My stepfather, when he married my mom, brought with him this idea of the family camping trip, something we'd not had in the concrete and desert of El Paso.  At first the whole idea was foreign, but fun: pack the car (an International Scout, 2 door, blaze orange with a white roof, 390cid Chrysler motor, 4WD with a heavy duty transfer case), pack the dogs (a short-hair Saint Bernard named Heidi and my half-chow half-wolf Connie), pack the kids (my brother and myself) and the drinks (open container laws weren't invented yet) and drive to some rugged destination for a weekend, a week, a month....

My stepfather built a cabin (with much help from my mom and little from myself) that we would go to every weekend.  My brother and I would sleep in the open, under a tree in the meadow below the cabin.  This was my first exposure to the outdoors, really, and it was quite wonderful.

After four years or so of this being a weekly routine, it lost it's luster.  I'd grown to be a whiny middle-class brat.  I liked air conditioning.  I enjoyed being inside when it rained.  I was a big fan of the desert, but not so much of staying in it for days at a time.

One day, middle of the hottest summer I could remember, we packed the Scout, attached a motorcycle trailer with my stepfather's XS1100 (fully faired and luggaged), and, bidding the dogs adieu, we hit the road, heading for a small town in Montana.

From southern New Mexico to central Montana, the trip was planned for ten days at the least, 14 days at the most.  We'd camp the whole way up and back, none of this hotel stuff, though we did plan on staying in established campgrounds, resorting to KOA camps when nothing else was available.

That first day, we got just outside of Las Cruces when my stepfather pulled off the interstate and unloaded the motorcycle from the trailer.  He asked if I wanted to ride with him...a stupid question, really; I loved that motorcycle.  He did, too, and was reluctant to have me on as a passenger, but we were soon flying down the road, easily going 80.  The roar of the wind, the liquid-hot sun pouring onto my sleeveless arms, the interior of the helmet must have been 120 degrees when the rain hit.

You have to understand something about storms in New Mexico: they hit fast, drop an ocean of water, and leave off.  No drizzling, no mist, very often little warning.  The atmosphere, dry as bone and superheated, would produce storms with cloud-tops reaching space.  You'd have a moment of black sky, then the air temperature would drop 50 degrees and you'd be in the middle of it: drops the size of your fist pounding down, accompanied by lightning that was intent on splitting the sky.

On a motorcycle at any speed, rain sucks.  At high speeds, it really sucks.  At high speeds with no rain suit, it beats you black and blue.  My stepfather obviously wanted to either drive through the storm (most of these summer storms are short-lived and have a tiny footprint) or find an overpass (in 220 miles of interstate, there are maybe 8).

My very first indication that this trip was going to be a test more than a vacation was this storm.  We pulled off finally, my stepfather laughing louder and harder than I'd heard at the sorry state of our ride and our selves.  The scout caught up to us (we were in CB Radio contact) and we loaded the motorcycle back onto the trailer while the storm raged around us.

Our first night, if I recall correctly, was spent in Los Alamos at my stepfather's parent's converted duplex.  Sandy, my step-grandfather, was a scientist for Los Alamos National Labs.  He'd been there since the tail-end of the Manhattan Project, had helped with the first H bomb.  We'd visited them often in the past, and I always enjoyed my time there.  It was strange to be there in the summer, though, with no snow or sledding available.  The storm we'd brushed by caught up with us that night, and I lay awake in my bed thinking: boy, am I glad I'm not out in that.  Lightning started a fire on Pajarito mountain that night.  Another omen.

The next day was a short trip to southern Colorado, to a campsite near a river.  My brother and I would be sharing a 2 man (really more of a 1.5 man) orange nylon tent, one that we'd used plenty of times in the past.  We set it up, trenched around it to prevent water from rushing under us in case of rain, and set about hiking and fishing for dinner.

The woods in Colorado are very different from the scrub oak and pinon of southern New Mexico.  My brother and I were warned about carrying our catch for too long, lest a bear track us down in search of easy trout.  We carried bells or cans tied together on our packs to alert bear.  We heard, that evening, that one of our fellow campsite guests had seen a bear and two cubs...a bad sign.  I didn't relax, not a bit.

It rained that first night, a gentle sort of downpour that only woke me because I'd pressed up against the side of the tent, wicking water through the nylon to my skin.  I was soaked, my sleeping bag was soaked, and I was freezing.  I lay awake until sunrise and dried myself next to a  small fire, clothes steaming as I heated water for tea.

The whole of the trip could be described by the new rituals my brother and I developed.  The daily ritual of tent break down, pack, clean up, get in car, travel, unpack, set up tent, sleep.  We'd carted an entire shoebox of cassettes along with as many AA batteries as we could muster for our Walkman decks so we had some respite from the paltry collection of 8 tracks that my parents had.  We set the tent up in slightly different, slightly better configurations each day, stretching the side lashes to their limit, leaving 6 inches of space between rainfly and tent, learning how to allow ventilation without letting water in.  We hiked as much as possible as far as possible, spending time alone.  And I read voraciously, having brought with me a selection of paperbacks and magazines.  Cut off from the world I knew, my life consisted of my pack, my mess kit, my side of the tent, and whatever James Bond or Travis McGee novel I was reading.

The trip we took was straight north with few exceptions, including a stretch of highway that wound through the towns of Ouray and Silverton in Colorado.  Those two towns, small Alpine villages which at the time harbored little interest in tourism, were like jewels.  We'd turned a corner on this winding road and suddenly, Switzerland.

The rest of Colorado was mercilessly ugly.  Though we spent part of the trip on the great divide (and saw a rainstorm divided by the highway, soaking rain on southbound lanes but a light mist on the northbound) most of western Colorado is just a blur.

