Up and Down America

Friday, July 26 - New Mexico

I'm a flatlander. I don't apologize for that. Flattened lands, terrain without contours, a country with distant horizons, this is my comfort zone. I don't understand mountains.

I've been through the Appalachians a few times in my life. When I was a kid my family would drive east to visit relatives most summers, but those are friendly mountains. They ease you up into their heights with the rolling hills at their feet and give your ears a chance to slowly adapt to the lighter air pressure. They cover their naked elevation with a coy draping of trees. As you climb them, there is greenery and the hint of active fauna to make a human-friendly environment. They're not flat, but at least the eastern mountains don't throw their looming altitudes in your face.

These western mountains, however, seem to pop up out of nowhere. This struck me as I drove east out of El Paso and saw wide gray mountain ranges fade in all along the horizon. No sooner had they appeared, still 20 miles in the distance, but they raised the arc of the horizon at least 15 degrees higher. Soon clumps of smaller mountains rolled into view to the left or right, rocky and steep, but clearly inferior to the growing mountains ahead.

The ground level itself rose only slightly, judging from the occasional pop in my ears, before these great jagged walls came into full view. Road signs eventually named the Guadalupe Mountains. Their jagged rise and treeless slopes and scattering of boulders about tell a story of violent tectonics below, eons ago, convulsing the earth and giving birth to these giants. I drove into them wide eyed and dumbstruck by the steep faces and vestigial rockslides still gathered at their feet.

These are monsters made of rocks, surrounded by dramatic vistas and dangerous avalanche zones. They have a scattering of shrubs and desert plants on them, in spots, but not the full beards of green you see back east. These are adolescent mountains, patchy in their foliage, still awkward, and prone to tantrums. And yet to us, they are like gods. My car brought them onto me faster than the first humans could fathom, but even that advance of human mobility couldn't tame the awe the Guadalupes command.

Cars, like most technologies, try to make us love God less. But the Guadalupes mock technology. You can't help but approach and enter those mountains and not fall silent at nature's might. Paved roads that slice through the deserts have to bend to accommodate mountains of this rise and girth. Wending between two rocky clusters of sharp mountains, my eyes darted up left then up right toward the tops of the spires. I couldn't not look.

Circumnavigating the first peaks, a new clutch of mountains appeared around the bend. I was in a valley of giants, my mouth agape like a suckling infant. I felt small, but safe between the spiring rocks. The things that worry me didn't matter up here. Drunk drivers, angry strangers, shrinking bank accounts, and temperamental artists don't matter. Threatening bosses, rising insurance payments, self destructive friends tumbling drunk off balconies, capricious utility companies, manipulative politicians, and the slow creep of environmental destruction all lost their grip on my shoulders and fell away.

These mountains will endure the loss of all we know. The weight of being in debt, of being powerless, of not being good enough all fell away. Human things didn't matter in the high mountain air. We're just here while we're here and then we're gone. Only these rocks abide. The scope of the mountains shrunk my worries and fed me and made the world safe for one afternoon, even as I flew on black rubber through the falling rocks zone. The mountain air lightened all worrisome things and lifted them into the clouds. I cried at the sense of relief in these mountains and then laughed at how silly it was to cry about mountains.

But there's something bigger than human cares up there. For a second I felt it.

Beyond the Guadalupe Mountains the road persists into Carlsbad. I didn't have to use my turn signal once. Unlikely as it sounds, it's all just one street from the Coral Motel to the tourist traps outside the Carlsbad Caverns.

The natural entry into the caverns is a looping, dropping path down into the earth. On a hot day, the cool of the cave radiates off the dank walls as your feet tack you downward into the planet. Park rangers warn tourists about bats and not touching the stalagmites. But today there were only song birds chirping wildly and fluttering in and out of the cave's mouth. There were a hundred birds from several different species, each physically small—either because deserts keep their residents small or because the mouth of the cave was so large.

The park rangers do not warn guests about heavy scent of guano—bat poop—rising out the throat of the cave on the warm air of human tourists. For forty five minutes, you just walk down and down more, weaving like a doodle, into the dark cool. Eyes adjust as the indirect light above dissipates behind you. The occasional electric spotlight casts reliefs onto walls and triangular shadows onto the ceiling of the cave.



A sign along the path warns hikers not to touch anything off the pathway, not to make too much noise, not to drop trash that will stench up the cave pools or attract vermin. In other words, don't be too human. You are but eyes here, and you are ears to the quiet, if you can get away from others on the trail, and you are body heat that the rooms of the cave will push out to keep the balance. But you are nothing else.

Another sign further down makes it clear. Do not enter the deep paths in the cavern after 4:30pm. Do not remain anywhere in the caves after 5:30. They do not mention the government's secret treaty with the Mole People that allows them to carry off whoever they find after 6pm. But it is implied. This is not where you belong. Stay on the narrow path. Do not tire down here. We are not responsible for you.



Perhaps I've read too many pulp stories to be impressed by dungeony underground lairs. Bodies of stalagmites and collapsed boulders carry impressive names. The Dolls' Theatre, Iceberg Rock, the Whale's Mouth, the Twin Domes, the Hall of the Giants. I couldn't help but notice the obvious omission. The domes and minarets of mineral formations all have a distinctly phallic appearance. Perhaps God's great claw carved out these cathedrals and throne rooms from the Earth for us to explore. But before the apes shed their hair, naughty rock appendages rose out of the cavern floors and flagged down from the moist, spent ceilings. These are the halls of the penises. This is not Plutopolis; it is Priapusville.

For a change of pace, a giant nipple

Eight hundred feet down human commerce stops. It took me almost an hour to cover the length of less than two and a half football fields. At times I had to walk backwards, like an acrophobe, just to shift the pressure off my ankles and onto my calves, both of which had an easy time of it. Another hour of milling about at the lowest, and most impressive, levels and I was overnourished on nature's beauty. I had a bus to catch back in El Paso. There's an elevator now that comes down to the 800 foot level—where Eisenhower and Krogthurgnert signed the secret treaty they don't tell you about. I gladly hopped on and shot back up to the human world. I bought a commemorative shot glass at the gift shop and drove away.