Motel, road, gas, road, gas, road, motel. A rhythm emerges and I won’t bore you with the practicalities or pain of persuading old components, mechanical and biological across 362 miles of sun bleached wind blown highway. We both made it although the portion of my large nose that protrudes below my visor is now shedding its second skin.
“That’s your problem Timothy, you just don’t think” my mother would say after my latest mishap. She was right, of course, I don’t think, not in that organised safe, all outcomes considered, all risks evaluated way. I envisage a happy path or sometimes a sad one, often a little above achievable or below believable, and off I go. Bags on bike, gas in tank, cash in wallet, let’s rock! Impulsively swinging between optimism and pessimism. What was I thinking?
I could tell you how the trees thin out as you head west, diminishing to bushes and finally are gone, how the horizon flattens and the road straightens, how the insects impacting my helmet, face and jacket become less juicy and scarce until that dying dies out altogether. How the cattle in the vast fields no longer hog the fence by the road, forced to forage further afield. A thousand hacks like myself have done that before and will do again.
Instead I’ll tell you about the lady in the gas station who said that this was a bad time for tornados and that her sister had lost a car to one just last year, presumably not completely. I’ll show you these trucks with their extraordinary loads of three turbine blades that I came across on their way to a turbine.
Road kill of the day, early on, was a dead heat between a snake, possibly rattle, and a deer, upturned like a table after a bar-room brawl with one leg in the air. Long shot of the day was this snap of a mini-twister in the distance to the right of the pole, at first I thought it was smoke from a fire rising up in an, all to straight column, to the clouds above then I realised that it was dust in a vortex.
Roswell New Mexico greeted another long distance traveller, an hour earlier (Mountain Daylight Time), and I walked down to ‘Ceriritos’ for tacos a margarita and beer, they don’t milk the alien thing, much.
Le Mans man 