Traveling Dan

Spike's Home

As in Snoopy's brother. That's where I am now. Saguaro cactus, blast furnace heat, barren mesas and ridges framed by cholla, the desert as we all imagine it. Southern Arizona is where you find it. I reached the southernmost point of this trek yesterday, a hamlet called Hope at the junction of highways 72 and 60. Snowbird country, the towns (if you could call them that) were loose collections of buildings and usually one or two RV parks, each claiming to be the ideal winter retreat but looking rather forlorn as the season is rapidly changing and the behemoths are rumbling back north again to clog the roads and campgrounds of Yellowstone, Glacier, and the Oregon coast.

Several times today a particular kind of truck would pass me that smelled so bad I can't even describe it, like rotting meat and shit all together. I don't know what exactly they were carrying but it literally smelled like death. Reminded me of when I lived on the 11th floor of a building overlooking I-5 in Seattle and every now and then as I looked down there would be an open-topped truck-trailer filled with bones, not just bones but eviscerated livestock skeletons. The first time I saw this it blew my mind, how many times would you see one of these trucks going by at street level and have no idea of its grisly cargo, or of the strange trade in slaughtered remains headed for some final production into pet food or garden fertilizer or something. The trucks today reminded me of those death lorries. Sort of the flip side of pedaling past all those placid doe eyed cattle the whole trip.

Interesting thing, of about a half dozen tiny towns I've been thru in the last couple days (Bouse, Salome ("Where She Danced" said the town sign,) Wenden, Aguila, etc) it seemed as though each one was either all anglo or all Mexican, as if there is a (deliberate?) civic segregation in rural Arizona. I remember the sun-leathered anglo woman in Parker who told me "Now I know this sounds bad to say but... I don't recommend you stay in Wenden, its all poor Mexicans you know," which sort of piqued my curiosity about the place, turns out it was just a little cantaloupe growing town with a lot of migrant workers sitting around waiting for work, and granted the people at the little grocery didn't even speak English, but you know what? I know how to say "queiro un snickers bar, por favour." There's obviously a lot of fear out there of the growing Hispanization of American culture, but guess what, we are now a fully bilingual nation. The border has grown to encompass the whole of el Norte, and there's no going back. Quite soon I predict that many public schools will teach in Spanish as a first language and will have to deal with the problem of children who speak only English. Now granted, there are cultural differences, but for me it comes across more like the difference between me and anglo rednecks: most of the Mexicans I encounter on a daily basis drive pickups, wear seed caps or cowboy hats, and look at me like I'm a lunatic. A lot of them also ride bicycles along rural roads and in small towns, not as a lifestyle choice but simply as cheep wheels, and they too look at me like I'm nuts, because why would anyone *choose* to bike with a loaded trailer simply for the fun of it? Not to ramble too long, but brings to mind these two homeless guys camped next to me back at Ventura, they reminded me for all the world of the pair in "Of Mice and Men" except on bicycles and buzzed on "Natural Light" beers. They had purchased 50 dollar used rental bikes with money from food stamps they sold to a guy outside the Santa Monica welfare office, and they were quite sincerely planning to bike all the way up the coast then head to Alaska to homestead in the bush. They were totally serious and I didn't have the heart to tell them that that Alaska homesteading thing is pretty much of a legend. They said their ride was for Freedom, in a time in which there is less and less of it. I'll drink to that.