Life is most worth living when we take its very existence in our hands.

Orion, you do not wander the sky alone tonight. Tonight we walk together to the new dawn, you on your celestial path, I on my terrestrial path. Planets, night wanderers, tonight I am you, wandering the sky reflected in the road. My friends tonight are not books by candlelight or the companions of dreams but the animals of the night, foxes crossing the road in silhouette ahead, owls swooping from high tree perches to fly low across the road into brush at my approach, skunks startled at the roadside, both of us turning from each other in mutual fear and respect. I scare deer into darting across the roadside fence, freezing motionless on the other side. I call out to them, but they stay frozen hoping I’m talking to the owls.

I stop at a house lit up, the only one in thirteen miles close to the road, and get a bottle of water to take me to the dawn. Two old-timers sharing a beer laugh at the sight of me walking in, dressed for the cold, orange highway safety-vest on, holding an empty water bottle.

“Come in!” very friendly in the Texas night, “Stop by any time, there’s faucets outside if we’re not around.”

I walk a guy out. He’s heading home, but he pauses to tell me about two years spent on Kodiak Island in the winter, a different kind of cold he says. He shakes my hand in the night, “Good luck, enjoy yourself in Alaska,” and the three of us remain anonymous in the road night of desolate Texas desert.

Orion the dawn will swallow both of us up, drown you out and drown me out in the new day which must be shared with so many others, but for now I thank you for sharing your night with me. We have already bid goodbye to the evening planets, and now to the last warmth of day. Coyotes howl at us.

No flashlight for this night writing. The moon is my flashlight, headlight, guide, protector.

I am the dreamed Japhy Ryder tonight, true Japhy Ryder of enlightened mountain vision, instead of suburbia I pass through the desolate towns. I pass silently by the lamplit houses, unnoticed but by dogs, and then for passing under my own power rather than the comforting normal sound of a motor. Counterpoint to society, I live purity this night.

A meteor salutes my choice to use the night fully.

I follow my moonshadow into the deepening night. It moves beneath me, and soon it is following me as I race the moon to the horizon, a race I cannot win and it cannot lose, but I gain much ground for trying. An armadillo joins my cast of night friends, pink-eyed and slowly shuffling away unworried as my flashlight beam follows it, me joyous for seeing all these creatures alive which I usually see only as roadkill.

The road is a silver ribbon of reflected moonlight through featureless monotone landscape ahead of me. I come to a crossroads and on the other side a strong wind begins blasting me incessantly. It starts out as a sidewind. I lean my bike at ridiculous angles as I’m riding, and it almost blows over even leaned into the wind when I stop to put on my jacket. The road turns, in all darkness hours no more than five cars pass me, for twenty miles I have the road to myself. My road turns and my sidewind becomes a very slight component of tailwind.

I check my map by moonlight as I pass through another almost-silent town, and see I have to head back into the wind before it will be at my side again. I crawl into it, an unchecked wind across miles of open plains, cursing it but taking my curses back because the wind cannot be fought. It must be accepted more than anything else, because it so easily has the power to defeat me. I take an hour and a half to go eight miles on level ground, but my steady progress leaves behind ever-accumulating miles.

I stop and eat dinner at one am sitting on a vinyl couch in front of a small general store that won’t open for two days. The town is eerie, it is maddeningly loud. Everything slightly loose makes noise. A strip of tassels on the roof makes a racket, trash barrels roll in the street, flagpoles clang, loose pieces of corrugated steel twist and slap on barns. It’s unnerving because I am absolutely alone, I have never been so in isolation as this night’s ride. My isolation is emphasized because it is not the time for people, it is a time for wild night animals with pink glowing eyes that dig for food, time for wind that whips unceasingly across whole plains and valleys. I am but a visitor in this night, and all around me knows it. I am more comfortable sitting beside fences in the relative darkness with the wind only in my ears and in the grass, than in the artificial light of a town, with the wind punishing the artificial objects of man.

If I were to go mad, it would be on a windswept open plain. The incessant howling wind would always be in my ears. During windy periods I would beg the heavens for silence, but in silence I would be deafened by its roar and long for the relative quiet of a howling wind. On rare calm breezy days I would find sanity, but that sanity would soon be snatched away by some will-less roaring wind that cannot be escaped. Even hiding behind a hay bale or a small rise in the roadside, I know I am a cowering cornered animal, and the only way out is to face into the maddening wind again.

To punctuate the whole night, in the first light of day the wind becomes slightly more gentle but directly in my face, so just as effective in slowing me down. I am humbled.

My only companions to last the night through were skunks, tails held high; the moon, reliable light through the night; the shining silver road; the stars; and of course, the wind.