“They kill babies and fill them full of drugs to get them across the border.”
…A thousand miles after leaving a snowy December Colorado, I found some warmth in what became my new favourite environment; the desert. Big Bend National Park – America’s least visited National Park. Its distant neighbour the Grand Canyon has 15 times more visitors in a year; why’s that? Location or vicinity, I mean is it because it’s not on the way to anywhere or is too close to somewhere else? The winding Rio Grande gives the park its southern perimeter and its name. It also gives the country its border. But it wasn’t the river, canyons, cliffs or other geological phenomenon that kept me there, they were just, excursions, ride outs.
The thing that appealed to this anti-social light sleeper was the silence of the desert. No crickets, no wind, no distant traffic, not even planes overhead. Utter silence…
First light spans the horizon like a shallow rainbow outside my open tent; it’s hard to get perspective on it. Could be a headlight, or the top of an illuminated dome, but it’s just dawn. Just the first evidence of a new day and it’s very exciting. Too new to miss, too vast to view from my tent, so I run up a hill to take it all in.
Most days I ride out, off-road or paved I never do the same route twice other than to get fuel and water…
Graham’s first book ‘In Search of Greener Grass,’ the story of his trip due east from Essex, is available here.
