Daily Miles: 71.1
Total Miles: 1792
Max: 28.1
Avg: 11.4
Time on the Bike: 06:12:41
I slept well enough and woke up around 6:30. I wasn’t in a rush due to a dense fog advisory for the area until around 9:00 AM. According to the weather lady the visibility was 0.0 miles. This isn’t great for cycling. Not because you can’t see but because other people can’t see you. I hung out until around 8:30 drinking coffe and watching some news on the TV, all of which was unsurprisingly not uplifting.
I headed out into the fog but it was better now and the conditions would only improve. The air was like a wet air conditioner blasting my body. Not 1 minute into the ride I had dew all over my beard and safety vest and my shirt was soaked. I started climbing back into the mountains. There was about a 2-3 mile climb back up to around 2,500 feet. I zig-zagged around the countour of the ridges following the small road upwards. Soon I was above the fog and sunlight shown on the hilly earth in abundance. I eventually made it to the top and stopped for a second to catch my breath and drink water. I had been riding an hour but only managed 7 miles so far. Those long uphills will put a halt to any and all hasty forward progress. I didn’t have to stop and walk my bike this time so this pleased me, and I smiled a little bit to myself and started onward again.
Up on the ridge it was small ups and downs and then I decended a long way to the town of Camp Wood, another small nondescript town in a series of tiny and forgettable towns with a convenience store and a few restaurants if you’re lucky. This town had a population of 850 which was more than twice the population of Leaky. A guy pulled up to the convenience store towing a small trailer with a bunch of goats in the back. They were all huddled together making sounds that goats make and looking haphazardly all over the place. I wondered where they were going on thier trip. Probably to be delivered to some buyer who has a bunch of other goats somewhere in a big Texas ranch with barbed wire fences so tall not even an elephant could escape.
I left Camp Wood with a gallon of water. It was 50 miles until the next town and the highs were going to be high enough to break records. I started out on highway 55 and a great tail wind carried me along nicely. There was a slight downward slope and I cruised at a cool 17 mph for an hour and fifteen minutes. I hung a right and was now going west and the nice tailwind that I had enjoyed turned into a ferocious headwind, berating me in my sun burning face. I tired of fighting the wind and slunk off to the side of the road to take a break and have lunch.
There was silence on the side of the road and it was nice to listen to the wind and look at the blue sky without being interrupted by a slew of cars blasting by. It was around 85 degrees outside but it was cool under the juniper trees in the shade.
Eventually I had to get going and battle the window again, so I packed m my things and ventured off to meet my maker. The rest of the day was hard and slow, and I may have yelled at the wind and called it some not nice things, but it deserved anything that I threw at it because it was making me miserable.
A few miles outside of Bracketville, the town I was going to stop at for the night, a saw a Border Patrol SUV parked on the side of the road. It was my first cruiser of this type I’ve seen and it reminded me that I was only 35 or so miles away from the Mexican border.
I thought about Trump and the proposed wall and then I thought of all these private ranch fences. It’s wired how humans can claim to own parcels of land and put barricades up to prevent other people or things from going onto their property. It’s just rocks and trees and space and water, really. Everything is about having something and controlling that something. Why are we driven to do this? Money and power and ambition and history I would guess. What’s mine is not yours so go away. Fences are put up to keep things out and keep things in. There’s gates but they have locks or guards or cameras. Nothing is free flowing. And right, wrong or indifferent, that’s just the way the world keeps spinning and turning and moving around the sun. Day after day until it’s spun itself all out and there’s nothing left.
