Don´t Cry for Us, Argentina

Day 8, Week 2; 120 km.

Getting out of Mendoza was a snap. It was a Sunday morning and the streets were empty of cars and buses and dogs.

Church bells were ringing in the distance. It was a good day for going to church or other sanctuaries, I thought: clear and bright and cloudless, the kind of morning that starts quietly and, as it unfolds, makes you think of your life, and how you are spanning time and where you would go, where you would be if you knew your wish would be granted, if the gods of loss and longing had asked you to name what it is you love best in the world and it would be yours, just for the naming of it. It was that kind of quiet.

One main artery led away from the city center -- Ruta 40 -- and we tracked the signs for San Juan as we rode, and 6 km later, the city freed us and we were off, following the blacktop through and past the smattering of five or six pueblos that always trickle out of a city, small towns that you can never find on a map. Dogs barked at us, but only half-heartedly, as though they were drowsy or toothless. They felt the quiet, too.

In the distance were mountains, solemn and hazy in the heat, pushed up from the earth like loaves of crusty bread left too long in the oven to bake. They were reddish and riven with age and unremarkable. I could not compare them to anything that pleased me, so after a while I stopped trying. Some people factor prime numbers or dream of things they would still like to do in life when they ride; I try to think up pleasing similes. Deputy Dawg listens to poets: Springsteen and Neil Young and Dylan.

Hazy desert mountains

The road ran on and on between the mountains on the left and scrubland on the right. There were strange things growing in the scrub: trees with a loose canopy of long branches, burred and sharp, and bushes with tiny silvery leaves and thorns. They looked like delicate coral growing in a long-ago sea.

I´d been watching Deputy Dawg as he inched along ahead of me in the distance, and suddenly, the blacktop road became part of the scrub and the heat and the red mountains, and with a start, I realized we were in the desert. It was like falling headlong into a furnace. It seemed to have happened all at once, the desert, the way that love or kindness or catastrophe happens.

When we stopped for lunch on the side of the road, we did not discuss the desert or the heat or the fact that we were not prepared for this turn in our ride: we had not brought enough water; the town of Media Agua was another 50 km away. We did not know if there would be a hotel or a hostel there; we did not know what we would find, but we hoped that our luck would hold and there would be something for us -- a clean room, water, a cafe.

We would talk about this later, when we were safe in our room in a pensione in Media Agua, the moment when the arc of a day turns from ordinary to dire, and you find yourself in a wilderness that you had not expected to find, the moment when you remember again that your hold on life is always tenuous and the best that you can count on when the day turns on you is luck -- luck that whatever you´ve brought for the journey will be all you will need to get you through the day and to a place of rest at night.

Memorable: The Green Apple, a vegetarian restaurant in Mendoza featuring sandia (watermelon) juice: fantastic!
-- Mad Dawg copyright 2007