Time Traveling: Home to Arizona

A hundred miles an hour, towels pinched between searing grey metal and tinted black windows. Air conditioning 66, air temp 110, the white sky a ball of flames we’d do anything to avoid. Elmo on the portable movie player for the baby. My PlayStation 2 on the cigarette lighter. Madden football in the third row of the rental Ford Flex. Cheetos, Dr. Pepper, ham sandwich. Our own small world flying down Interstate 8. Lead foot, gospel music, V6, hallelujah. Four hours to go. We’re heading to Phoenix. 

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This was my childhood, the part where control was never mine, where life was a blur, where what happened happened, no matter if I liked it or not. It was every weekend my dad had custody. It was a fast afternoon blast through the desert oven, with grey streaks of sand and heat only feet from my head and lost forever. It was the desert condensed into a speedbump. It was the interstate and that one Love’s gas station in Gila Bend, population 450, one UFO-themed restaurant, one 9/11 memorial. The desert was a chore, the blank space between two families. Get it over with. Rip the band-aid, cabrõn; it’s gonna hurt. 

And so the desert was always that. The 400-mile drive from San Diego to Phoenix was a rhythm my sister and I would fall into, still in the powerless phase of life. We would see family and play games, swim in the pool, and be kids. Sunday night, Dad would shovel our listless, sleeping bodies back into the car, and he would put the gospel music back on, and drive the five hours back home, and the entire desert would pass in a quick dream. The days when we’d wake up the next morning and time travel would be true. 

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But we are past all of that now. I can go as I please. I have the agency and a heavy bike and a tent. Time travel means something completely different now. Because I have seen that traveling slowly is the way to learn about your surroundings truly and intimately. Every hill and town and change in the story of the land. And so now, with the holidays looming and family gatherings yet again down that boring interstate, I could point this steel sword of truth at my past and simply ask myself, “What’s really out there?”

And I could grab this brute of a bicycle and leave my keys by the front door and head out to answer that simple question. 

On the Bikes

The lore of the American Southwest is endless. The buttes, the sunsets, the red rocks, and the pastel color palettes. Logic might dictate that the furthest south and west you can travel in the US would be the heart of that bootstraps, cowboy mentality. San Diego, population three million, is the most biodiverse county in the US. And as we ride from the coast to the mountains, through oak tree orchards and pines, along veins of granite and quartz, the coastal fog laps at our backs. We head east through trails and canyons and bivvy in bushes next to roads under houses. The natural world and the human world mix like palm leaves in trash cans. The houses grow thinner and the people more country. The hills turn to mountains, and we stare them down. San Diego, as an outdoor destination, has always been undervalued. It never fails to impress me. I feel a kindred respect for my home as we leave it once more. 

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The world is calm as we ride in the punctuated shadow of the border wall, a morse code of tragedy, shadows dashing our faces and punching at our eyes. We ride in the shade of the wall, on the graded dirt road that pays no attention to steepness. An unlimited budget road, through anything, just over the next hill, whatever it takes. We push our bikes together as our feet slide in the soft granite. It is quiet on the border today, three days post-election. A few dusty backpacks, old shoes, torn-up papers from Georgia, maybe Russia. We are leaving San Diego the ugliest way possible: in the gut of its politics. 

To the north, I see the interstate we drove as kids. Cars and stories and insignificant humanity in the distance, tiny dots with infinite worries driving fast with something on the radio. A stone’s throw from my home, we are already just drifters in the desert with three gallons of water and a pannier of beans. Border patrol checks on us hourly. We recite our story each time. “We’re riding to Arizona,” we say. They all recoil, like we’re rattlesnakes in the shade. To Arizona? On bicycles?

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We trip a sensor. Officer Ramirez races over the hill and almost runs us over. Fast truck, big dust, spotlights, disc brakes. Intimidation tactics. She rolls down her electric window, and the air conditioning wheezes out into the warm mid-day sun. She checks us out. We pull out our white privilege. “We got a reading for a couple bodies out on this road. Is that you guys?” Shocked, I ask, “You call the migrants bodies?” Unimpressed, she says, “Yeah. Did you see any?”

Together, we push on. My girlfriend Bo and my best friend Ben. It’s heavy riding next to such an ugly scar of humanity, knowing the pain and suffering it has caused, knowing how many people have died here, and all the better things this money and resources could have gone to. But admittedly, the riding is good. The road is steep and straight, the surface is smooth and quiet. We ride over the pass. We drop into the desert, the old beige smudge I know from passing by. 

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An old train track is our rough guide down to our new life. Deathly drops and old creaking wooden slats, our tires skipping on the metal grates. Adrenaline for breakfast, tortillas and beans for lunch. Our bodies change fast. Chapped lips and sunburnt ears, a dry throat, dust-covered legs. It’s winter, and the light is strong but sparse. We rise early, we stop early, we lie for hours in the dark and watch the meteor showers streak overhead. Slowly, we enjoy the quiet world we pass gently through.

Unlike the jungles of East Africa, where life fights and claws over itself, here in the desert, everything is subdued in the blinding, relentless sun. Life is individual. A desert cactus has room around it to be seen uniquely. Strong and detailed, the desert plant life is a world in itself. Each cactus is a lesson in defiance and resilience. The slower we go, and the closer we look, the more beautiful it all becomes. 

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Dust coughing in the rollers of my chain, the saggy unit grinding into my rusty cogs, my left crank bent out of true, wobbling my wobbly legs. The bags creak when the bars turn, and the bars turn when the sand gets deeper. Crawling sometimes. Jets streak overhead and drop bombs for “practice” that pulverize the ground and rattle the bedrock beneath. Desert tortoise population. American military priority. 