We ended up in central Wyoming, spending the night at a campground in Jackson Hole.  Wyoming is uglier than most states, wind-swept and flat, but when you do get to the mountains, they are amazing.  I fell in love with the Tetons, the way they towered over the Snake River, the fact that they had glaciers(!) and were thrust into the atmosphere with the same violence and intensity as my own Organ Mountains in Las Cruces.  The Tetons really are a breathtaking range.  We hiked around the base of them, me fantasizing about free-climbing to the nearest glacier.  We went white water rafting on the Snake River.  We saw bear, elk, deer, all manner of large animals.

The thunderstorm that night, like all previous nights, woke me, but this more for the ferocity of the thunder.  The mountains stalled a violent storm which scoured the river valley, ripping roofs from buildings in Jackson Hole.  Our tent made it, though we lost one of the side ropes and snapped two lines attached to the rainfly.  The next morning I took a shower at the campground facilities (this was an RV park / campground / cabin rental place with public showers) and was hit on by a boy my age.  First experience with that, ever, and I handled it very badly.

In the camping space next to us (about twenty yards away) there was a guy in a one-man tent (one of those close-fitting cocoon-looking things) who was on a motorcycle trip, going from San Antonio, TX to somewhere in Canada.  I offered him some tea and he told me about his trip so far, the bad weather, the broken chain, the flat tire outside of Cheyenne, hitting a jackrabbit the size of a child outside of Jackson.  He was road weary but only half-way into his journey.  He told me, you start something like this, it's like setting the planet in motion.  You can't stop, he told me.  You can't go backward.  You just ride.

He passed us as we headed to Yellowstone, waving, one more crazy biker for the road.

Yellowstone was too polished, too tourist.  Jackson had been wild, unfenced, no rangers in uniform, no tame animals.  I enjoyed the hot springs and geysers in Yellowstone, but the same outside of Jackson Hole were less policed, less public, and much more interesting to me.  The whole of Yellowstone felt like Disney, right down to the scripted Old Faithful tours.  It was interesting and very pretty, but not wild, and very crowded.  We stopped in a line of cars held up by some begging elk and my stepfather sort of slumped into the driver's seat.  "Do you all mind if we just press on through?" he asked, unsure if we wanted to tour any more of the park.  We'd toyed, the previous night, with staying in Yellowstone for an entire day.  Faced with tourist hell, we were all wanting to leave.  Except my brother. My brother had met a girl from Louisiana at the previous stop (one of many hot springs with walkways suspended over them) and was reluctant, but he had her address.  My brother was very good at this.  You could have dropped him in the desert of Bahrain, he'd have found a cheerleader and had her heart in less than an hour.  He knew there was more road to cover, more women ahead.  We nodded, my stepfather stepped on the gas, and the tires smoked all the way to Harlowton.

During this frantic 100 mile an hour drive my stepfather said, you can tell how fast we're going by counting the thumps.  Those are rabbits, he said, and they jump into the side of the truck because we're going too fast for them to jump in front of us when we startle them by driving by.  There's a rabbit about every car length.  I tuned out the thumps and listened to Willie Nelson.

Harlowton was ugly, hot, dusty scrub.  The tap water was brown and gritty.  The people were rough-edged, calloused, like the wind had sandblasted the humanity from their faces.  Montana is a rough, flat, hard place.  It's people are still pioneers, still subsisting in an era long gone.  My stepfather's aunt lived in a huge house built in the 1920s on the foundation of a house built in the 1820s.  Both she and it had survived horizon-wide wildfires, week-long dust storms, lightning, tornadoes, range wars, mine strikes, and the railroad. It was also the first house we'd slept in in five days, so who was I to complain.  It was actually a very nice house, big rammed-earth walls in the back half, two story, tin roof, with a storm shelter below.

My brother and I walked to a park, where he met three girls, them trying so hard to be 80s city chicks, the big bangs, the Van Halen pumped out of the portable tape deck, the tight acid wash, the glitter nail polish.  We talked to them for a bit, my brother flirting and me ridiculing him.  Even now when I hear the song "Panama," I think of them.

My brother snuck out of the house in the middle of the night and met up with one of them.  He came back hours later, right before the storm hit. I slept fitfully, the raging thunderstorm du jour pounding against the 50 year old glass window.  I remember a train going by, and the next morning someone saying that was no train, that was a tornado.

The entire trip up, we'd been rained on, and not by small storms.  I was growing gills and harboring algae.

The trip back was all the bad, none of the good.  We all fought a lot.  We were all tired.  We hated each other.  I was tired of being soggy, tired of heat and sand and goddamn Willie Nelson.  We spent three days driving back, pushing it hard.  We'd stopped being civil, stopped even being angry, and moved to taciturn silence in the car, no tourist stops this time.  Highspeed all the way home, my stepfather hunched over the wheel, my brother smelly and snoring, my mom silently taking in the plains and the west.  I was in a stupor, my entire body ready to leap free at the nearest sign of escape.

We burst into the atmosphere in northern New Mexico near Shiprock, and I could see why the wagon trains loved the sight of it.  The first real beauty in the flat burnt plains of southern Colorado, it stands all bizarre against the gigantic sky.

Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Socorro, Truth or Consequences, and finally.  Finally.

Home.

The first night back, I spent an hour in the shower.  I went outside and ran around in circles with my dog.  I went into my room, climbed a chair and planted my face on the air conditioner vent. I grinned stupidly for hours.  I watched television. And that night I stripped down and climbed into bed, and with the last pieces of a gigantic storm vacating the sky, slept with the full moon on my face through an open window.