hermosa

I fell asleep at 9:30pm and slept very fitfully until 7:45am, and in between had very vivid dreams, all of which I have forgotten except the one in which I was playing either a bone flute or a clarinet very loudly from my hostel bed. This morning in the hostel I made friends with a Durango divorcee named Terry who was very kind to me and who burned me a CD with four albums of music from the Irish and Scottish highlands; then he took out two dozen carbon fiber arrow shafts and let me hold a razor-edged titanium elk-hunting arrowhead and instructed me on the hubcap-sized patch of animal that one must hit in order to get a heart or double-lung strike to kill the animal there. I peppered him with questions about weapons while he sat at the kitchen table scraping the plastic feathers off his used arrows. I had a cup of coffee and waited, to no avail, for my bowels to move yesterday's Wendy's breakfast meal out of my body, and then slowly shoved unnecessary supplies into a pannier and made my slow way through Durango, up Highway 550 to County Road 203 to Hermosa. My chain fell off immediately -I'd overshifted - and then my left shoe got stuck to the pedal because a bolt fell off my cleat and I was flailing about trying to figure out how to stop without freeing my foot before I remembered that my other foot was free. Also, the altitude is still not easy to overcome; walking up a flight of stairs leaves me breathless, and today's flat, 28-mile ride with only one half-loaded pannier should've been pretty easy but wasn't. Other than these little glitches, all goes well and I have not been leveled by one of the millions of SUVs or trucks out here. I probably should've known that Colorado would be this full of rural white people. Maybe it's that Colorado people aren't as friendly as midwesterners (i.e. not as responsive when you grin and wave at them or when you want to make conversation with them), or maybe it's that my season of playing bluegrass has tricked me into thinking that I actually have access to the all-white world of country strangers, but I admit to being a bit disappointed by how many people either walked away from me or blankly stared when I did my friendly midwestern jawing to them today. Whatever, I had a delicious five-pound calzone for lunch and that was enough to make me happy. Also making me happy was the scenery; it was sunny almost all day today and the Animas River valley was very lush and the weird reddish rock formations shooting up around it - I wouldn't really call them mountains because they come from nowhere and appear to be made out of rock, not earth - were very pleasing to view from a slowly-changing angle of approach at 12 mph. When I bike alone I think mostly about sensations - leg pain, back pain, neck pain, sun burn, fear of cars - and then I think about next steps - distance to destination, tasks to be completed at next destination - and when I drift from this, I think stupid things like Will I be superheroically fit when I return to California now that I am acclimated to Colorado altitude? and Did the Anasazi from Mesa Verde ever take trips to the Animas River valley, and if so, how long did it take, and did rival groups of Pueblo people live there or were they relatives and friends, and did they ever get over to Moab where the red rocks must have seemed so different and strange? Ordered thinking almost never occurs when I am biking. I can't tell if this is good for my brain, which is crowded from an emotionally taxing move from Chicago, my new love, my job ending, my ex's 30th birthday, or whether I ought to be using this time to make general conclusions about vexing life questions. I started at 10am after handling Terry's arrowheads, took a two hour break to wait for my calzone and write in my journal, and got back into town around 4pm. Roadkill seen today: many birds, many chipmunks, something that looked bigger than a chipmunk but was similarly furry, and a totally flattened black (and now also red) garter snake. Food eaten: oatmeal, calzone, banana, handful of trail mix, Colorado peach, soup from a can with instant rice, two Reese's peanut butter cups from the hostel free pile. I got in bed at 8:30pm but couldn't sleep, so I got out of bed on a premonition that SL might be online, and she was! I am a shaman. It made my night so sweet to talk to you.