One morning my brother Peter awakened to a mission: jump on a motorcycle with wife Eva and run up to Meeteetse, Wyoming for a beer in the Blue Ribbon Bar. The summer he was 16 he had worked on a ranch near Meeteetse, and he had had the first beers of his life there in the Blue Ribbon. Now thirty-something years later he was being called to go back and have another.

I had worked at the same ranch two or three years earlier than Peter and had my own first experiences up there. I got to be a real cowboy that summer. I've always been a city boy, albeit one from Texas, and hadn't a clue about life away from the pavement and the supermarket.

Basically a cowboy moves cattle from one place to another, point A to point B. Throughout the first half of summer we moved steers from the low-lying deserts of the Bighorn Basin up into lush pastures in the Absaroka Mountains, and later the steers were moved back down to winter. The foreman remarked more than once that the only thing dumber than a steer was that guy riding behind it, trying to make it go somewhere.

The thought of retracing those steps was very appealing. Besides, a beer run to Wyoming is a good reason to take a cross-country motorcycle trip, and I asked Peter if he minded if Janice and I tagged along. And so it became a foursome. We would be riding a pair of gray K1200LTs, BMW's version of the ultimate riding machine for long-distance two-up touring. (It's said that the gray LTs are the fastest because gray is the color of the wind.)

It was mid-seventies and muggy as we rode out of Austin an hour or so before daylight. This was mid-September, and it was still summer in central Texas. We were aiming for Salina (suh-LIE-nuh), Kansas, about 630 miles north on Interstate 35. Normally we would avoid the Interstate, but decided the trade off for slabbing it up there would be waking up tomorrow in a different part of the country.

LtoR: Janice Yeager, Paul Yeager, Eva Wilbert and Peter Yeager.

Traffic was very light as we slipped through the dark past Georgetown, Belton and Temple. I remembered riding through the dark that summer on the ranch. We would have trucked ourselves and our horses out to the far end of some miles-deep pasture in the dark, and then deployed ourselves along the back fence line as dawn cracked and light began to seep across the land. At first only shapes could be made out, darker shadows of bushes and boulders and bluffs, and then details would begin to appear like limbs on the bushes and indentations in the rocks, but without color, everything in monochrome. As the light grew, greater and greater detail could be seen and just after you could pick out individual leaves on a plant, you realized you could see in color. It was moment of magic for me every time it happened.

I was anticipating that moment as we sped along the freeway, but there was too much light coming from all the billboards and freeway signs and truck stops. Color never really left the landscape. Still it was good to be riding when the sun came up - that always feels like a special blessing on the day.

We had a grand slam breakfast in Waco and then took the west fork of I-35 through Ft. Worth, scarcely slowing from highway speeds as the K bikes whirred past the downtown skyline and north past the stockyards and train yards. We stopped for gas in Denton and thirty minutes later crossed the Red River into Oklahoma. The riverbed is quite wide, with bluffs on both banks, but the river was way down and looked more like a creek winding through the middle of the bottomland flat.

Gently rolling plains north of the river rose up to larger hills and the optimistically-named Arbuckle Mountains, then down into the valley of the Washita and on to the Canadian River and Oklahoma City.

The freeway choked with lunch hour traffic just south of Oklahoma City, so we stopped and had lunch and eased our legs a bit.

After Oklahoma City the countryside rose out of the Canadian valley and continued to roll gently across the watersheds of the Cimarron and the Arkansas - up the little bluffs, across the rolls between the drainages, down the little bluffs, across the bottomland flats, up the little bluffs, and so on.

Crossing into Kansas the countryside changed from cattle and horse ranches to great fields of stubbled wheat, and the scale of the roll increased. I had always thought "the Great Plains" would be pretty flat, like the Llano Estacado, but under those fields of grain the land itself rises and falls in waves.

The other expectation I had had was that "the wheat fields would go on forever to the horizon." Instead the wheat fields are squared and bounded with tree rows, as if for protection, and occasional openings between the trees connect one field to another. The wheat had recently been harvested, leaving vast tracts of stubble. Stubble is never pretty.

We got to Salina in late afternoon and pulled into a motel whose sign was welcoming Quarterhorses and Wheatland Cluster Dogs. I know what a quarterhorse is, but none of us had ever heard of a cluster dog. I wondered, would a cluster dog be bred to round up sheep or something into clusters?

