Riding Texas at night........

Texas is often so hot, that we would sometimes ride at night, or so early in the morning as to be night. It's best when great black thunderheads roll along beside you; towering, anvil-shaped clouds streaked with lightning, heavy with rain and imagined dread...... The plains then, the Estacado Plano, smell wet, fertile, and alive, and your bike speed will always creep up in time with the beating of your heart and the excitement in your soul.......

Red and I ran alongside Palo Duro Canyon one such night years ago. Palo Duro, the last stronghold of Quanah Parker, the half-breed Comanche war chief son of Wanderer and his white captive, Cynthia Ann Parker. Cynthia Ann was rescued during a Texas Ranger raid by Charles Goodnight, the real life Colonel Call in Larry McMurty's Lonesome Dove; but she resisted repatriation and had "gone native," and forever after cut her hair short in mourning for her Comanche loved ones. A nineteenth century photograph of her nursing her little Comanche daughter is haunting, her eyes thick and rich with the despair and hopelessness of a normal human being ground to bits between two societies, two cultures, two destinies.....

To ride alongside Palo Duro Canyon during a Texas summer night is an experience shot through with religion, not Christian, not Comanche, not anything other than a deepening sense of despair and love, an undying love for all those who have gone before, who have fought and loved and lived and died, who nursed their children and then hacked at their enemies, who loved the night sky and the winds of the plains and the gathering rain of the Texan summer. That's what it's like to ride in Texas at night......

At least, that’s how it was for Red and me......