The drive was fairly uneventful, passing through occasional small towns that reminded me of the places I went to high school my junior and senior year. My junior year was at Moriarty High School in Moriarty, N.M., 20-odd miles east of Albuquerque and on the other side of the Sandia Mountains from the big city. When I was making the drive, I caught my breath momentarily with recognition when I saw the Sandias and I saw roadsigns for Moriarty and Edgewood, the next town over (and where we actually lived).
It's strange going back to places you've been. I discussed this with my mom when I got back, and it turns out she feels the same way I do--that there are certain large chunks of my life that feel like a dream and feel like they may never have really happened. Driving through Moriarty to the school, which I could still drive by instinct despite only spending one year there, affirmed my experience. I did go to school there. I hated a lot of it, but I really enjoyed other parts of it, and the school was largely the same. It was about 4:30 in the afternoon, and the only students were with the football team, so I waltzed myself into the school, wandered around, took photos, and no one ever questioned me.
I think every school has these big school year posters that show senior class photos of everybody from that year. When I was going down the main hall, I saw that poster for the 2000 kids--I had somehow ended up ahead in most of my classes, and so my junior year was spent surrounded by seniors. It was weird, looking at all the kids. There was the skater kid whose locker was next to mine, to pulled me into this weird waltz down the hallway one day; the one out gay guy, who caught a lot of flak but showed off his shaved legs in shorts regardless; the meathead who was a total jerk to me and once made me cry in the middle of civics class; the Army ROTC kid who sat next to me in civics class; the girl who was obsessed with comic books and introduced me to some really funny British comedy shows; the cowboy kid who worked at the supermarket we went to and was always really nice and polite and was always wearing shitkicker boots. The nametag on a nearby classroom was the same, too; it was my civics teacher, a liberal New York-state Democrat in a generally Republican town whose brother was a movie director.
After leaving the school, it was only a short drive to Edgewood, and I drove through town (it used to be just a supermarket and a few tiny restaurants; now it's a supermarket, a Super Wal-Mart and a few tiny restaurants) and headed north toward where our house used to be. It's easy enough to find, since there aren't a lot of streets and all of the houses have at least a few acres. It's easy for me to get turned around in a big subdivision, with houses crowded and lawns all the same; out there, most houses are adobe or have colorful metal roofs. The house we leased was still there, still looking largely the same, although our landlord had sold it and the people who lived there had a ton of broken-down vehicles on the edges of the property. The large hill--or is it a mountain? I need to find out some day--was still there to the north, and the sky was clear. I'd forgotten how it was so damn windy all the freaking time out there on that side of the mountain.
I still had time to kill before I met with my couchsurfing host, so I cut through back roads to Tijeras, another tiny town, and took the scenic Sandia Crest Highway up to the peak, slowly winding 14 miles up. Some of the trees were starting to turn; chipmunks and squirrels darted out of the way. At the top was a viewing area, a good 15 degrees or so colder than at the base of the mountain. Teenagers in T-shirts, tucking their arms inside, were up there. The inside of the bathroom doors are stenciled with a black bear, the New Mexico state animal, and with the words "Feed a bear, kill a bear." A fenced-off area full of radio towers was fascinating to me, almost more so than the view down to the west, over Albuquerque. The sun cast a glare over the city, so it was hard to distinguish anything, but the towers and wind combined to make a sound like a jet engine revving nearby.
With the sun sinking and making photos more difficult, I climbed down, got into my car, and drove down. I passes cyclists, huffing their way up the roads, and wondered what they would do when it turned dark; the sun sets earlier, and I'd be afraid of getting hit by a car (or wandering black bear?) out at night on a bike. When I cut back through Tijeras to the highway and then through the pass to Albuquerque, the sun was setting and the sky was dark orange. When I called my parents later that night to tell them I'd made it, my dad was disappointed I'd unplugged the GPS and put it in the back seat when I got into New Mexico. I was afraid I'd come back and everything would have been developed, that large, generic and faceless rows of strip malls and housing complexes would have taken over, but not much had changed. I didn't need directions.
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