A man was walking across the parking lot with a little black and white dog on a leash and I asked him if that was a cluster dog. "A what?" he asked rather stiffly. "A cluster dog,' I said, pointing to the sign. He smiled as he realized I wasn't trying to insult his dog or be smart with him, and kindly let me know his dog was part-terrier and part he didn't know what.

A rainy cold front was blowing through next morning so we dressed in the full touring suits and zipped in the liners. I remembered the flannel-lined blue-jean jacket I had that summer on the ranch, when I found out that denim wasn't really an all-weather performance fabric. Not like ballistic-weave Kevlar double-sewn to Teflon-coated 500-dernier Cordura laminated over micro-breathable Gore-Tex, lined with Thinsulate and punctuated with stuff that shines in a light like a beacon.

We headed west on I-70, pretty dry and comfortable all things considered. I wondered if the people in the cars thought we were crazy. We rode out of the rain in Hays some ninety miles later and turned north on US 183 (the same 183 that goes past Kreuz's Bar-B-Que in Lockhart, Texas). Outside of Hays the highway became a two lane and as the pavement dried we could pick up the pace a bit. Though the road rose and fell across several rivers, the plain itself was rising ahead of us. The temperature rose into the 60s and those four-cylinder engines were singing and it was very pleasant ascending that plain.

We crossed Prairie Dog Creek into Nebraska and the speed limit dropped to 65. Please. On a dry road in the middle of nowhere? They must be kidding. The landscape rose and fell just like before and the road arrowed straight north through the farmland. The stubbled wheatfields had become early green cornfields and fields full of giant sunflowers taller than humans, their faces all pointed east as if faithfully waiting for the sun on this gray morning. Between the fields spread pastures dotted with cattle.

We crossed the Republican River and Harlan County Lake and began to rise up out of the valley when suddenly Nebraska Highway Patrol appeared at the top of a hill. Pop, pop - 86 and 84. S**t.

His overheads came on and he started into a high-speed u-turn, but we had stopped and dismounted and were taking our helmets off before he got all the way turned around.

He turned out to be a very polite young fellow, and indicated that if we maintained our good behavior he "might give us a break." This meant writing up the 86 mph ticket at less than 20 miles over the limit. In Nebraska 20 is a magic number -- over that and the fine more than doubles. Decorum was maintained and we got our break and as we separated, he was kind enough to turn around and head in the other direction.

Presently we came into the valley of the Platte River. It's just like in the history books, a mile wide and a foot deep, with multiple channels running in braids across the plain. The Oregon Trail, the California Trail, the Mormon Trail, and the Pony Express route all went up the Platte River, and a few years later Union Pacific built the eastern part of the first transcontinental railroad up this valley. The bulk of the Great Migration West that began in the 1840's and lasted half a century went up the Platte.

The railroad still runs beside the river and I-80 runs next to the railroad. Groves of woods grow between the tracks and the water and on the islands out in the braids of the river, and as we rode along the sun came out and lit all the green leaves with gold edges, creating a very cheerful prospect.

Being back on the slab after hours on a cross-country two-lane was a shift, but we could watch the scenery at a more leisurely pace even though we were going faster. Just set the cruise-control and stay away from the trucks. On an Interstate everything's so rounded-off to the next higher number that you can pay attention to the road quite some distance ahead, and you have a lot of time closer in to observe the passing landscape.

Riding along I imagined myself on horseback loping smoothly across the countryside. I remembered how integral horses were to daily life on the ranch. I was on a horse 8 hours a day that summer - after the third day all the hair was gone from the insides of my legs. Took years for that hair to grow back.

The horse was your natural ally with the cattle. They didn't like the cattle and wouldn't take any crap from them. If a steer tried to get sassy or refused to move, the horse would bite it. Steers didn't seem to feel much, but you could see they felt a horse bite.

You round up steers by moving the horse toward them and the steers move away. You head them in the direction you want by walking to one side of them or the other, and they go in the opposite direction. After you've collected a few into a little herd, others that you come across will join up pretty readily. It's a simple process and one that can't be rushed. In fact the faster you run at the steers, the faster they run away and in no time at all they're bolting in all directions and you have to go round them all up again. A good hand didn't let that happen. A good hand had a light touch and just gently nudged things along.

The Platte forks in the town of North Platte, and we continued on the Interstate along the South fork. Fifty miles later we exited into the town of Ogallala.

All of us being big Lonesome Dove fans, riding through Ogallala we talked about Augustus McCrae and those blue pigs and where Clare's horse ranch might be. We learned the first cattle drive from Texas had gone through there in 1869, and when the Union Pacific built a stockyard and loading ramp there in the early 1870's, Ogallala became a cattle-shipping hub.

