Saturday, February 1, 2003, and I was on my way to Sedona, AZ to go riding for the first time. There were seven of us, quite a crew, and we had departed from Boulder right after work on Friday, the night before. We'd driven - two Fords, an Explorer for people and my Ranger for bikes - as far as we could, nearly run out of gas, and stopped at a hotel very late. We woke up early, the way that seven mountain bikers jammed into a tiny hotel room tend to wake up stoked, and resumed the trip SouthWest.
Sometime after dawn, I found myself squinting against the glare of the desert sunlight smeared across the dirty windshield of my truck, like the sky had gone bewilderingly, sandy brown. The huge green interstate signs crept by at 80 miles an hour, validating that we were still somewhere short of Albuquerque on I-40 Westbound. I was driving while Shaine peered through his thick glasses at the roadmap in his right hand and nervously turned the radio dial with his left. The Emergency Broadcast Signal had chirped across the radio station twice so far, shrill and loud, panicked. Finally, a shaky young man’s voice came through the truck’s speakers, and he stammered out the bad news: Space Shuttle Columbia had broken up while re-entering the atmosphere, 80,000 feet directly overhead, along with the jarring reality that we were on the Western edge of the debris field, and if we saw anything, we were to call it in and not touch it.
The radio went quiet, just the suck of desert wind outside, and Shaine ducked forward hard, craned his muscled neck low beneath the dashboard to watch the sky. We traded stories about The Challenger disaster, 17 years before, and where we were and how it affected us. I can still recall how Ms. Blackard, tears dripping black and blue mascara down to her chin, hustled us down the hall from our 3rd grade classroom across the evenly-spaced, square, black and white tiles. How her voice echoed through the empty hall behind us so shrill and tense that I almost didn’t recognize it. How I had tiptoed across the white tiles only, for luck, suspicious that somehow my little shoes might make a difference. Mr. Burnette’s classroom was big enough for every kid in school to have a seat on the thin, tan rug atop rubber cement stains and playground mulch pulverized so deep that it never quite vacuumed out. But, more importantly, Mr. Burnette had a big box television up high on a wobbly metal cart on which he rolled out the hard truth and awkwardly perched it before us. I couldn’t watch.
Years later, in New Mexico, the kid came back over the radio and read the phone number to call if, perchance, we happened across any wreckage, and without irony, Shaine scribbled it down on a gas station receipt.
We rode in Sedona, Phoenix, Tucson, all over Arizona that week. We saw roadrunners, javelinas, lizards of all kinds. We shredded brand new single track, ate the best Mexican food of our lives. But we never saw any wreckage from the shuttle, and for the most part, we didn't talk about it. We found something else, however.
I kept the receipt for a long time, Shaine’s shaky cursive so bad that I couldn’t read the number, black pen on white paper, and it always smelled like regular unleaded, even years later. But underlined, there was one legible word, Shuttle.
It was the beginning of something.
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