PLACITAS, NEW MEXICO / 1999
One of the side effects of spiritual dabbling is a hypersensitivity to synchronicity. A willful and articulate universe uses synchronicity to communicate. I like to think of synchronicity as a nudging in the right direction.
On an April afternoon, exhausted after swinging a hammer all day, I was driving east out of Bernalillo and up into the foothills through Placitas. Along the first rise on two-lane Route 165, I made eye contact with an Indian male wearing a blue and yellow racing outfit. He was standing beside his bicycle with his thumb out. I did not stop. At mile marker 3, I pulled in at Homestead Village and made a haircut appointment at La Bonne Vie. At the market deli, I bought a turkey sandwich on whole wheat. On my way out the door, I saw the Indian walking his bike across the parking lot toward my truck. I whispered to the sky, “Okay, okay… it’s your move.”
The bicyclist looked to be in his mid-twenties. He said he was a Yavapai Apache and he showed me his tribal ID card. He told me he was riding with a group, from Montana back to Arizona, but at Flagstaff he decided to go it alone. He asked the crew in the sag wagon to ship his gear and most of his money to Albuquerque via Greyhound. The crew shipped his stuff to Santa Fe.
It was four p.m. The Yavapai wanted to pedal to Santa Fe. Someone correctly informed him that the only route between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, other than I-25, was Route 14. He was trying to get to Route 14 by taking 165 east, past Placitas and up and over a lower portion of the Sandia Mountains.
I said, “The pavement ends at mile marker 8. The rest of the way up and over is a steep winding dirt road. You do not want to struggle over a rugged mountain pass at this time of day.”
He said he was out of cash. Just north of Albuquerque, he had stopped at the Sandia Casino and talked to a pueblo tribal executive about a loan. The executive couldn’t help him because the Yavapai was “the wrong kind of Apache.” In New Mexico, the Apaches are Jicarilla, Mescalero and Fort Sill. The Yavapai Apache invited me to lift his bike with my fingertips.
“Titanium?” I asked.
“Carbon fiber,” he said. “Eleven hundred dollars.”
He offered me his medicine necklace and I politely refused the gift. I already had a leather medicine bag behind the driver’s seat. A dozen oddball fetishes crowded the dashboard of my monastery, the cab of my pickup truck.
He said he’d seen a motel in Albuquerque near Tramway and Central. “Sixteen-dollar rooms.” Tonight he would call the Greyhound station in Santa Fe and his stuff would be at the Albuquerque bus station the next morning. I was waiting for him to ask for something specific. But this was not his way. He presented vignettes from his long ride from Montana. The bicycle trek had begun in Kalispell. He mentioned the small town of Arlee. I told him I had attended the most recent July Fourth Salish-Kootenai Tribal Celebration just outside of Arlee.
I said to the Yavapai, ”What is it that you need?” He went quiet, so I answered my own question. “You need a decent night’s sleep in a seedy motel room near Tramway and Central.” I had twenty-six dollars in my wallet. I handed him the twenty. I handed him the bag containing my turkey sandwich. “That’s a rough part of town at Tramway and Central. The motels in that neighborhood have hourly rates, if you know what I mean. Stay inside tonight and rest up for the ride home.”
Was mine an act of kindness? I don’t think so. The Yavapai Apache and I talked for fifteen minutes. He was creating a smooth path and I was waiting for my comfort level to kick in. For me, acceptance began with the term sag wagon, and it deepened with his mention of Kalispell and Arlee. In 1977 I rode my 10-speed French bicycle in the two-day Tour of the Swan River Valley, a scenic 200-mile circle trip from Missoula to Missoula. The sag wagon carried the sleeping bags, clothing and cash of all the participants. I had not heard the term sag wagon in over twenty years.
As I drove up to the new post office at mile marker 6, I mused upon synchronicity’s cousin, grace. On that day, in the middle of rural nowhere, I was out of lumber. To finish the day’s work, I needed a slice of 2-by-4 twenty-seven and three-eighths inches long. I gently kicked through my meager scrap pile and at the bottom, there it was… twenty-seven and three-eighths… with the extra thirty-second of an inch I always add for a snug fit.
I sat for a bit in the cab of my truck in the post office parking lot and said a little prayer for the Yavapai Apache bicyclist. When I was his age, I too broke away from the pack and rode off in another direction. Along the way, there have been many surprises that were obviously gifts from the universe, gifts arriving as an inside joke, or in the nick of time, conveyed with an overt and reassuring sense of mystery by… synchronicity and grace.