Historian Robert R. Mahnken wrote in 1947, "Gateway to the northern plains was Ogallala from 1875 to 1885. At the little village on the Platte, Texas drovers during this decade delivered their trail herds of longhorn cattle by the thousands. Shrewd and calculating Wyoming and Nebraska cattlemen met in Ogallala's hotel and saloons with the Texas cattle kings and haggled over prices to be paid for the longhorns. A quick handshake, a jovial round of backslapping, a quick 'nip' at the bar, and bargains were sealed. Gold flowed freely across the tables, liquor across the bar, and occasionally blood across the floor as a smoking gun in the hands of a jealous rival or an angered gambler brought an end to the trail of some unfortunate cowhand on the stained boards of Tuck's Saloon. This was Ogallala during its ten years of fame as the point of delivery for the herds of Texas cattle being driven up the Western Trail to stock the northern ranges."

They're working hard in Ogallala to reclaim that heritage. We saw lots of signage about Ogallala being "the Cowboy Capital of Nebraska," and inviting us to The Real Boot Hill. We passed.

Peter, Paul and Janice Yeager on US 29. Photo: Eva Wilbert

We took State Highway 26 northwest out of Ogallala, the state's first scenic byway. It crosses the land between the forks and then heads up the North Platte. In a few miles we could see we were skirting the top edges of tall bluffs. The land dropped off sharply and we could see the North Platte running off in the distance.

The Oregon Trail had gone over these bluffs, down into a place called Ash Hollow. Wagon ruts still cut down the face of Windlass Hill where many a wagon crashed to the bottom. One recommended method for getting a heavily loaded wagon down this hill was to lock the brakes, chain the wheels to keep them from turning, cut a tree and tie it behind the wagon for drag, and then everyone grab a rope and hang on.

A man named William Kelly wrote in 1849, "the frayed rope parted, and the wagon slid, or more properly speaking, fell on top of the mules, upsetting and killing one on the off side and breaking the collar bone of the teamster, which was otherwise badly bruised; the bows were all smashed and the contents sent hopping down the steep. The wagon miraculously escaped any disabling fracture, thus enabling us to reload it and proceed without much delay. Two more moderate descents brought us into a lovely wooded dell." One mule killed and a broken collarbone, but the wagon was OK and Mr. Kelly was counting his blessings. Times were tougher then.

Today that lovely wooded dell is Ash Hollow State Historical Park, sitting between the steep bluffs and the North Platte, and in a few minutes we had blown by it and it was gone from the mirrors.

The land continued tilting up, rising before us right up to the clouds, like just over the horizon the road would touch their bottoms.

Another railroad paralleled the highway and a succession of coal trains rumbled toward us. Long trains of hopper cars, each piled high with an identical mound of coal passed by every five or ten minutes. The first one seemed like a whole lot of coal, and so did the second one and so did the third one. We lost count of how many coal trains we saw coming out of Wyoming, or how many empty trains we saw heading back. I wondered if the trains ever slept or if they ran all day and all night. That was a lot of damn coal. (As I recall, the Lower Colorado River Authority's electricity generation plant near La Grange, Texas runs on Wyoming coal.)

We passed more fields of giant sunflowers, and miles of prairie with cattle scattered across, and sometimes the land would roll so that you could see quite a good distance and there would be no distinguishing features all the way to the horizon. "Oregon Trail Crossing" signs were posted in several places along the highway, and the deep tracks were still clearly visible in the surface.

Maybe 90 miles past Ogallala, double mesas stood up from the plain off to the south. On a vastly featureless plain they stood like sentries, like the advance guard for something to come. A sign at the entrance to a gravel road said Courthouse and Jail Rocks, 5 miles.

Chimney Rock, Nebraska. Photo: Paul Yeager

A little further along we topped a rise and could see a tall spindle of rock sticking up out of a cone rising off the plain, kind of like a giant funnel upside down with the spout sticking straight up into the sky. Chimney Rock. The road to it was paved and the visitor center was only a mile or two off the highway, and I was glad when Peter leaned into the turnoff.

Chimney Rock would have been otherworldly to eastern eyes. One traveler in 1850 wrote, "Chimney Rock is a great curiosity to any person and the only way I can describe it is it looks like a big sweet potatoe hill (sic) with a pile of rocks on top something like a chimney." Another reported that it was ten thousand and forty steps around the base, no doubt working that out empirically. Others shot at the top of the rock and collected the chips for souvenirs.

