The Manifest Destiny Tour - Day 3

Glorieta, NM to Wilderness Ranch, CO

256.7 Miles/56 Songs

The Shins – Chutes Too Narrow
The National – Boxer
Midlake – The Trials of Van Occupanther
Led Zeppelin – II
The Dodos – Visiter

11:58 am – Tres Piedras, NM

If ever you find yourself in the middle of New Mexico, and all you want is a quick bite to eat, and maybe a little wi-fi internet access, don’t stop in Santa Fe. Last night Santa Fe pushed out Valdosta, Georgia as the official worst city in America. [My apologies to anyone from or in love with Valdosta, Georgia. I once spent a week there building houses for the Jimmy Carter/Habitat for Humanity build-a-thon. It was about 130 degrees, and it smelled funny.] I was a couple of hours ahead of schedule. (I thought I was a couple of hours ahead. Turns out I was only one hour ahead. But by the time I figured this out, I was 30 minutes behind schedule. I wrote a paper in college proposing we abolish all time zones and adopt a universal time. As Big Brother as that sounds, I’m still in favor.) So I thought I’d get dinner and, with the extra time I thought I had, check my email. Not ever having been to Santa Fe, I wasn’t real sure where to go to carry out this mission, but I didn’t think it would be too difficult. Living in Austin, turns out, will spoil an individual. The first exit claimed to have a visitors center complete with “free information,” so I took it, thinking I could find a finger pointing me in the right direction. I never found the damn visitors center. For all I know, the “free information” is a crappy joke on tourists and the friendly finger is anything but.

What I did find were the bowels of the city. Every building a brown, blocky log of a thing, tracts of them. And not a one, it seemed, offered anything to eat. I found a McDonalds, of course, and it might’ve even had wi-fi, but like I say, I was looking for food too. After traversing through damn near half the city with no luck, I decided to call the girlfriend to see if she, by way of the internets, could help navigate. Thirty miles from Santa Fe, this thought actually occurred to me, but I figured I’d be able to handle it on my own. She found several places in a matter of minutes. The Atomic Grill sounded the most awesome, so I followed her directions there. The Atomic Grill is in the so-called arts district of Santa Fe, and to be fair, I did pass by several galleries. One was even having an exhibit last night, and I could see in, and while waiting for several hoity toity patrons to cross the street, I got a chance to examine some of the pieces. From what I could tell, they all looked the same—varying shades of brown paint smeared vertically on the canvas, roughly a foot long and four inches apart. Looked like rows and rows of turds. Looked like Santa Fe. It’s the first modern art I’ve ever understood and appreciated.

The Atomic Grill is a trendy little open-air café, replete with gigantic charcoal portraits of American pop iconography: James Dean, Jimi Hendrix, Doris Day (or Marilyn Monroe), Bob Marley. After confirming with the waiter that they indeed had internet and food, I ordered an iced tea and, because I was wrapped up in the hipper-than-Tao atmosphere, a veggie burger. After the waiter left, I got out my computer and set up a little work station for myself, glad to finally be out of the car and all that lonely nothingness, surrounded by internet waves and pop culture icons. It gave me a certain feeling of comfort. And just as I was beginning to think I had judged the city hastily and unfairly and that there might be some redemption in it after all, it didn’t work. I could connect to the Atomic Grill wireless network, but nothing would load. I tried disconnecting and reconnecting and all the other tricks that sometimes work, but still nothing. Ten hours of driving, playing the fool to that God-forsaken place, and all I wanted was to check my freaking email. The waiter reset the modem. Still nothing. So in a last gasp effort, I restarted my computer. And lo and behold, the silver lining at last. The world at my fingertips. Go Gmail! Show me the love!

Nothing. Not one damn email. After several minutes of staring at the screen, unable to think of anything else to look up, I closed the computer, ate my veggie burger and left.

10:29 pm – Wilderness Ranch

Any attempt at describing Wilderness Ranch will come off sounding hokey and trite, so I won’t try it. I’ve been coming here in some capacity each summer save two for the past eight years. It’s a hiking/backpacking camp, yet ironically, I’ve never been out on the trail. I consider myself a base camp rat. Mostly I help with the maintenance of the camp and with various construction projects. One of my favorite things about coming here is that I get to see the product of the work I’ve done in previous years: a bridge, a porch, a roof, tile work, etc. All who return here get to see their work. It’s a satisfaction that our world doesn’t offer us much anymore, unless you are a carpenter, or a general, or a plastic surgeon. Most of us slave away at jobs that offer us no tangible measure of success. Not statistics or progress reports or evaluations. I mean real, physical actuality. And I can’t help but think there’s a problem in that. I think maybe we need to see the fruit of our labors. Maybe then we wouldn’t feel so purposeless and alone. Maybe it would give us something real to feel proud of and we could stop envying one another. C.S. Lewis wrote that he believed heaven to be a place where we could finally take pride in our creations without feeling ashamed. That’s sort of how I feel when I’m here. We’ll be here a week.

“All this workin’ just to tear it down.”
“Language City” – Wolf Parade