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Together, we ride on. An unhurried, almost lazy pace. Plenty of time for looking. The bikes are loaded heavily with water and food, but my 120-pound fat bike also smooths out the chatter of the washboard roads. We ride in washes, through slot canyons, trudge the dark mud canyons, ride over sand dunes, and lie in the stringy shade of the scraggly palo verde as the sun crests midday, wondering how it’s already there so soon. This part of the desert, the part I was brought up skipping, strikes me as remarkably diverse this time. The plant life changes every day, bending to the will of water, the master of every desert. The rocks and grit and streaks of color evolve every hour. The tectonic plates snapped off and now shoot straight out of the soft layered sand, and the soft canyon walls wave like fish. It is my childhood backyard. And these are some of the most beautiful landscapes I have ever seen. 

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These mountains, all these wilderness areas we ride along the edges of, Chuckwalla and Orocopia and the Chocolate Mountains, the Coyote and Palo Verde Mountains, from afar and especially at a hundred miles an hour, they all look so dead. Smears of brown—there is nothing there but sand. But as we ride, and the fragile spiny plants with the small orange flowers morph and change and dance and wiggle, and the next mountains get closer and show more than just sand, it becomes obvious this place is full of life. Scorpions, snakes, tarantulas, foxes, and badgers. Deer, tortoise, hawks, eagles, and buzzards. Cholla, agave, palms, buckwheat. Barrel cacti mark the hills like commas, and the ocotillo wave in the wind like exclamation marks. We ride slowly, seeing it all, and the story the landscape tells us changes with every day. 

Ben, on night 14, cowboy camping under the stars, the ocotillo and the mountains, writes our verbs down in his journal. “Riding, looking, stopping, looking, chatting, snacking, munching, cooking, grubbing, marveling, appreciating, enjoying, loving, listening, laughing, discussing, debating, disagreeing, apologizing, learning, wondering, asking, star-gazing, moon-gazing, shooting star-gazing, cloudspotting, photographing, drinking, shouting, reading, rolling, smoking, gathering, burning, exploring, unplugging, sleeping, snoozing, sharing, going, gabbing, spelunking, pedaling, farting, meditating, identifying, birding….”

Our rhythm grows deeper, and time drifts by, a whisper of wind in the sand storms of life. We have weeks to just pedal our bikes and look around and be peaceful. We are lucky to do this, to have bikes and health and each other and these places. We pass through. We leave nothing behind. We grow grateful. 

As the deathly glow of the city grows brighter, it feels so at odds with our experience removed from it. The American Southwest is the fastest-growing part of the country. Phoenix and Salt Lake City are the fastest-growing places, now booming megacities, even without adequate water resources and with an increasingly unlivable climate. The desert is being consumed and paved over, and millions of us will live within air-conditioned bubbles, detached from the natural world suffering just outside. The saguaros are dying from heat exhaustion. The rivers are choked and wheezing. Habitats and people are segregated by border walls. Off-road buggies leave clouds of dust you can see from space. Today, you can cross an entire desert without a drop of sweat or a grain of sand on your skin. And it’s considered acceptable to shoot cans of propane and leave it all to rust. Because in a wasteland world devoid of life, there is no trash. And in a world made for human consumption, it is our American right to go and consume it.

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We’ve lost our connection to the soul of the desert. Without air-conditioning units pumping fake air into asphalted neighborhoods and megahomes, we would never all be living here. We would understand you need folds of skin to scuttle away precious water and ribs of thorns to protect it. This land is hostile, but it’s also incredibly fragile. And if we all understood this, we would protect it better. Less shooting, fewer dune buggies, less consumption, less warming and drought and industrial farming. Fewer gunshells and rotting targets and dirt bike tracks. Fewer fighter jets and artillery and bombing runs. Bikepacking has taught me to live more simply. And collectively, we must all live more simply if we want the world around us to survive. 

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Three weeks later, we cross the Colorado River. To me, Arizona looks different now that we have a better understanding of its context. As we get to Phoenix and I walk the suburban backstreets of my childhood weekends, a place I used to find drab and depressing, I see the saguaro and the cholla clinging to the rocky hillsides. I see how the wren digs into the hard flesh of the cactus and how the ocotillo spines grow thicker. It is too early to flower, but the buds are loaded. I tell my family what plants can be used for medicine and which animals roost where. I see how the basalt rock flows heavier. The air smells wet from the nearby golf courses, and pigeons crowd out the mourning doves in the backyard bird feeder. 

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I see the desert imprinted on my body in my tan lines and scabbed toes, my chapped lips, and burnt nose, and I know that I am alive and a part of this place. I am present, indelibly and completely subjected to the world as I pedal my heavy, brainless bicycle. To my family, 20 years later with a ponytail and a camera, they can tell I’m different. When I show up on my bicycle, I signal this shift. Bikepacking has changed me. Travel, the natural world, a close proximity to death and a new appreciation for life have all left their deep imprints on me and my politics.

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I no longer dream of an easy life and time traveling around, of fast cars and cool clothes. I dream of the hard way, of a heavy bike and sandy washes with funky cacti and quiet wild camping. I dream of spending my time intently with people I love in bizarre and beautiful places that make me think. And now I feel a new sensation for Phoenix, and for Arizona, and for the desert as a whole. I feel it as we ride. I feel it now as I write. Some would call it love.

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