Further up the North Platte sits a still larger mountain fragment, Scott's Bluff. From overhead it can be seen that these are all part of the same formation, and are all that's left of a range of mountains that stretched for over a hundred miles.

We stopped for the night in the town of Scottsbluff. Legend has it that a fur-trader named Hiram Scott became too sick to travel and was abandoned by his companions out on the prairie. When they returned, they found he had somehow crawled 60 miles to the base of this bluff before dying, and so they named it after him.

Next morning was cool and gray so we put on the full gear again and continued along the North Platte up into Wyoming. The first town of any size is Torrington, Wyoming, and as we drove in we became surrounded by big 350 Fords and 3500 GMCs and whatever the big-ass Dodge with the diesel is, all pulling fifth wheel trailers loaded with cattle and horses. They were heading to the fall livestock auction and the town was hopping. Trucks were everywhere.

We stopped for some pictures and then continued up the flat plain of the river valley. Before long I realized I could see mountains ahead of us. Like I looked up and suddenly there they were, craggy snow-covered masses rising commandingly up off the plain into the clouds. They looked like they were flexing their muscles.

It was the Laramie Range with Mount Laramie in the middle, a good sixty miles away. The perspective was such that as we were flying along at eighty-mumblesomething miles an hour I suddenly felt as if we had stopped advancing. As if the motorcycles were speeding along a treadmill and not really going anywhere.

The Platte circles around the north side of the Laramie Mountains and we followed it up through Casper where we stopped for gas and lunch. After a semi-decent meal at a semi-colorful cafe we headed west across the yellow Powder River flats to Shoshoni. Wyoming is a very yellow state it seems to me - every color in the landscape has an undertone of pollen yellow in it.

At Shoshoni we turned north into the Wind River Canyon. This is a lovely little winding ride through a pretty little canyon, and just below at a place called the Wedding of the Waters, the name changes to the Bighorn. Two sets of explorers had named the river in different places, and years later it was discovered that the Wind River that disappeared into the canyon was the same as the Bighorn River a hundred miles north.

Being in the mountains made me think of the first cowboy hat I'd bought as a working hand. I had gone into the general store with one of the older hands, and he had advised that I buy a felt hat. I was fancying a straw one, but he simply said a felt hat was the right hat for this country. Needless to say I bought the straw one.

I clearly remember the moment riding horseback high up on a mountainside when the wind plucked that hat off my head and sent it sailing like a kite across the valley to disappear miles away.

The felt hat, I learned, flexed in the wind and stayed on your head. It was also warmer and more waterproof. Poetically I was riding with the same cowhand who advised I buy the felt hat, and we watched it for several minutes before that hat finally disappeared in the trees across the bottom of the valley.

We followed the river to Thermopolis, home of the world's largest hot springs, and thought about stopping, but at this point we were within 60 miles of Meeteetse and like horses smelling the hay in the stable, we were eager to get along.

Traffic was light on the highway and there were no patrolling officers and forty-five minutes later we pulled up at the town limit signs, "Meeteetse - Where Chiefs Meet." The signs are a mile or so outside of the town itself, and we milled around for a little while taking pictures and soaking up the atmosphere. Things felt only vaguely familiar.

Meeteetse is a Shoshone Indian word meaning "meeting place." It sits in a picturesque wooded hollow along the Greybull River on the edge of the arid Bighorn Basin. The Absaroka Mountains rise up just to the west and march off to Yellowstone Park on the other side.

The valley of the Greybull is one of the lushest areas in the state. Long thick bright green grass and groves of aspen trees and cottonwoods run up both sides of the river in marked contrast to the dry flanks of the mountains. People have been raising cattle in this valley since the 1870's and cattle are still raised here - mostly we saw black and red Angus. Even today the flanks of those mountains are alive with antelope, coyotes, deer and elk.

We climbed back on the bikes and motored into town. Familiarity began to flood in as we drove slowly along the main road. There was the post office, there was the general store, there was the little cafe where we ate when we came into town, that's where the Blue Ribbon Bar used to be only it wasn't a bar anymore. Now it was a cafe. We parked the bikes across the street and looked over at it. It looked closed.

Janice, Paul, Eva and Peter at the Cowboy Bar.

The Cowboy Bar right behind us was clearly open. The Cowboy Bar has been in continuous operation since the 1880s, when Meeteetse had seven bars and eleven brothels and was notoriously tolerant of just about everything. Reportedly the only rule back then was that you couldn't rob or kill a local. A real live and let live kind of town.

