High Country

A few years ago I rode on a cross country motorcycle trip with some friends. We started in Tennessee and took mostly two lane roads across Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, heading for Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was the middle of summer, riding across Texas was swelteringly hot, and we pit stopped for gas and a cold drink. Bikes parked, sitting in the shade sweating, a beat up Ford pick-up coughs to a stop and parks. A ragged cowboy steps out, gives us a wry look.

“Welcome to Snyder, boys. You in the armpit of Texas!”

“Appreciate it. Who are you, the mayor?” My buddy replies.

Approaching Santa Fe from Albuquerque,  the road winds up and up into the high desert.  Coming around a curve in the middle of nowhere, a simple adobe church sits alone. It’s a four hundred year old Spanish mission, beautiful in its simplicity. Built in the 1600’s by Spanish friars bringing Christianity to the indigenious people here, it was remote and dangerous work. The natives, having been here a thousand years, were understandably reluctant to change. But the Spanish were not easily dissuaded, and often brutal. As with most of European colonization, not one of Christianity’s finest moments.     

In Santa Fe we meet my brother, coming from California, and the (now) four of us ride up from Santa Fe over the mountain plateaus to Taos, crossing over the Rio Grande on a suspension bridge nine hundred feet above the river. It’s a heart stopping view, and would give a person vertigo looking down over either side. That evening we have some good Mexican food at a local cantina and wander around the old Taos Plaza looking at remnants and reproductions of the Wild West. Outside of town, Taos Pueblo, a Unesco World Heritage sight, has been home to the Tiwa tribe for over a thousand years, one of the oldest continually inhabited sites in America. Kit Carson’s home, the famous Indian fighter, scout, and mountain man, is a museum now.

On one of our best days of riding, we wind up through the Rio Grande valley in southern Colorado, going toward Telluride. Pink Floyd pulses through my ear buds, fly fishermen are wading the river, and the drift boats used by the guides float lazily downstream. The valley in June is lined on both sides by snow capped peaks. The road follows along the river and I pull off to wait for my brother, who has stopped for gas a few miles back. I park the bike and climb up on a rock to sit and admire the view. Spectacular and pastoral at the same time, the familiar motion of fly rods cast the still pools and riffles.

After a little while my brother pulls off the road, and climbs up on the rock with me. We sit for a few minutes and take it all in. The view is a postcard, but a postcard wouldn’t do it justice. A fisherman below us hooks something, and after three minutes or so, eases a large rainbow trout into his net. Even from where we sit, the sunlight glints off its shimmering pink and gold scales. He eases it out of the net and releases it back into the green water. 

Telluride is an historic and picturesque town set high up in a Rocky Mountain box canyon. Like most of these Colorado mountain towns, they were originally mining settlements, silver in this case, but now run on tourism – skiing, climbing, fishing and hunting, outdoor sports. A friend of mine has a restaurant here, and we share a really fine meal, with good wine and company. I kid her about stealing my shrimp and grits recipe. But, as is often the case with really good cooks and chefs, she’s just taken it and made it her own. Nine hundred miles from the nearest ocean, the result is delicious. 

After a couple of days in Telluride, we circle back towards Santa Fe, where my brother drops his rental bike and flies back to California. The three of us head back cross country toward Tennessee. Crossing the panhandle of Texas, the dark clouds in the distance are obviously bringing heavy weather, bad news for a man on a motorcycle. And then a ways away you can see it, the swirling funnel of a tornado veering toward us. We pull under some gas pump awnings right as the rain begins to come down in earnest. We keep our helmets on. The wind howls, soon followed by golf ball sized hail pounding the roof of the station. The storm is so loud we can’t have a conversation, so we just wait it out. High wind rattles the gas pumps on their bases, and the overhead canopy is threatening to fly away. If there was better cover we would take it, but now it’s too late to move. We stay on the bikes to keep them from blowing over. But then the tornado takes a turn south, missing us, and after a few minutes the storm passes, sun peeks out from behind the clouds, and we saddle up and continue east. 

It’s summer as we cross over the muddy Mississippi River and into the green hills of Tennessee. It’s been a fantastic trip, riding the Western mountains, a one of a kind adventure. Beautiful country. Big skies, high peaks, rushing rivers. But the lush Southern landscape of the final leg is a destination in itself. Thomas Wolfe might have said you can’t go home again, but here we are, and family is waiting, supper on the table.