Sunday, July 04, 2010

Time Trial

This place is old.  Stone, wood, water, wind, even the people are elemental, burnt clay figures walking, selling red Chiminyo chile, sitting in the shade by the side of the road.  The sky has an inverted mass of its own, spreading into the gaps of the red rock country, seeping into arroyos and merging with the land.  This is an old place.  This is a place where the forgetfulness of quarter century can be forgotten, absorbed into the sandy ground like an afternoon rainstorm.

The pain comes quickly.  I glance down at the computer on the stem and think that it’s just been one mile, just one, with four more to go before the turnaround and the quick descent back.  No one has passed me yet, though the windy sound of tourists on the highway mimi occasionally a disk wheel slicing through the air, chasing me.

My road winds through canyons.  The sight and smell merge into a memory of the Cevennes, driving with the family from Nimes to St. Flour.  Arid, browns and red and light unfiltered by contaminating moisture.  Smells travel far.  I can smell the pinon before I see it.  I can smell the rain before it falls.

I’m never fast enough on the climbs.  I’m soaked in an inertia I can’t resist and it pull me back to nineteen miles an hour.  The struggle against it is the point, the purpose.  Why else would a grown man dress in a lycra skinsuit and put on the helmet of Bugs Bunny’s Martian nemesis?  Why else?  A mile to go on the climb and I’m passed by my two minute man and then my minute and a half man.

Cordova lies in a valley off of the high road to Taos.  I turn off the high road and go to meet someone from my memory.  In my memory there is a skinny young guy with infectious energy, a mop of black hair and a smile.  We played basketball together thirty years ago.  I have moments with Terry, a pat on the back after a blocked shot, seeing him in the old Marquette hallways, sometimes with an organic odor about him, a difficult scene in a locker room before a game.  A mixture of energy, happiness, pain; I suppose the stuff of our existence.  I pull into the gallery parking lot.

The turnaround comes, a red cone in the road.  I’ve yearned for that cone for a millennia, for fifteen minutes.  Why this is true, I have no idea.  My heart rate was right at threshold the entire time, 162 beats per minute, the measure of my effort.  I turn the cone, hear ‘Keep it up 334!’ and make the turn downward.  It’s easier; I’m faster; the effort is the same, 162bpm. 

A hug.  There is perhaps a slight awkwardness standing in the gallery surrounded by beauty.  How does one compact thirty years of life, time, experience, love, loss, thought into the moment before the shower is offered?  We move through this.  Our conversation offers peeks behind the curtain of who we have become.  The point of this is our becoming. 

I am spinning a 53x11 gear down the hill which means I’m touching 40mph.  My effort is the same, but now I’m fast, flying, steering with my elbows, slicing through space with a narrow focus on the riders ahead who passed me.  When I catch them, they will still be two minutes and one minute thirty seconds ahead of me, but that isn’t the point.

Laughter comes easily and we share riffs of the same ideas, similar experience, like loves.  We share a black market Budweiser in a can, purchased through intermediaries in a local shop.  It tastes good, so I know this place is magical.  Soon, his family comes home and I see Terry from thirty years ago, gangly, a tad awkward, a big smile on his face.  His wife Paula completely shares the beauty of this moment, now as participant but in reality as creator.  I dwell in clear moments talking with each, my mind a mirror of the clouded sky sometimes, but then clear with a memory or thought as we move from place to place, time to time, Milwaukee, Africa, Germany, Santa Fe.  We remember people, times, places and now create something new.