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I spotted the huge red Ford truck (an F-350?) from about a hundred yards away, barreling down unpaved Miranda Canyon Road toward the stop sign at the intersection up ahead the way so many do. The other guy could surely see me but apparently had no thought of stopping. Of all the nerve, I thought, and dangerous, too. For several years now I’ve been on a hopeless one-man neighborhood crusade to alter that behavior in this location, so I was primed. Sometimes I just honk and shake my head, but as we were already on a collision course, I stomped on the gas to make it clear I knew I had the right-of-way. He did, too.

I wasn’t going to kill us, so I skidded to a stop on the gravel road and honked before I reached the intersection as he roared on through toward Hot Springs Road. A second later, however, he pulled over on the left side and slowed, leaving room for me to go by on the right. As I did, he swerved sharply in my direction! I slowed to a careful crawl and we both stopped.

“What the hell are you trying to do?” he yelled.

“Stop sign!” was all I said, jerking my thumb back to where he’d been, and then proceeded. So far, so good. I’m so smart.

Unfortunately, we were both headed in the same direction on a long road that went down to the highway; I’d have him in the rearview mirror all the way. To thwart any mischief and get the hell out of the way, I pulled into a driveway at the first curve. Instead of zooming by, he stopped in the road, blocking me in, and he was most offended:

“What the hell’s the matter with you, go home, get off the road, what do you think you’re doing?!?” etc., etc.

Imagine this about twenty times. I wasn’t angry, just incredulous. I hadn’t even entered the intersection where he ran the sign, and here he was yelling at me.

“There’s a stop sign back there!” I called out, rather calmly I thought.

“I saw that, but I was going faster than you!”

I have to admit, this momentarily disarmed me. “Uh, you have to stop at the stop sign…” Brilliant!

This he didn’t like, and the verbal punishment replayed. I just shrugged and said, “You gotta stop at the stop sign” three or four more times before he gave up and drove on down the road. Whew. Well, no whew. I could barely see around the curve as I backed out, but I noticed that he’d pulled into a driveway himself about fifty yards away, backed out, turned, and backed back in, facing the street, waiting to pounce when I drove by. I decided not to find out if he planned to ram or shoot me and quickly turned around the way I’d come. There was an alternate road down to the main one and I took it, holding my phone to dial 911. I guess he didn’t see me, though, because he didn’t follow.

Well, now.

Besides hoping he doesn’t live here, what else comes to mind? Time to stop driving like a fourteen-year-old in Abilene, Texas, perhaps? Those were the days, all right, and there were more than a few car chases, but we were having fun. A few trash cans in the alley got whacked and maybe a squirrel. Peel out in somebody’s driveway. Play the menace in the junior high school parking lot. No one was even dating yet, we jousted with our cars. Or Dad’s. But no, that’s not it. I learned a lot from those times. I know what a car can do.

This was like the time I yelled at a cop in Washington, D.C. (Don’t ever do that, by the way.) I was right and he was wrong and neither of those means a damn. There’s a higher order of awareness, anyway.

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It was another beautiful day here in el Norte. The photo was taken in the middle of June, but who cares? My wife is as beautiful as ever, and everything else is still the same. Or is it?

Just yesterday the toilet wouldn’t flush (again), and I had to call Gilbert the Plumber. It had been a short two months since he was last over here to run the snake down through the roof vent into the septic tank, and we were both a bit subdued. This time I’d apparently called while he was sitting at the breakfast table in his pajamas eating cereal, but he made it over just the same—on a Saturday, mind you—which proves how blessed one can be, even in the midst of crisis. The issue is “roots” in the wastewater line, although I massacred and poisoned the guilty Japanese plum tree and lilacs sometime back in April. Maybe I should have used dynamite instead. I have a friend who used to stop his truck along the forest service roads and blow stuff up looking for gold. Talk about going directly after what you want, hoo boy. Anyway, he could have helped. (Now that I think of it, he probably has!)

Later that evening, the lady in the picture read me a traditional Navajo saying: “Coyote is always out there waiting, and coyote is always hungry.” No doubt intended to make us pay attention, there’s also something reassuring in the way it lets one off the hook.

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Returning to Taos is always a revelation. The picture above is still southeastern Colorado, but Lord in heaven: we’re going into that. And over, and beyond.

When we used to live in the East and were coming back from those Iowa road trips to my wife’s family, we’d know we were getting close to the Baltimore Beltway from the bunched-up traffic zooming down from western Maryland. The tension would ease some after we finally made it past the city and reached our rural enclave on the Eastern Shore, but generally speaking, whatever connection to something greater the open spaces of the Midwest nurtured vanished in the grinding roar of the megalopolis. These days that dynamic is reversed.

The night before last I tweeted that we’d arrived safely back in Taos. Something about it sounded like a dispatch from a long-ago expedition, I thought. Like Lewis & Clark and the Corps of Discovery. (Isn’t that an incredible name?) But that’s exactly what how it is. The place feels very far from anywhere. The plunge into so much unbound Nature can be scary. Getting here takes faith and courage and is not an act of much convenience.

Taos proper is a little letdown at the end. A town is a town is a town, solace for the lonely and the body. The place they keep the things that let you live here in the desert. Somewhere to plug in this computer. You know. This isn’t news, but never mind all that, because I notice less and less.

Maybe I’m beginning to understand why I’ve always been pulled in this direction, why I have to get as close as a lazy man can be to where it’s difficult to live. One undertakes a journey only partly physical. It’s the “connection to something greater” thing. In the absence of the other stuff, the state is easier to encounter. I need it like we need a drink of water. I need it like a heart. Take away the chance to touch the numinous, and everything turns to shit. Why even go on living?

My parents believed that life consisted of a few things you could grab on forays from behind the barricades. Love and joy and hope and faith were luxuries a sane man would eschew. It’s taken many years to realize how ingrained the damage is. Every time I reinvent myself or grow another limb I feel the drag. The impact of Creation is like a lamp behind the window in the dark and leads me Home, where everything is possible, allowed, and free.

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This has to be the quintessential Colorado Highway 10 photo. Just gimme the damn prize right now. You’re looking due west here. I shot it through the windshield not too far from where Rt. 71 ends if you’re coming down from Rocky Ford and you turn right (west) on 10 at the “little white house”—actually an old garage there on the corner—maybe ten miles west of La Junta. From the aforementioned intersection to Walsenburg is a sixty-two mile stretch of pavement without a town or crossroad. We saw just a single pronghorn (antelope) this time, but it was handsome and no more than a hundred feet from the road.

We’d been looking for one hard. I think my wife summoned it out of the ether.

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