a vintage bike rally in Utah. I asked, very politely, if they wouldn’t mind opening up the trailer so I could take a look at them. He asked his friend, and that friend led me over to the back of the trailer, put a key in, and showed me two of the most gorgeous machines I’ve seen in my life.
“I’ve had this one since 1967,” he told me. “Rode it to Canada once with a friend’s girlfriend. When he found out, he wasn’t too happy about it.” He laughed.
As I pulled out of the gas station, I could feel the wind picking up. With every gust, I took down my speed by another 5 miles an hour, until eventually I was hugging the side of the road, doing about 45 miles an hour with a 65 speed limit. In front of me, the sky was getting darker and darker. I saw an old-fashioned diner up ahead, and decided to pull in for a bit to see where the storm was headed and if I could maybe wait it out.
Over my meal of a cheeseburger with ham and an egg on top (ah, diner food), I checked the weather radar on my phone. A storm with large hail was scheduled to hit the next town where I planned to stop, a little bit after I planned to arrive. As I looked out the window, saw the sky get darker, and watched the leaves in the trees shake in the wind, I was scared. Honest to god, I was extremely apprehensive about riding out into that, even knowing that, were it to start raining and hailing, I had waterproof coverings for all of my gear, and could just pull over and wait it out. It had been four years since I had seen a real storm, and as much as I missed them, I missed them from the safety of a house with strong walls, or a car with a metal shell. Regardless, I decided to pack up, put my rain cover on my gear, and head out, with the plan being to get to the next town before the storm arrived and wait there until it passed.
The road covered slight rolling hills and at the crest of each, I could see for miles in every direction. And the one thing that took up more and more of the horizon was the storm. I could see a rain shaft to the southeast; as the sun set, the light intersected with the rain, and part of the storm lit up in a rainbow. The sky was getting darker overhead, but behind me was a gorgeous sunset, everything golden, and to the right was a rainbow. And as the sun continued to set, the front of the massive storm cloud lit up with pink lines across the front, just for a minute, before returning to gray as the sun dipped below the horizon.
I passed through an abandoned town on the highway; some structures were falling apart, others were just in disrepair. At this point, the sky was almost black, and the remaining tinges of sun lit up the broken down buildings. This felt like the apocalypse, or at least a scene out of a Cormac McCarthy novel.
As I got closer to the dark clouds, I checked my weather radar on my phone again; the storm had shifted to the east, and was going to narrowly dodge the road I was taking. Instead, the road followed the storm, and I spent the rest of the ride looking to my right at flashes of lightning in the clouds.
As I watched the lightning, I decided I needed some sparse music to go with this sparse landscape of rolling hills and thunderstorms. Sun Kil Moon’s “Benji” immediately came to mind, maybe because I was inching back towards Oklahoma and family there, maybe just because it’s heavy on the reverb and light on the instrumentation. I’m just going to point out the obvious here: this was absolutely the incorrect album to listen to. It may be thematically appropriate, but contemplating death, school shootings, and a midlife crisis alone in the dark on the back of a scooter in the middle of nowhere is not a very positive state of mind. By the time “Ben’s My Friend” was over, I was ready to pull into the hotel, have a minor emotional breakdown, and go to sleep.
Instead, I decided that I needed to go buy some chamomile tea and honey to help ease my cough (thanks, Eden, for the suggestion!). After picking this up, making the tea, and spending some time in bed reading, I noticed two things: first, I was in a much better mood, and second, my cough had pretty much stopped entirely. I managed to fall asleep without benadryl or melatonin for the first time in almost a week.
Today, I head back to Oklahoma. I was originally planning to stop in Sayre (since I had written a song about it and all), but it turns out there’s only two hotels in Sayre and, given the reviews, I don’t really want to stay in either. I could go all the way to Elk City, which has a few more places to stay, but my ride to Oklahoma City the day after is already extremely short, so maybe making my ride today a bit shorter as well wouldn’t be the worst thing. With that in mind, I think I’ll be stopping in Erick, a town right on the Oklahoma-Texas border (and home to some of the best cheeseburgers I’ve had in my entire life).
Looking forward to the familiar terrain of Oklahoma’s Route 66.
-Esten
