Of Mountains and Wind

Into the silence of pre-dawn, I climbed like a  mole to the dark mountain surface above Silver City.  Stars too bright and numerous to think of as distant—brighter than the town lights below.  It was cool and blue as a morning painted on canvas.  I climbed for four miles to the continental divide, where droplets split company—some to the Rio Grande, some to the Colorado. 

Contrary to meteorologists’ word, no wind came up from the west to hinder my progress.  I sailed happily into daylight thinking the hills will be easy without that dreadful west wind.  And so I came to rest in a little berg called Cliff.  “D” runs a fine little restaurant here serving biscuits and gravy full of carbs and fat, which I fully expected to burn off on the many steep hills before me until I rest for the night.  He assured me that wind will begin in earnest by ten, no matter the forecast. 

So it was, just as “D” said, a flag stood out straight, pointing at me on edge, as if to say you cannot avoid the wind. 

What really got them in the end—

those women who didn’t make it,

who withered and blew away

in the open—was the wind.

Space, yes, and distance,

too, from neighbors,

a piano back in Boston.

        Peter Ludwin    

Why take a picture of an obnoxious thorny weed, hated by farmers and sportsmen?  Because I am like the thistle in many ways—prickly, even cruel if approached unprepared, but with a gooey heart that draws the gentle bees, the ones who avoid the thorns.   

a thorny weed

relieves the thorns

I felt so long

its flower declares

pleasant thorns   

Arizona comes at the top of a ridge after a long, headwind climb.  Two states traversed and two to go.  It’s the undone part that can unravel a person, win her over, send her astray from the goal.  It “highlights the natural process of life as not being finished.  And we arrive at the adventure itself, not the ending... that excites, satisfies, and is our element.” (Kathabela on Facebook, Tanka Poets on Site)   

I plunged into Arizona, dove into it, dropping three thousand feet in just a few miles, falling lower, lower to where the night promises to be warm enough for camping with my lightweight gear.  

So it was after eighty-two hard miles I came to Three Way—a store and a place to camp at the ranger station.

This morning I crawled out of the tent to see headlights coming down the mountain from Safford.  It’s the mountain I would climb, and was happy to see a morning absent of wind. 

I made it to Safford and the Budget Inn which probably appears as much like camping as Three Way.  But it’s luxurious, made that way by those many miles of hills and wind.  It is like there’s a space in my heart that will never be filled.  So I wait and wait and ask and keep pedaling.  And out here, I perceive the positive in nearly every moment, something I fail to do in life at home.