Our beta indicated that we should reach a windmill and double back on the track parallel to our travel. It would bend off toward misshapen hulks of volcanic rock, the course on loose sand that was navigable enough with the right momentum and body english. Wild comfortable places all around us to pitch our tents, but we’d been told this spot was something special, an abandoned ranch and homestead with ghosts in the dirt, memories in the barbed wire fencing and stone foundations.
Sideways pink light shafts, picking our way through the yucca stands, this might be a night for visions. We’re riding longer than maybe we wanted to, but when the story isn’t fixed the remedy is the purpose is the wander.
And then we burst on it, a clearing in the rock, a basin in roughness. The house used to be there, the well pump has fallen over, a tank, a furtive gravesite when just then a sharp light is a spear impaling my breath against wooden crosses.
Deterioration blanching into mere mythology, a metaphor for clinging to corporeality, protest, paean to an age of corrals, roping, hat band sweat stained through.
Set up in what must have been the main staging area for the business of the ranch, under the same moon, same and completely different coordinate, riding far away under the same sky.
There’s a fire ring, lay my sleep gear close to it, I’ll fade into a fire crackle staring up accelerating along a traverse in backward time.
