Alibates

I yawn and gap and stretch, the old aluminized rescue blanket, almost pointless now, crumpled down around the feet of my light summer bag. The sun is peeking over the edge of my hammock, which is strung up underneath a picnic shelter at the Sanford-Yake campground in Lake Meredith National Recreation Area. It wasn't the closest campground to my destination today, but it was the only one with showers. I sigh, deeply, remembering the hot water last night: watching grit run off my lower legs, wringing out my riding bib again and again, turning around a countless number of times to stab the button just to get another fifteen seconds of water. It was a rare comfort to get a shower two days in a row--first at Chris' house in Pampa, and now here. I had slept deeply after watching the sunset (it still rang of the same notes as Foss Lake, a gorgeous western smear of reds and oranges dropping slowly into the opposite shore, lighting the low surface of the water with a hot crimson). In the soft twilight, I had ridden my bicycle to the rangers' information sign to plan my morning. I saw a jackrabbit and a roadrunner. I reveled in the lightness of my bicycle. I made a plan for ten the next morning, the time of the ranger tour at Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument, a plan to see something new and unheard of.
And here's the sun, ready for a day of adventure and new experiences. I'm just trapped over the horizon and waiting to find them.
It's nine am.
Panic quickly grips my guts. I thrash viciously at my sleeping bag and tear at the zipper and half-fall out onto the ground. The sun had betrayed me. I spin around and there's all the detritus of my life spread out on the table, the bench, the bike, strung up under the shelter, hanging to dry. Essentially everything I own is out of place and Google assures me I'm fifteen miles from the National Monument. Even if I leave immediately, I have to maintain my fastest average speed (with an unloaded bicycle) just to have a shot at arriving on time, and I'll be making the ride with a full load and no breakfast. So I shut my brain off and package my disappointment to deal with later.
The hammock I strip down into its stuff sack faster than I have ever packed it. I peel open a granola bar and leave it half hanging from my mouth between bites so I can use my hands more efficiently. I strip and slide into my riding bib there on the open plateau, kick into my riding shoes, and shovel everything into my panniers. Even in my haste, I'm true to my programming and everything ends in the bag it lived in. I jog a quick circle around my campsite, and, seeing nothing, I kick off.
My pell-mell pedal back to Fritch is in the metaphorical dark. I don't have cell service here, so I have to remember the turns from yesterday and replicate them in reverse. I hesitate a few times to pull out the phone and catch my breath on the way to the corner of Eagle Boulevard and the 136. It's time for a treacherous phone call.

"Hello, this is Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument. How can I help you?"
"Hey, I read the ranger tour of the quarries starts at ten?"
"That's right."
"Ok, I'm wondering when they usually leave?"
"Ten."
"Right, but I'm on a bicycle and about ten miles away, and I don't know if I can get there by ten?" I'm begging without being explicit that they will postpone somehow for me, or give me some good news, or let me off the hook, or--I don't know--offer to pick me up at the road in a truck.
"Do your best. I hope you get here in time."
"Are you--okay. Thanks for the information."

That was it. I hang up, and a cold, hard anxiety settles in my guts. At this point, November fourth, Thanksgiving is three weeks away. I have 1,100 miles, or so, until I got to Philip's house. Do the math with me. That's fifty five miles a day without breaks and, let's be honest, I'm not known for straight lines or efficient routes. I'll inevitably add miles to my trip. If I miss the tour today, there's honestly no way I can add another day and still make it to Philip's in time for the holiday. I'm still ragged-breath shaking from flying down the five mile gravel track, and I snap my shoes in before I truly catch my breath. I'm going to try.
I fly down the road. I'm pedaling as hard as I can maintain, building a constant rush in my ears of the wind whipping past and my building heart rate. I know that for all my effort, I'm probably only maintaining a mile or two per hour more than normal. Every time a pickup passes me, I consider flagging them down to ask for a lift, just to the turn, no more. There's one in the parking lot, should I? Here's one turning onto the road, would they? And yet I pedal on. I have grim determination. I start to soak through my headband, even in the wind. I have to at least try.
I finally arrive at the turn from 136. There's the sign, the long road, and maybe I'm not too late. It's only half past, after all. I just need to arrive. I spin down a little, catching my breath on a long downhill, building strength for a long slope ahead. I grind my teeth, I grind the gravel, I grind my pessimism. I must try to make it in time. This trip is all about seeing things, directing my path however I want, making decisions for me alone. I'm here to accomplish, not to be turned away at the gate. And yet, at the top of the hill, there's just more road. Right turn. Long left-hand sweep. Past a small farm road. Another sign. Down a hill to the only building for miles, and into the empty parking lot.
No--not empty. I arrive, a squeal of tortured brakes, and the wind settles around me. A man wearing ranger khakis is leaning against the side of a big ten-passenger van. He leans toward me, pushes off, and just loud enough to be heard, he says "You're the biker who called?"
"That's me. You all back yet?"
It's 10:50.
"You're the first person who's shown up all day."
"Oh." It was worth trying, suddenly, and I'm shaking a little from the exertion. I can't manage much more than a clean sigh and a slow push towards the bathroom.
"You take your time. Get a drink, cool down. We'll go when you're ready."
"Are you sure?"
"Sure, I'm sure."

