A walk on the moon

If you thought the transition from Texas to New Mexico was drastic, it was nothing compared to the one between New Mexico and Colorado. After leaving Santa Fe, I drove for a few hours and watched the landscape turn from open desert scrub to steep rock faces that closed onto the curvy highway. Then we rounded a turn and a valley lay before us and somewhere down there lay Taos, sparkling like mica in the sun. We stopped in the old adobe village for lunch and I talked to the couple dining beside me, who told me that it had become crowded and full of tourists but that when they moved north of the city in the late 1960s, you could ride a horse into town. Then we drove across a steel bridge and looked over the gorge that was carved into the earth and we were in that valley, crossing it in a matter of hours to arrive in green Colorado, where we drove across another valley and watched rain bear down on us, coming across that flat land as a mix of water and dust. And then, we reached the greatest conundrum I have ever seen: a huge pile of sand in the middle of a lush, green expanse of land. The Great Sand Dunes National Park.

We climbed them, the wind pelting coarse grains at our faces and making tears stream out from our eyes, and I felt the sun grow hotter and hotter on my skin as I hiked ever closer to it, and it seemed like we were in a crazy dream, Rennie and I. The end of the earth. The beginning of time. The middle of nowhere. And after all that, we climbed back in Marco and I rolled the windows down and we drove straight across more valley, past a compound that boasted of summoning UFOs and then huge clusters of trailers and enormous empty plots of private land, and the air grew cooler and cooler and cooler, and the light stretched out and out and out, once high in the sky, then hiding behind the clouds until it was just an orange, glowing thing the crept down on the other side of the mountains that were in front of us, which we crossed, before settling into a motel room for the night, the first bed I had slept in since leaving Mexico.