We ordered a round of beers and began to unwind by looking around the bar. Several pictures of Butch Cassidy hung on the walls, and the bartender was still proud that Butch had been a former regular. Butch and Kid Curry and the Wild Bunch had drifted in and out of the Meeteetse area for almost ten years, and Butch had been in actions against the giant ranchers in the bloody Wyoming cattle wars. He was arrested out in front of the Cowboy Bar in 1894 at the behest of one of the ranchers.

Tom Horn, the famous "Shootist" had also been a regular, as had people named Bronco Nell, Laughing Smith, Swede Pete, Greasy Bill, and Shorty the Crock, among others. A little nook sits off the back room with an old eight-person card table in it, and you can just see the crowd of folks gathered around. The place is a living museum.

Somewhere in the second round of beer we began to let our hair down. After riding three days, it seemed we had arrived suddenly and it was a rush. Our reasons for coming began to pile out of us, and the bartender and the two other patrons were more than happy to be included in our excitement. The ranch was still in operation, they said, but things were probably real quiet out at the ranch and they urged us to go visit the current manager, Blackie.

More beer, more excitement, more people came in the bar and the party got bigger. They welcomed us like prodigal sons, long lost brothers. They were at least as jazzed about us being there as we were, and I guess we may have been the best show in town right then.

We caught up on some of the history of the town since we'd been gone -- the folks we'd known had passed on, the Blue Ribbon Bar had changed hands back in the '80s, the general store had closed in the early '90s with merchandise still in the display cases as if the store-keeper had locked the door one day and just not come back. Not much commerce in Meeteetse any more, but four or five bars continued to serve this town of 351.

One story spun in to another and time passed and the afternoon began to grow long. One fellow drew us a map on a napkin showing which back roads to take to get back up to the ranch, and the next day the map actually helped us find the place. And then we said our thanks and our goodbyes and made our way towards Cody and the closest motel. We'd had the beer we came to have and life was good.

Next morning Peter rented an SUV at the Cody Airport, and Eva drove us up the rocky back roads along the Greybull River toward the ranch. We passed an extraordinary meadow that stretched for miles before touching the base of the mountains. Several herds of antelope ran across the face of this meadow, and close by a pack of coyotes could be seen running through the brush. A cow with a calf noticed the coyotes and immediately began to go after them, but they were already heading away.

We passed a succession of No Trespassing signs, each more serious than the one before. The last one said, "No Huntin', No Fishin', No Trespassin', We're not foolin' and you're not welcome. This is your last chance to turn around." Peter and I kept assuring Eva and Janice that it was going to be OK, that the guys in the Cowboy Bar said Blackie'd be happy to see us, and we were confident he would be...

Actually I think we both felt bullet-proof. We had come this far and nothing was going to keep us from reconnecting with this place. All these signs were really welcome signs, telling us we were getting closer.

We crossed the Greybull on a low concrete bridge. Lining up and down both banks was a marching time capsule of rusting automobile carcasses, with the earlier ones like Bonnie and Clyde drove closest to the bridge, and fairly new ones maybe a hundred yards upriver and fifty yards down. They're put there to act as a breakwater during floods, to keep the land from washing away around the bridge, but after 45 minutes of driving through a landscape where the only man-made thing we could see were the dirt tracks of the road, this was a surprising and incongruous sight.

On the other side of the river the valley walls closed in and the road continued up and over and around and then there we were. We drove in past the stable and up to where the road ends at the gate to the ranch buildings.

Eva parked by the fence that circled the ranch buildings, and as I got out, a man wearing a weathered black cowboy hat walked briskly toward us. I guess we all instinctively looked to see if he was carrying anything in his hands. Janice said she was relieved he was carrying a can and not a gun.

"Is there something I can do for you folks?" he asked. You could tell he was wondering what part of "No Trespassing" did we need explained.

I introduced myself and said that my brother and I had worked here over thirty years ago. The official face of the ranch manager broke into a good neighbor's smile and right away he invited us over to his side of the fence, asking if we'd like a beer. Peter's face lit up. He was ready for a beer and Blackie had his brand. Busch - what are the odds?

Paul, Blackie and Peter. Photo: Eva Wilbert

The original building in the complex had been built of logs in 1893, a two-story central room with an enclosed balcony, flanked by single-story bedrooms on either side and a kitchen in the back. There was a giant wood-burning stove in the kitchen back when we worked there, and they cooked 3 meals a day on it for a dozen or more people and made it look easy.

