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Rushing around... travel trauma... dust...
I woke up. I was feeling edgy but tired. I was feeling tired because I'd just woken up. I was feeling edgy because I wasn't 100% sure that I wasn't supposed to be getting ready for an airplane flight to El Paso. I was pretty sure that I wasn't flying out until tomorrow. I wasn't 100% sure. I checked the itinerary that America West Airlines had sent me. My flight was leaving on March 16, 1999 at 10:23. I relaxed.
I tensed. Today was the 16th. The day before, I'd gone grocery shopping to pick up snacks for this trip. Outside the grocery store, someone had asked me to sign a petition.
Too lazy to make up my own mind on whether or not to sign it, I had looked at the names of people who had signed. Up at the top of the page had been "Julie Soller"--the name of the woman who lived across the hall from me. Thus, I had decided to sign the petition.
The petition had required a date next to my signature. Too lazy to remember the date myself, I had again looked to previous signers of the petition. The person on the line above mine had written down 3/15. I wrote 3/15. That had been the day before. Therefore today was 3/16. Therefore my flight was leaving in two hours. I hadn't packed. I could just barely make it, but I was going to have to go flat-out.
Denial is always the first stage of working through any problem. I picked up my watch and checked the date. It said... it said that today was 3/15. My flight wasn't until the next day.
Obviously the person who'd signed the petition just before me had got the date wrong. I made a note that at some point I was going to have to start doing my own political thinking. The herd was obviously unreliable.
1999.03.16 TUE
The airplane ride had made sense. I understand airplane rides. Boarding a plane behind Japanese tourists on their way to Las Vegas, hearing them count off the seat row numbers niju, nijuichi; this made sense. The lady next to me putting her complimentary bag of raisins on my tray, then refusing to take them back; this did not force me to rethink how the universe worked. The flight delay in Las Vegas because Phoenix air traffic control wasn't used to rain; this could all be explained. The descent into El Paso, airplane shaking in the wind so that I gripped the armrests and whimpered; this all fit within the Newtonian paradigm. Calling up the airporter shuttle to Alamogordo to find out about their schedule--only to learn that the van had just pulled out; running outside; catching the van: all this had made sense.
While a certain aura of chaos had hung over everything, it was the chaos of travel, the sort of thing you take for granted. But something wasn't making sense. It was the sky. The sky was brown. It was, I claim, an angry brown. It was brown in El Paso (inspiring me towards Alamogordo days earlier than I'd planned). The van was well out of El Paso; the sky was still brown. This wasn't the orange of smog. This was the brown of dust. There was gritty dust in my teeth. There was dust in my hair. There must be dust in the air for a hundred km around.
I listened to the muttered conversation between two of my fellow van riders. One told the other, "This is why I can't take March around here. Every year, I try to spend as much time as I can away from here. My nose just can't take it. I was in Manhattan. Now here I am back and..." He helplessly gestured at the air around us.
This didn't make any sense. No-one had said anything about March being a time of dust storms. Yet the air was so saturated that I couldn't tell where the sun was. There were two weeks of March left. What had I signed myself up for? Was I really supposed to be a tourist in this kind of weather?
The Border Patrol stopped the van at a checkpoint, asked our driver if there were any trouble-makers aboard. The driver laughed and said no. The Patrolman waved us past. I made a mental note: if I'm ever an illegal immigrant, I'll do my best to travel by inter-city airport shuttle to avoid hassle.
The shuttle arrived in Alamogordo, pulled into a parking lot. I hopped out and walked a short ways down the highway to the nearest cheap motel (the Western Motel, if you're curious).
It was starting to get dark. The dust, no longer content to stay up in the sky, was swirling all over the place. I stumbled into the motel office, blinking, rubbing my eyes, looking up to the portrait of smiling Jesus Christ. Jesus was used to the desert and seemed amused at my distress. I considered knocking the smug fellow's picture over.
I was soon checked in, had dropped my bag in my room, and was walking North through the billowing dust in search of dinner.
A mile up White Sands Boulevard, I had dinner at Angelina's. Here, I relaxed a bit. The food (reported to be the best Italian food in Alamogordo by the Lonely Planet Guide to the Southwest USA) was filling but that isn't what relaxed me. A member of the staff wandered out of the kitchen to sing to the restaurant patrons and that's definitely not what relaxed me. Eavesdropping relaxed me.
Patrons were looking out the window, watching sheets of dust blow past. At more than one table, children pointed out the "rain" to their parents. The kids didn't recognize this as a dust storm. Obviously, this storm was not a common occurence. After all, we were in the desert, right? Rainstorms were rare, right? So if a local kid thought mistook the dust storm outside for a rainstorm, then dust storms must be rarer than rare, quod erat desideratum.
As I walked back to the motel, dust gusted past. Strands of my hair whipped about my face, blown free of their scrunchie. Ristras hung from a tent by the side of the road. Cars rumbled past, their headlights illuminating the dust. I was lost in thought, planning my schedule for the next couple of days--I'd originally planned to start my trip in El Paso, not Alamogordo. Lost in thought, I stumbled over something, barely kept my footing. I looked down. A tumbleweed was tangled in my legs. Tumbleweed. I was in the West.