The Cowboy Way

This is my third year doing solo motorcycle adventure touring. The destination my past 2 years has been Burning Man in Black Rock Desert, Nevada. about 2200 miles coming and going, a little over 2 days each way. Less and less carried each year, you would have thought I was preparing for a nuclear disaster the first year and in fact that's where I went the first year, Trinity, New Mexico. I began the first year by shaking off the sleep by walking around gas stations and truck stops aimlessly. This year I slumped against the wall of all night McDonald's, wrapped myself in a Massai blanket and slept damn near under my bike or lay next to it, my electric jacket plugged into an accessory port.
In the middle of a field in the middle of a night, my helmet still on, the stars twinkling o'er my head on a cool summer night I finally felt myself approaching the Cowboy Way of life. Sleeping on the open range, alone and in wonder. Wondering if someone would come up and hack my arms and legs off and throw a sack of lime on me. Alone and out there, the Cowboy Way which is also the Artist's Way-ALONE, EXPOSED, your work out there intact and beautiful or getting hacked to bits by people with wine glasses in their hands who dramatize all the reasons someone has given them for not doing something themselves. Anyway you cut it it's great-the wind, the ride, the people who come up and meet you, the other loners you come across, the people who help you, the people you help, the lady you give a dollar to in Kayenta who is working the people who pass her by for money to buy an ice cream at the McDonald's when you know the ice cream machine is broken. The same lady who tells you about her life, her husband and daughter and son and you realize this could be your mother too, her beautiful skin wrinkled by the desert sun and her Navajo lineage. People get all uptight about their handout bucks--ooh don't give a panhandler money it encourages them not to work or teaches them to be a freeloader but the same person overpays for a whimshit chai latte they could have made at home for 2 dollars less and they get no improvement in their history lesson by exchange, they get no beauty, no brown eye shining at them, no wizened look cast a glance over the dry red desert and it all right there before them like a gift found in the dust of the playa lake bed all crusty looking like a St Anthony medal till you take it home and wash the dust off to find a belly dancer your wife can question you about....