Ten Thousand Waves

The luxury SUV behind my Uber honked and waved for us to pull over as my driver slowly ascended the New Mexican hillside towards the resort. Interrupting her story of her 5:30AM fare that day who had invited her up to their solarium to look out of their telescope before departing – a move, we agreed especially given today is Halloween, that was definitely the start of a horror movie – my driver announced “the speed limit is 35, and I am going 35.”

As we turned into the parking lot of Ten Thousand Waves, the SUV blasts past with one last, long blare of the horn. I peer at the driver, concerned that this is an emergency, and see the middle finger of a middle-aged, overweight woman wearing big sunglasses and screaming what I presume are expletives from behind her window. It appears we’re looking at entitlement, not emergency.

My every-cheerful driver deposits me at a welcome sign next to a staircase, noted as including 90 steps up to the spa and offering a call button for a shuttle. I’ll take the stairs.

Curving up to the spa, I’m smug at how healthy it is to walk up rather than drive, and also a little bit winded. The path is gravel, the steps edged with wood and inconsistent in spacing, following the ascent of the land like a trail. I stop along the way to turn and look out at the desert mountains, a landscape foreign to me.

In the resort, everything is Japanese. Japanese is written everywhere, including the signage for the fire extinguisher. A calm woman with the aura of someone who meditates and eats well gives me a tour of the facilities.

Past the koi pond where fish the size of dachshunds and the colors of crayons mingle around a waterfall, up the stairs past the electronic-wristband-controlled lockers that I’ll inevitably struggle with later in the evening, lies the entrance to the Grand Bath. Here, my host tells me, is the communal hot-spring-fed bath, cold plunge, and Sauna, for use of spa guests.

In the gender-inclusive locker room I shimmy out of my clothes to just the bathing suit underneath and slip on the Japanese robe I’d received at reception, grabbing plastic slide sandals from shelves packed tightly with them.

Awkwardly using my wrist to open the heavy wooden door the Grand Bath and accidentally slamming it behind me, I turn the corner to find a large, blue-tiled pool with a bamboo-pipe waterfall feeding spring water into the misting bath, two pour-over waterfalls sending water back out from the other side.

The space isn’t busy. Already in the pool sit a half-dozen people. A tall, young couple whose appearance makes me imagine casual European luxury. A couple in their late 60s or early 70s who are continuously murmuring to one another. A man with blue-painted toenails and his companion, who seems always lost each time I glance at her.

Dropping off my towel, robe, and slippers, I self-consciously slide into the pool, imagining I have an audience evaluating my body. But as I look around, nobody is watching. I learn later this used to be a “clothing optional” pool and wonder if I would have had the confidence to even try that.

I relax into the water. It’s hot, and the surprise of the heat, the intensity of the minerals, and the strength of the jet plowing into my back as I sit against it send my body into an internal frenzy. I can feel my heart rate pick up, my limbs tingle, my face flushes.

Relaxing feels like a challenge to me. I have to fight my instinct to try absolutely everything, to get as much “experiences” out of this experience to justify the expense, to feel like I was worth this. In the Grand Bath, I can hardly settle down at first. The first spot I try, with back to the jets, is too deep for me to sit but far to shallow to stand. So, I perform close to a Malasana squat in front of a jet, then sit on my heels, moving around.

I watch as my fellow bathers try the cold plunge. First, the maybe-European man and his companion approach. He sits in immediately, clenching fists above whatever and breathing sharply with his eyes squeezed shut. I’ve seen those techniques on social media, and it looks like a performance in person. She watches him calmly, dangling her legs in by the side before slipping silently to sit next to him.

The female murmurer lies to move around the pool on her hands, her legs dangling behind her. To enter the cold plunge, she slides up and over from one edge into the other, going fluidly from hot to cold. After a few minutes, she emerges from the cold and lays flat on the strip of tile between plunge and bath. I can see long, deep scars on the outside of one thigh.

Trying not to stare, I think about the bodies in the pool. Here she is, lying happily on the tile, scars on full display. The blue-nailed man has an array of tattoos, but it seems rude to look long enough to consider them. His companion wears large, round glasses and has curly hair pulled tight against her scalp but exploding into a ponytail on top of her head, safe from the wet.

Across from me, the male murmurer sits gazing at his wife, wisps of white hair erratic on his head, with fuzz and fluff on nearly all of his upper body. He’s calm serene.

From the sauna emerge another pair, two women, one in a bathing loose bathing suit, with lots of stretch marks and cellulite adorning her legs. Her companion’s suit is tightly synched with string on the back like a shoelace, with colorful tattoos cascading fully down both arms. They move to sit in on a ledge in the bath, whispering conspiratorially as they gaze around the space.

As the others move about and the small cold plunge empties, I decide to try it. I make it just past my knees before my body reacts. After a minute, I’m out, back in the warm Bath, which causes my legs to tingle and my face to flush even more.

I’ll revisit this space after dark, alone, after my long massage and lovely talk with Moss, a young man who tells me of visiting Burma and boarding in the dark on the white sands in southern New Mexico. The mist above bath, the only sounds the bamboo pipe pouring in fresh and the two waterfalls cascading out the other side. There’s an abandoned robe hanging from one of a row of hooks next to the Adirondack chairs around the bath, inexplicable to me as they seemed to be on a 1:1 ratio. The sauna glows through a small window in its door.

The trees around the bath still have green leaves. The black sky above is dotted with stars, that reveal themselves more and more the longer I stare.

Here, I do not worry about what is to come. Here feels safe, secure, healing. But here is only accessible to few – I came a long way and paid a great deal to access this type of peace.

I paid to get away from my life, to momentarily suspend my belief that the world around me grows increasingly dark, the sense of foreboding and despair that seems to have descended like smoke over my home and neighborhood back in Washington, DC. I don’t know where to go. I don’t know who to be, or sometimes who I am. Here, alone in the dark, air lightly thickened with mineral-laced mist and lit by a glowing moon, I try to exhale some of the stress.