Desert Encounters

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"Aieee," Cecily cried as a mother and her ten-year-old walked in. "They're back again!"

Maria and Juan have been trying to get to a northern state for a year to join the rest of their family, who work on a ranch.

Maria, a slight, thin woman with pale skin and an angular face, has traversed the mountains on foot and by car, her son in tow. She has even saved enough money to pay "coyotes," professional people-smugglers, to take them over the border. But they have been caught each time.

This was about the tenth time Cecily had seen Maria and Juan at the shelter. When the border guards take them into Juarez, they come right back to El Paso.

"It's not measles," Cecily reassured me. "They're mosquito bites, from spending nights outside in the mountains."

This was about the tenth time Cecily had seen Maria and Juan at the shelter. When the border guards take them into Juarez, they come right back to El Paso.

"We will try again soon," Maria told Cecily, who wished her luck. Maria shrugged, and smiled with one side of her face.

"Gracias," she said, and added wistfully, "Next time we will be lucky."

THE NEXT MORNING I drove along the Rio Grande on my way out of El Paso, along the wide cement wall that holds the muddy Rio waters in, and keeps the Mexicans out. This dividing line between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso is reinforced with chain-link fence, searchlights, and four-wheel-drive vans marked "Border Patrol" parked every fifty feet along its wide, flat top. The patrolmen scan the river, ready for a chase. They might dash across: that woman washing clothes, or the young man smoking a cigarette. He gazes across the narrow river and waves at me. I wave back, feeling small and constrained. We are so close to each other, but we are not allowed to meet and shake hands. I feel almost like we are both in jail.

I visited East Berlin, before the wall was taken down. I traveled through Europe when it was not possible to get from country to country without passports and visas, curt questions and official stamps. Now, when I visit Europe, I drive through border stations that look like abandoned toll booths. I can drive into France, into Italy, Germany, and Holland without stopping. It is like driving between Montana and Idaho, from Texas to New Mexico. They are united states, now, the European Economic Community. The isolation and suspicion are fading from each culture as they get to know each other. It is curious to me that North America hasn't done the same.

At the El Paso/Ciudad Juarez border

There are reasons it should be done. For instance, the wide strip of yellow air that hangs over El Paso, jaundiced by toxic chemicals, smoke, and particles. No country can ignore what the next is doing when what one does so affects the other. El Paso and Ciudad Juarez are really one city, divided in half by the Rio Grande, divided in half by a language, a culture, and by laws made, or not made, by two separate and often uncommunicative bodies of government.

Before I left the pollution of Juarez/El Paso, I was stopped.

"A routine check," said the border patrol, and without asking, he pulled back the leather cover of the sidecar, as if Maria and Juan were hiding in there, under my suitcase and my toolbox.

NEW MEXICO. HIGHWAY 80 lies in the flats between two mountain ranges that rise in thick purple folds above the thin desert plains. The road was so completely deserted that for a while I wondered if something awful had happened, if I was actually alone in the world with the cactus and sagebrush and the black asphalt road that melted and disappeared under the waves of heat that rose ahead of me.

I was relieved to come to a small country gas station at Rodeo, a town that sits smack dab on the dividing line between New Mexico and Arizona. It is the only building in town. A black dog with a gray muzzle lay sunning itself in the dirt by one of the old round-topped gas pumps, the white paint of which was pocked with rust.

At the sound of my engine the dog got up with effort, shuddered, and sauntered toward the old cowboy sitting in a rocking chair under the slanted tin awning of the station. In the energy-efficient manner of people used to living in the heat, he raised his hand in a gesture that meant "hello," "welcome," and "help yourself" all in the same movement. The other hand clutched a silver can of Coors, its aluminum side beaded with cold drops of water.

He squinted and nodded west, then looked at me with surprisingly clear bottle-green eyes. "You'll want to see Bisbee."

"Don't worry," said the cowboy. "I'm far out here but the gas is real clean."

"Oh, no," I said, walking over to pay. "It's lubricant for the engine. You know, it's an old-style engine."

He smiled and raised his Coors. "Oh. So where ya goin'?"

Behind him was a rickety wooden structure that was maybe a store, maybe a house. The dog stood in the doorway, and finally decided to lie across the threshold. Cool air from the shade inside radiated outward to where I was standing.

"Well, all over, I guess. But where would you spend the night if you had to be in Phoenix tomorrow?"

