Route 17 North

I wrote this story for the Village Voice in the summer of 1971.  I was 24 years old.  It seemed like the whole world was 24 that year.

We were passing the Great Sand Dunes National Monument, and the lady, with a calm turn of her head, shot words at me in her harsh whisper:  Man, you just don’t know my sensitivities, and I don’t think you even want to.

It was at 60 miles an hour that she put it to me flatly that afternoon high in the Rockies. I continued to gaze down the long stretch of two-lane blacktop out there in front of me, not a mile of it dipping below 7,000 feet on its way along the hundred-odd miles of San Luis Valley between Northern New Mexico and South Central Colorado.  Yes, I thought, there are times when I couldn’t give a good shit what she thought, just as I was sure the same was true of her about me.

The lady continued to search for and chew off split ends which were cropping up in her hair at an alarming rate out there in the dry climate of the west.  I had no idea what she was thinking.  When we stopped the morning’s yelling, which had gone on all the way from Taos to Fort Garland, she started that damn hair chewing again.  Except for those few accusatory words, she had been silent since Alamosa.  I presumed she meant what she said, but I didn’t give it much thought beyond that.  The miles whipped by, the valley with them, and all I did was drive.

They grow hops and barley in the San Luis Valley.  Annual rainfall each year makes the area semi-arid, and primitive irrigation ditches crisscross like veins on the underside of your forearm.  From the air, I’d guess, they’d even look blue.  Route 17 cuts the valley in half with a skinny rib of patch-worked and pot-holed asphalt that has no turns and only one gas station between Alamosa and Poncha Pass.  To the west, the mountains are over 12,000 feet high and snow-capped this time of year.  To the east, in a jagged ridgeline, they are the last line of defense before the Midwestern plains.  The people who live in the valley probably have Native American ancestors who were converted to Catholicism by missionaries 400 years ago.  The town giving its name to the valley, San Luis, is the oldest town in Colorado, and though the missions still stand, the missionaries have left.

Route 17 is one of the last bastions of America untouched by the odious wand of the highway lobby.  You can get to the Great Sand Dunes National Monument without traveling it, so it has been neglected as a way to get from one place to another.  Few people drive Route 17.  The sights along the way are not worth speaking of, unless you count the barley, grazing cattle, a few horses straying out into the roadway, and of course, way off in the distance, those ridiculous sand dunes squatting against the base of an otherwise perfectly normal Colorado mountain.  It’s a good place to lose your mind, Route 17.  A good place for a relationship to disintegrate, for the lady to turn my seeing into staring.

No doubt she knew this.  She stared at her lap for mile after linear mile.  She didn’t see the carload of Kansas tourists with five kids who passed us dragging a small camper, every kid from two or three years on up hanging out the back windows, a half-dozen peace signs extended into the air stream.  The father, when he saw his kids and the long-haired asshole they were waving at, slammed on the brakes and pulled his rig over to the side, obviously bent on giving them a good talking to about what’s good and what’s bad about America.

She didn’t even seem to notice the dusty dashboard, the open glove compartment strewn with sunglasses and dead coke cups and the jug of water on the floor and the bags of trash stuffed under the seats that had collected since we left Albuquerque four days ago.   Conversation isn’t necessary when you’re traveling by car in America.  At times, it might not even be desirable.  Air blowing through open windows, fence posts and fields flashing by outside, the radio if you’ve got one blaring wide open against the road noise, that relentless wind against your left arm, grasshoppers slamming one after another into the windshield, that endless procession of diners and gas stations and cheap motels and roadside attractions – it’s enough to make relationships a folly, to twist what used to be your feelings into scrap.

We flew into New York late at night and took a cab straight to the Lion’s Head on Sheridan Square.  Without so much as a word, she left her suitcase under the coat rack next to the ladies room and split for the Buffalo Roadhouse, a raucous, hip bar a few blocks down 7th Avenue.  I left my suitcase next to hers and stayed at the Lion’s Head for the conversation and camaraderie I had missed on the road with her for almost two weeks in the west.

Nick Browne was tending bar and he’d had a few by then and wondered out loud why it was that we could form friendships among men that seem unassailable, while those with ladies like the one who had just walked out the door were so fragile.  Why do we stumble and fall with them, he asked, and stand so steadily with each other?

I didn’t have an answer beyond some sort of pap about cars and driving and a litany of other male shit.  I remember saying that the rush of road noise allows the car and the San Luis Valley to talk and all we can do is listen.

She was right about me.  I had no more feeling for her sensitivities than I did for the Great Sand Dunes National Monument or for the Kansas kids and their peace signs or for the horses stretching their necks against barbed wire trying to get at clumps of grass along the highway.

It rained at Poncha Pass, and we saw only one good day of sun the rest of the trip.