This night’s sleep was the boiled-down essence of timeless travel. Just lie down at darkness wherever it finds me, look at the stars, watch the moon rise, drift to sleep, and wake to different star positions and moon positions in the night. Pull the sleeping bag a little tighter against the small hours’ wind, but mostly relax and be still in the night. Dream timeless dreams of interactions with others despite my perfect solitude. No tent, no reading, no artificial light. The sky as my roof, the ground poking into my back and legs. Rise before dawn, hit the road again, ride beneath the fading stars and night sky, and dawn and sunrise find me in another place, a new landscape becoming visible in discontinuity from the night’s last visible landscape. Ride into the day when others join me, captives of time.

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West of Tatum, New Mexico

I am on a high open plain, in stretches as flat as western Kansas to the north, with slightly rolling plains to the south. I am about a hundred feet from United States 380, and again I will sleep on the bare ground next to a barbed wire fence under an almost cloudless sky. I absolutely love sleeping without a tent on desert nights. I love the simplicity of waking in the open morning air, dressing in my sleeping bag, stuffing my sleeping clothes in a bag, and taking off. There’s just no comparison to waking up to a light breeze of morning air brushing against your face. Opening your eyes to the morning stars puts you in a long line of wanderers stretching back to the beginning of consciousness.

I sit watching the afterglow of sunset pass through its shades of colors towards darkness on a perfectly flat horizon, a perfect line of blackness meeting a perfect line of orange light. The silence is powerful. I wonder if any experience I ever share will approach the absolute purity of this moment, and so many others I have experienced in solitude.