The Sheila Variations

Moab Memories

Dooce is in Moab right now with a bunch of her girlfriends, having what appears to be a riotous time.

I saw the photograph on her site of that slick red rock and remembered my time in Moab, but it was long ago, on my trip cross-country (early 1990s). And so the memories came in flashes, like snapshots, flash-cards ... I don't have the connecting links, just the images.

-- I actually mountain-biked on that slick red rock. Moab is famous for the slick-rock (check out the photos here - that's the "Slick Rock Trail"), and mountain-bike freaks from 'round the world consider Moab a MUST on any of their "let me go ride my bike through crazy terrain" tours. My boyfriend at the time was one of those people, so he took off on his mountain-bike. I, to put it mildly, was not in his league. I was not in anyone's league in terms of bike-riding. I just like to, you know, ride my bike and stuff. Riding a mountain bike through that slick-rock red terrain, it's like a smoothed-out moonstone, like a Martian landscape ... is an experience and a half. It's scary. I couldn't even begin to do what I saw the other bikers do. I was the Special Olympics version. But once you get the hang of it, and "let go" (metaphorically, I mean) - it's a BLAST. Within half an hour, I got used to the dips and bumps and smoothness (that's a kind way of saying: slippery as hell. They don't call it slick rock for nothing). I wiped out a couple times. I lost control of the bike, and went flying. But I got up, and kept going. I was no longer embarrassed that I wasn't zipping about like the mountain-bike freaks surrounding me in a frenzied manic blur, pedaling up, down, zip, kerplam, zoom, whoosh ... I was self-conscious for about 5 minutes about how slow I was going, etc., but finally - I LET GO of all of that. And surrendered to the red-moonstone slick-rock, and truly. There is no better terrain for mountain bikes. It was exhilarating.

-- We splurged and stayed in a RATTY motel - as opposed to our camper van. I remember shivering in the air-conditioning, curled up under a worn-thin blanket on the bed. I did other "indoor" things, reveling in them because we had been on the road for two months: I took a shower with hot water, I ordered take-out food, we bought a six-pack, we watched television. Rapturously. We hadn't seen television in months. I watched an hour of Looney Tunes, drinking my beer, shivering in the air-conditioning. My muscles aching from my mountain-biking extravaganza of that afternoon.

-- We kept running into the SAME PEOPLE across the country, on the camping National Park circuit. We'd pull into some random campsite, get out of the van, stretch, look around, and immediately see someone we had met two states back. A funny community of people. We ran into a bunch of people we met in Moab, mountain-bike freaks all of them.

-- But mostly I remember the heat, and how the sun seemed to bake the landscape into a frozen smooth expanse of redness. I am from the East Coast, and so when it's hot in MY hometown, it's also sticky and humid. The heat in Moab was dry, pristine. As I careened over the slick-rock on my bike, bandana wrapped around my head, I could feel my own sweat - on my forehead, on my back. But without the humidity, the experience of sweating is COMPLETELY different. On the East Coast, when you're sweating and it's humid, you feel like a fat disgusting pig. You are hopeless. You are a sticky hopeless mess. But sweating in Moab? Ahhh. It's clean. It's healthy. The heat, the sun, the blinding red rocks ... it was like I had landed on another planet.

-- And beer tastes much better ... when you've spent the day pedaling your mountain bike through a weird red world in the blinding sun ... and you finally get to have a HOT SHOWER, and you turn on the TV, and your hair is wet and clean, you start to comb it, and you've been outside all day, and your muscles ache, but it's a clean ache, and you sit cross-legged on the thinned-out ratty blanket, sipping a cold beer, watching cartoons, laughing out loud at some of them, combing your clean clean hair ... In that circumstance? Beer is the BEST THING IN THE WORLD. Everything in that moment says: ahhhhhhh

That's what I think of when I think of Moab.

Posted by sheila