Day #10: Williams To Las Vegas
I knew the next morning the ride back to Las Vegas was going to be flat and uninteresting. The short detour (spur) I took at Seligman, onto old Rt.#66, provided little in the way of anything new. After a week at life’s summit, a higher power was letting me down gently — to return to a world of greater relativity where all answers would appear obvious — and where the important questions would hide in my memory. The old stretch of Rt. #66 was a desperate attempt to hang onto what the 1950’s romanticized, and then lost. It stood as a carnival sideshow to what was happening in the big tent out on Rt.#40, which ran parallel to Rt. #66, just twenty miles to the south.
As I got back on #I40 at Kingman, the cutoff to Rt.#93 approached on my right. This was the road to Las Vegas, and it signaled that in less than 100 miles my current adventure would end. In an oxymoronic defiance of logic, the higher in elevation I got, the hotter it became. Las Vegas drew heat to itself in a big-bang tribute to all that was divergent in the human spirit. It tried to confuse with its ‘Light-Show’ what its true emptiness contained. Were it not for its great location, I would bypass it forever. The temperature was now 104,’ as I spotted the Joshua Tree Forest in the distant Northeast.
I passed through Boulder City in the severe mid-day heat and began looking for a gas stop with a do-it-yourself wash bay. I spotted one on the other side of the highway just past Hoover Dam and got off the interstate and made a left at the bottom of the ramp. In thirty more seconds, I was parked at the ‘Ultra-Wash’ in the second bay from the left. I needed to get the ‘road-dirt’ off the bike before turning it in, hoping, that as I did, no precious memories would wash away. I loaded the automated machine with quarters and watched ten days of well-earned highway patina flow into the drain.
The Dirt Was Gone, The Bill Was Paid, But The Memories Remain
It took only fifteen minutes to wash the bike and fill it up with gas. In twenty more, I had circled the beltway around Las Vegas on Rt.#I15 North and was back at the bike rental agency. It was after four in the afternoon as Stefan opened the big overhead door, and I pulled the Goldwing inside. They closed for the day at six, which had given me plenty of time to get back. It took less than a half hour to unpack the bike, change out of my riding gear in the agency washroom, and call a cab to take me to McCarran Airport.
The Goldwing looked sad, among the other bikes, where it would wait for another out of town rider to again set it free. I understood the feeling but could not share in its mourning — I had a flight to catch. My separation anxiety was growing intense, and I had to leave, and leave quickly, before it got any worse.
As I walked out to my arriving cab, Stefan said to me in his best Austrian accent: “Wow, you averaged almost 500 miles a day. Most people only do half of that.” I smiled back, acknowledging what he said, while I reminded myself again that it was never about the mileage … only the miles!
The cab driver who picked me up at the bike rental agency was a pleasant surprise. His name was Ari. He was an Israeli, a romantic traveler, and he had been living in Las Vegas for over twenty-two years. He was divorced with one son and had lived through all the changes that Las Vegas had been through during that time. He, like myself, was nostalgic for what once was here — and would never be again.
When I told him where I was from, he became very animated and said: “I just returned from a road-trip back East.” He said it was his first trip to the eastern part of the U.S., and it totally changed him. He made it as far as Easton Pennsylvania, which was only ninety minutes north of where I lived in suburban Philadelphia. He told me that some of his boyhood friends lived in Easton, and that their homes were right along the banks of the great Delaware River. They had rafted and tubed the river the whole week he was there, and he told me that he still couldn’t get over the rolling hills and dense forests that lined both sides of its banks.
Majestic in its own right — the Delaware River paled in comparison to the things I had seen. That being said, Ari felt about the East the way I had always thought of the West. Amazing that a realization of contrasts, and a coming together of two spirits, could have happened in the span of a twenty-minute cab ride. Time really was a slave to importance when all respect for it was gone.
Ari told me he saw things along the Delaware that were beyond his belief. With the passion of his words, he reconnected the spiritual bond between what I had left 10 days ago and what I was taking home with me today. As I thanked him, and got out of the cab, I reminded him that within three hours of Las Vegas there were things to see that would change his life again and not conflict at all with what he had seen in the East. He thanked me, as I paid him, and said that he did have a trip planned to the Grand Canyon for late September and then on to 4-Corners and Durango Colorado. The return trip to Vegas would be through Monument Valley and Northern Arizona, passing through both Bryce Canyon and Zion National Park, before heading back south on Interstate #15.
I told him to stop in at the San Juan Café, when in Monument Valley, and say hi to Sam. Tell him I continued to keep him in my daily Rosary and thought of him often. The smell of his frybread, and the wisdom of his eyes, occupied a permanent place inside me. Ari helped me get my bags to the curb, as he wished me a safe trip on returning home.
His words “returning home,” weighed heavy on me, as I exited the cab and gave my bags to the skycap. They stayed heavy inside me, as I went through security and proceeded to my gate. When I dropped my helmet and carryon, and sat down inside gate #15, I started to wonder … what did “returning home,” after all these years of travel, really mean?
‘Returning home’ no longer seemed related to any one place. It was more about the spaces inside of me that had increased in size. ‘Returning home’ allowed me to clearly go back inside myself and see what had always been covered in fog. Upon reflection, the trip out and the trip back were interdependent realizations of the same thing. Neither existed without the other — they were two halves of the same whole.
‘The Road Back’ Always Delivered Best What ‘The Road Out’
Searched For Longest
Whenever I tried to live my life in either one direction or the other, I was reminded by their connected wisdom that to see clearly, I had to be the product of both.
Going Out, Coming Back
Becoming What Was Meant To Be
Traveling Far — Returning home
Together In The Lessons Learned
The places I left, and the ones I was headed toward, took me far beyond the contradiction’s that had kept me prisoner. As they opened a new awareness inside of me, I saw things that had happened in the past, and things still to come — all in the perpetual present. Where I had been blind to parts of myself distant and unconnected, there was a new image that I had been unable to believe in before.
They opened inside of me unlimited possibility and the realization that I would never be alone. As I rode along their great mystery, I no longer felt separated from all that I had been before or from that which I would forever become.
I was transformed in their eternal presence, while they appeared to others who traveled only on their surface, as just — A Road.
Epilogue
At night, I would lie in bed and think about the path that led through the woods behind my house. Little did I know, the dirt trail through the oaks and pines, and then to the creek beyond, would become much more than it first appeared.
It opened up much more than a young boy’s access to the creeks and ponds. It created an awareness that is still being shaped today. In its many forms and variations, it became the guiding light of my delivery, and through all the years, and all the miles, remained steadfast in its calling. In the messages hidden within its direction, it gave me back to myself, and on days when I wasn’t sure of which way to go … I just went.
‘The Road’ was that one last place that never abandoned me. At the worst of times, I packed up the bike and headed out in search of answers. Finally, at the end of a long and lonely road, where two directions turned into one, I found what I had lost.
‘The Road’ has always been there for me … waiting. Waiting to take me one more place and one more place again. It’s allowed me to see the very thing that made all the rest of it possible, as it reopened a new and special place inside of me —never visible before.
‘The Road’ never threatened with either timetable or denied access. It is, as it has always been, as it was in the beginning, and will forever be.
Pray God, Let Me Go Down One More ‘Road’
Kurt Philip Behm
August 28th, 2011