"Bisbee," he said simply, without hesitation. His face was creased under his white cowboy hat. He squinted and nodded west, then looked at me with surprisingly clear bottle-green eyes. "You'll want to see Bisbee."

BEYOND RODEO THE DESERT FLATS turn into soft, grassy hills, and yellow caution signs warn of high water and flash floods.

A doe and her fawn stretched their necks and froze as I rounded a gentle curve. And still there were those mountains, purple even in the daytime, deepening to blue black at sunset, and the thin, dry air of the West, and a growing scratch in my throat that I tried to ignore.

At Douglas I was on the Mexican border again, but Highway 80 curved north and I rode through the long desert sunset to Bisbee, which had no campground. The historic old town looked as if it might have a tumble-down motel with cheap rooms somewhere. It looked like that kind of place -- sort of half being worked on and half very chic.

The narrow streets were lined with even narrower sidewalks that wound up and around a hill past the Grand Hotel. A woman emerged, laughing, and her yellow dress was bright against the gray stone walls of the building.

Lights from shops and art studios glowed dimly. People walked by them and into restaurants and bars. I parked at an inn a little way up. If it's under $40, I'll stay, I thought. And it was.

The Inn at Bisbee

Jeannene helped me unpack the Ural and showed me around. She runs the inn with her father, an artist whose paintings decorate the walls. An old boarding house for miners in the early 1900s, it is now a very charming bed and breakfast.

"There's a tunnel over there," Jeannene jerked her thumb westward, "that separates the 1990s from the 1890s." She was talking about the difference between Bisbee and Tombstone. "Tombstone is like a movie set -- really camp," she said. "Bisbee's the real thing. You'll see."

Bisbee was a copper mining town until after World War II, when it was abandoned. All but a ghost town, the 1960s brought hippies, who bought lots for $200 apiece, Jeannene told me, and barely kept the town going. The 1970s brought artists, and the 1980s started to bring in some more affluent residents. Now Bisbee is a town in the process of being "discovered."

Jeannene showed me my room. It was comfortable, quiet, and papered with maps of the world.

It's a good thing I liked it, because I was in it for two days with a sore throat and a fever. I even went so far as to go to a doctor, who prescribed rest and antibiotics.

"I can't rest," I told him. "I have to be in Phoenix tomorrow."

I could barely speak above a whisper when I called Michael. "I'll be all better by the time I get there," I promised.

But I wasn't.

I TURNED OFF THE HIGHWAY in Cordes Junction, miserably sick. A Phoenix traffic jam had held me up, and I'd ridden the 60 miles north in the cold night air of another desert sunset.

This place is in the middle of nothing. Prescott, the closest town of any size at all, is 30 miles away. Cordes Junction is merely an intersection for gas and quick food. Arcosanti lies two miles beyond, on an unlit dirt road the texture of a washboard.

The city sits on 860 acres. All parking is outside the structures, which take up less than five percent of the land. It is surrounded by nothing. Nothing but desert.

This has got to be the wrong way, I'm thinking, when I hear the creak of metal and a thud. A shadow rolls past me, hits the wall, and veers off toward the ravine.

This has got to be the wrong way, I'm thinking, when I hear the creak of metal and a thud. A shadow rolls past me, hits the wall and veers off toward the ravine.

I stop and cut off the engine, one wheel in a hole. The bike leans sharply to one side. I set the brake and dismount, and notice that there is nothing at all on top of the trunk. No spare tire. No rack, no backpack, no helmet, no rain gear. Nothing.

I looked around for it. It didn't really even bug me. In fact, I was grateful that it hadn't happened on the highway out of Phoenix. Imagine what a disaster that could have been.

I walked back and picked up my stuff, still very securely tied to the rack, and piled it on top of the sidecar cover.

I didn't even hope to find the tire, but it was lying not too far away -- miraculously it hadn't rolled into the ravine.

All the loose stuff was balanced precariously on the sidecar cover as I continued down the path, hoping I was almost there. At another bump everything slid off the top and wedged itself between my foot and the sidecar. It interfered a little with the foot brake, but seemed secure, so I continued.

FINALLY I CAME TO A LONG BUILDING with doors that looked outward and a tall figure by the stairs -- Michael.

We embraced and I whispered, "I can't talk at all."

The rest of our conversation was bizarre. He talked, and I typed, using the Powerbook as a modern-day slate.

He laughed. "Isn't is almost appropriate, after all these months of talking without physical contact, that now we have physical contact and you can't talk?"

