The Hill

Indian School was a biking area.

In some of the previous areas, like River's Edge and Bloomfield, my companion and I shared a car with another companionship. In Haines, we had no car, though we often took the bus. Indian School was another all-bike area, but this was included a nasty detail: The Hill.

The Hill (which I often intentionally misspelled with an "e" instead of an "i") was about a half mile long, with enough elevation gain between the bottom and top to make you require a depressurization tank if you ascended too quickly. On the way down, you could rest your feet on the chassis of your bike and coast. If there were no cars in the five intersections that interrupted the sidewalk of The Hill (an unlikely event given that this was downtown Albuquerque), you could probably reach at least Mach 2 with a good tailwind. Going up, however, required you to draw upon reserves of energy you never quite knew existed, which would come only after you repeated all the Mormon swear words you knew at least forty times. ("Aaaaarrghhh ... goshnabbit ... fetching ... Simon and Gaaaarfuuunkelllll!") When you finally reached the top, somehow defying momentum and gravity, your white shirt would adhere to your flesh and sweat would obscure your vision.

We usually saved the uphill journey for a time when we were assured an adequate resting time afterward, like the end of the day. Our apartment was almost at the top of our area, with about seventy percent of the area spread across the length of The Hill. Most of our promising investigators, of course, were near the bottom of The Hill.

Indian School got me into shape fast.