Main Ranch House. Photo: Eva Wilbert

The big logs were painted dark brown and chinked with a home-made concoction of local gypsum and ash that was naturally bright white. Bleached buffalo skulls ringed outside the central area of the main building further offsetting the brown logs. Later buildings matched the style - a bunkhouse, a smokehouse, a wood shop, even a greenhouse. A little village way up in the mountains.

The earlier buildings had been built by A. A. Anderson, a true turn-of-the-century renaissance-man: he was a cattle rancher who was an early environmentalist, a Paris-trained portrait painter and founder of a school of architecture in New York. He hunted with Buffalo Bill Cody and worked with Teddy Roosevelt as one of the architects of the National Forest program, later serving as Superintendent of Yellowstone Forest Reserve. He vacationed with Thomas Edison, and his portrait of Edison hangs in the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian.

But what he's best known for around Meeteetse is having taken more than a few of the local ladies from the brothels up to the lodge to model for nude paintings. Folks around Meeteetse feel like there must be a large body of work someplace consisting entirely of nudes, but nobody's ever seen one. Several of the relationships lasted long enough for Anderson to have a cabin built for one lady or another, and cabins still stand on places like Betty Creek and Lizabeth Creek, while the lodge itself is on Jack Creek.

Blackie opened every building on the property for us, each one conjuring up memories of people and events from so long ago. I remembered my first day at work. I was presented with a horse from the corral and told to saddle it and get it ready for a day of herding cattle. I was rather proud that, even though I was a city boy, I knew the proper way to tie a cinch knot. I took a little extra care making sure the cinch was good and tight and that it was tied as neatly as the knot in a necktie.

We all went into the bunkhouse for breakfast and returned maybe 30 minutes later to ride out. I gathered my reins and as I stepped briskly up into the stirrup, the saddle rotated under my weight and I pulled it clean around and under the horse's belly. I fell backwards and landed on my butt and the horse reared up over me. The saddle was down in a place that he didn't like and he was trying to get it off, pawing the air and snorting. He started to buck and Frank the foreman reached out and grabbed the reins and settled him down.

I was yammering before I was completely up off the ground, protesting that I was sure the cinch was tight when I went to breakfast. Frank stopped me before I could get very far and let me know that I had pulled the cinch too tight, that a good hand rode with a much looser cinch that wouldn't rub blisters on the horse. Furthermore I shouldn't be leaving my horse with a tight cinch and then going off to eat breakfast. I should always loosen the cinch if I'm not going to be riding for a while, and since I hadn't done it, he'd done it for me. Walking away he said, "A good hand always checks his cinch." Pretty soon the other hands stopped laughing. I was glad to learn that lesson, though. Check your ride before you mount up.

Blackie made us feel we had the run of the place again, and we spent that day as if in a dream - forgotten details and vistas and smells and the way the air felt, reliving all of it now thirty years later with our wives. We took a lot of pictures and wandered around the property like kids again. We shared our stories and helped Blackie fill in a couple of paragraphs in the ranch's history, and by the end of the day we were all old friends.

South Pass, WY. Photo: Janice Yeager.

After that the roads took us back to the Oregon Trail to cross the continental divide at South Pass, then down through the amazing Flaming Gorge in Utah, through the headwaters valley of the Rio Grande and the yellowest aspen groves I've ever seen, to the old mining town of Creede, and then on to Taos and through the first snow of winter before we got out of the mountains and across the Llano Estacado into Lubbock, and finally back to Austin.

And as we rode, that summer on the ranch came forward out of memory and became tangible. It connected with the present, hit me going along the highway how my riding today has been shaped by that summer.

That's when I'd learned to love riding all day across the countryside for days on end. That's when I learned to appreciate the rural way of life, and how closely tied it was to nature's world. The shapes of the land, the geology that caused those shapes, the prairies and the woods, creeks and rivers, animals and people, soaking all that in day after day developed in me a taste for those qualities. Today I'm stimulated to connect dots I never would have seen without that exposure, and looking for connecting threads still drives me as I ride.

And so the bikes fly and we fly on them, like thoughts across the countryside. We briefly encounter the land, the animals, the people and their places and fly on, and we are so much richer for even the briefest encounter. That's why we get up early on a riding day. That's why we seek out the wild places, and why we ride to them the long way.

© 2003 Paul Yeager
Houston, Texas
September, 2002
pyeager@fyi-net.com