Potrerillo Creek to “The Funnel”
HERE COMES THE SUN
I savored the warm waking and morning. The miles passed quickly to the Brea Family summer farm. Upon our arrival, we asked for water, and were quickly invited to lunch: lamb meat, salad, and coca cola. There were parts of animals everywhere: innards drying on a wall, hides drying on the porch, a bloody lamb’s head in the back of the bed of a pickup (the carcass inside the cab), various animal preparations in the kitchen (heads, tongue, brains and all being cracked open like a nut). It was a surreal scene.
I greatly appreciated the meal, and found myself falling into anthropologist mode at the whole scene, indifferent and curious. I was offered candy and cookies from the little boys running around—I never even looked to see what it was, as the only thing I saw was that those little hands had just picked up a bloody lamb’s head that had been rolling around fermenting in the sun in the back of a pickup. I greatly appreciated having this experience, but my knowledge of germs had me keeping my distance.
We rested and were given a ride twenty kilometers down route. Even the ride was surreal, watching the landscape bounce and jiggle by with no effort from my body. It was an immensely enjoyable experience.
We were dropped off on an alternate to our route, in the heaviest wind we had had yet, late in the afternoon, far from any possibility of a camp. Thankfully it was a tailwind, and twenty-eight kilometers passed in just a couple of hours. We found a desperate camp, behind a short dirt wall in an arroyo, with big storm clouds on the horizon. I slept hard.
[Neon, in the video: “So, we just got dropped off here. In the middle of nowhere …and it’s got to be like a seventy mile an hour wind.”]
~Neon collecting water from the small stream of fresh water that runs through the pampas grass at Vega Agua Dulce.~
~Back at the bikes with the fresh water I’d carried down from Vega August Dulce.~
My body was tired; I could feel it wearing down. I thought I could squeeze out a few more kilometers, and so I tried, but really, things were shutting down and I knew it. You can only embrace so much exhaustion, so much cold, so much seeming rushing, before the body just stops abruptly. My joy was waning quickly. The wind was doing that afternoon thing where it starts to feel like it’s slapping you around just for fun. The day felt like it was stretching into eternity. My will was fading. My sciatic nerve was screaming at me. I screamed out to stop. For everything to stop. For the wind to stop. For Neon to stop. For the exhaustion to stop. For the chill in my bones to stop. My screams fell silent against the wind. I got off the bike and sat in the road, breaking into tears. A moment later I was riding again.
I pushed my bike up into “the funnel” to the edge of the black lava rocks, where neon was zapping his water with his Steripen. I said “this is a nice spot.” I sat down beside him and started messing with my gear. He said “maybe we should set up the tent tonight”? We both quickly agreed. It was warm inside the tent, out of the wind. We slept hard, and did not budge in the morning until the sun hit the tent, with my famous morning singing “here comes the sun … it’s alright …”
PS, if you click on the smaller images that are grouped together, you can view the full size photos.