It was, somehow, appropriate. Not desirable, but somehow par for the course.

Michael in the cafe at Arcosanti

FOR TWO DAYS I stayed in our room recovering, coming out only occasionally to look at the desert. It was desert like an ocean, flat and calm, but radiating with heat in visible waves.

Arcosanti is an urban experiment, an ecological design solution to the climate of the high desert. The product of Italian-born architect Paolo Soleri, who studied under Frank Lloyd Wright for a time, the place attracts thousands of tourists every year, for tours and for construction workshops.

The guest housing unit overlooks the ravine and the desert, and above it is a swimming pool. The buildings are stark and white as a Greek village, and designed to provide maximum shelter from sunlight. Scattered around are several massive arcs and asps (quarter-spheres) made of cement etched and colored in bright patterns. These structures take advantage of the low winter sun, and provide shelter in summer, when the sun is high and hot. Some are work areas where apprentices make Paolo Soleri's famous bells, the sale of which is the primary source of income for the city. One asp is dedicated to ceramic bells, and another houses a foundry where bronze bells are poured into molds.

Cindy and Carla in the ceramic bell asp

Making the ceramic bells was Cindy, a strong, dark haired woman of about 19, wearing clay-spattered cutoff khakis. I asked her to tell me about what she was doing and she explained, shyly, as she poured the slip (thin mud, it looked like to me) into molds. After a few days, she told me, the thin stuff gathers in the middle, and the thick stuff sticks to the inside of the mold. Then she pulls the liquid out with a ladle or a turkey baster, then sets them out to dry in the sun. When the clay shrinks away from the mold, she pulls the mold in two. The bell is still soft, and ready to be carved with a design.

The city houses a cast of characters, many of whom are involved in the city itself in some way or another. They work in construction, cabinetry, landscaping. They work as artists, in management, in tourism, in workshops. Some residents, though, work outside the city, using computers to telecommute.

Michael and I met some of the residents in the communal cafeteria and cafe, where many of them take all their meals. From its windows and balcony there is a stunning view of the desert.

During lunch one day I was trying to ask the manager of the shop about tools to fix my bike when "The Detonator" came in and rushed to our table.

"Did you hear the explosions?" he asked.

His blue eyes were shocking enough under his mass of jet-black hair even without the flash of insanity that came into them when he talked about explosives.

"We only blew up one section, because we ran out of sandbags. We didn't have enough sandbags to finish -- you know, you need them to weigh down the explosives."

"Are you going to be here tomorrow?" he asked me. "Because you can watch tomorrow, if you're around."

He saw a friend on the balcony outside and rushed off. "Did you hear the explosions?" I heard him say.

AFTER LUNCH MICHAEL AND I went to the shop to fix my trunk. It was a matter of finding a bolt and nut large enough to hold the tire on. Then, since it would be impossible to find exactly the same size bolt, I'd have to make a cap that would replace the metal cap that secured the tire. I figured a piece of wood would do, so I cut one about the same shape, and drilled a hole through the middle, securing it with another nut. It worked just fine.

While I was in maintenance mode I adjusted the valves, too. They were only a little off, and the carbs seemed to be adjusted fine, despite the fact that I gained so much altitude.

That done, it was time to relax. I was strong enough now to take a walk, so Michael and I headed out toward the desert. We made it as far as the pool, where we sat in the shade of a little stone house and just looked at each other.

It was reality check time. Having a cyberspace email romance hadn't really prepared us for each other's physical presence again. It was almost Victorian, and yet the very epitome of modern life. However it came about, we were there together, finally. Michael sat on a wall of gray stone beside me, the sky behind him. His eyes were blue and gray and his hair moved across his face in the warm desert breeze.

I decided I liked him in person, too, as we sat there and talked, looking over the desert and this strange, beautiful city. He'd been great the last couple of days, bringing me food and vitamins and staying upbeat through what could have been a disappointing and depressing time.

Meeting him there, though, I felt very close to the end of my trip. Sometimes I've felt very ready to end it. Other times I've wanted another month or two to continue exploring. At the moment, I was longing to explore the American Southwest, to go up into Colorado, to explore New Mexico.

Another trip, I thought. After all, these places are fairly close to home.

In only a few days I'd be in California again, visiting Los Angeles, one of my few big city stops. From there it'd be an eleven-hour drive to Santa Cruz along the coast on Highway 1, and my circle would be complete.