I filled up my bottles, listened to the ranger explain hunting restrictions to a man in woodsman orange, and watched an interpretive video about flint napping. When I'm ready, the two interpretive staff walk with me me back out to the van. I get names. Bonnie's going to drive the van (I get the impression she's new, because she's asking questions about everything). George is the man who met me in the parking lot. His walking stick has medallions nailed to it for about a foot at the top, markers of a dozen places he's been. We come up to a gate with four locks attached to it.
"Oh, this is for the companies that were grandfathered in. Most times, you can't get mineral rights to a National Monument, and for good reason, but these folks were here long before we were formalized. Now they've got a claim out here, so they need to get in. Makes things a pain, though."
I spent about thirty or forty seconds trying to reverse-engineer the gate mechanism, which opened no matter which lock was removed, even with three others still attached. I couldn't quite make out what Bonnie was saying, so I scooted forward in the seat.
"How's that?"
"I said we weren't sure anyone was coming today. You're the first person who's shown up."
"Then I wasn't just lucky. I was double lucky."
"I suppose that's so." She laughs. She and George feel to be about fifty each. This is the job they're likely to have when they retire. I'm caught up in wondering how they came to this tiny nowhere to sit and wait for a single cyclist on a Friday morning. George points out the few turns for her to take, and soon we're at a tiny parking area.
"Time was people could just drive up here, but when things were turned into a Monument, the folks up the ladder decided they had better protect it a little more. We were losing an awful lot of rocks from the site."
"Oh. That's no good." I get the feeling that he isn't bluffing. Americans are notorious about taking souvenirs. We walk up a short path, climbing out of the valley and toward the flat plain above, stopping once or twice so George can explain how the natives dug for the flint because the top layers were weather-worn and had too many fractures from water infiltration, repeated freeze/thaw cycles that shattered the rock and made it unsuitable for knives or spearheads. Then he says something that starts to seem incredible.
"When these rocks break from Nature wearing them down, you'll see edges like this." He holds up a relatively round-looking rock. "But any time a human has been involved, uh . . ." he stoops down and picks up a rock right next to his shoe, "you'll see this sort of sharp edge, see? It's distinct." It is. I'm incredulous.
"Every time?"
"It requires force to get flint to snap like that, and the shear of freezing water doesn't act like that. Keep your eyes open, you're likely to see more.

The top layer of the earth up here is a thin topsoil, and below that, a thick, four-foot layer of flint. Below that, more soil and sandy rock that erodes away. The flat prairie on top of the valley is broken by warrens and rivulets made by water wearing away at the earth beneath the flint. And up here, there's a thick gravel underfoot. I'm starting to look with new eyes, and I'm feeling more and more ancient.
George passes a shallow depression in the earth. "Last stop," he says, "and then I'll let you have your own look around. This here is what the quarries look like. All you have to do is dig down to the flint layer that hasn't been exposed to winter weather and you start getting really good flint. You dig and dig, then pound it with something hard and you can pull out the pieces. Anything too small you just toss, but anything that starts to look right, you shape right here into a blank." He pulls a flatish palm-sized rock from his pocket and hands it to me. "That's what you're trying to make. You can take that and fashion any tool you want out of it back at the village, or you can just trade the blank to other groups that need it. And everything that isn't a blank?" He gestures expansively. My breathing is accelerated, and not from biking this time. Essentially every rock underfoot, a thick layer of them, is broken with a sharp edge, the tell-tale mark of human hands. There are snapped bits of debitage making a thick pavement. It would be impossible to put my foot down without stepping on something that was dug out of the ground, broken away and tossed for being the wrong shape.
I'm trying to wrap my head around what I'm seeing. I walk out past four or five more shallow depressions, some marked off, some right near the edge of the short cliff, others more central. At the end of the peninsula in the sky, I look out at the other edges where rocks poked out, where the plain gave way to steep valley walls.
"George?"
"Yeah?"
"How many other sites are there?"
"We've counted a few hundred quarry pits in a few dozen sites, but we find more from time to time. Nobody's done a complete survey."
It's humbling to stand so near to such dedication. I've been to Cahokia to see the mounds, I've seen petroglyphs and ancient paintings, I've climbed in a kiva preserved on a cliff. I've seen the handiwork of an epoch long past. But this was something even older than the ancient marks I had seen before. This was like walking into a man's kitchen thousands of years after he'd passed away so I could rummage through his cabinets to find his spatula. This wasn't one person's art that fate had preserved. This was a thousand families over generations slowly changing the face of the earth with hand tools and dedication. I picked up a rock (any rock), and I touched something dug up and tossed aside. My fingerprints joined the memory of fingerprints that time had worn away long before Cahokia's mounds were piled up, before the Manitou was painted on the Missouri's cliffs, before the kiva was dug--long before the oldest creation of mankind I had yet seen.
I suppose it was nothing, really. But sometimes, life conspires to hand you a truly beautiful experience, one you couldn't create on purpose, and gives you a chance to feel unreasonably sentimental about something that, if you're honest with yourself, is nothing, really. Sometimes, life puts you fifteen or more miles away from where you've got to be and asks you to throw yourself down the road on a ragged bicycle. Sometimes, when you arrive, it's as though the whole world was waiting up for you, as if your panic deserved special recognition,. And sometimes, you see something exclusive, personal, unlikely, something you were a hair's breadth from being blocked from forever. I had such a moment, and it was beautiful.
We rode back. Bonnie was more confident behind the wheel. It took George less time to lock up the gate. I tried to buy some postcards and Bonnie gave me a sticker for my car window, two pencils with the Monument's name, and a chance to rummage through a small box of flakes ("We get rocks from a farmer not far away, and on Wednesdays a man comes in and teaches people how to nap flint. This is rock you can take with you, if you like. Take as much as you want!"). I take a bit for each person in my family, making sure each small rock has a strip or two of the deep red-purple that I loved in the rocks. Before I can profess my undying thanks to Bonnie and George, she says "We're so glad you stopped by." I can't do much better, but I try.

An hour later, I've just gotten back on 136 southbound to Amarillo, and I feel enchanted. I lead a charmed life.
I'm glad. I think I will always, at least, try.