The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [102]
Suddenly, I can’t stop laughing. If I had wanted to alter my reality, achieve a true escape from my life in San Francisco, I had certainly succeeded. It’s so far away I can barely imagine it—my apartment on Nob Hill on the cable car line, my boyfriend Michael making coffee after an all-night party in some Multimedia Gulch warehouse with electronic music and designer drugs, not to mention the everyday realities of refrigeration and indoor plumbing. And for fun, an afternoon at Baker Beach under the Golden Gate bridge, a motorcycle ride to wine country, or a weekend at Harbin Hot Springs for baths and massages.
I rumble past the now-lifeless gas station and head into the green mountains, passing a village with houses made from mud and straw. It’s a tight jumble of rectangles standing on a natural shelf between the road and the river with smoke rising lazily from metal pipes sticking sloppily out at angles from red-tiled roofs.
The sun is bright and hot but the air is still cool. The only other person on the road this morning is a man in blue Mao pants, jacket, and cap pulling a cart of twigs toward the village. He must have been up to gather them before dark.
Centuries ago the peasants lived the same way, in mud and straw houses with wood-fuelled cooking fires. I catch a whiff of smoke and then it’s all wilderness again, only mountains and trees as I make my way up a series of switchbacks.
Carla King is an adventure travel author who specializes in riding unreliable motorcycles around the world. Her Motorcycle Misadventures dispatches have been published on the Internet since 1995, in realtime from trips around America, China, India, Europe, and Africa. She is a member of the Wild Writing Women and co-founder of Self-Publishing Boot Camp. You can track her down at carlaking.com. The story “Alone, Illegal, and Broke Down” is excerpted from her upcoming book, The China Road Motorcycle Diaries.
MARY CAPERTON MORTON
Wilding Horses
In wildness is the preservation of the world.
—Henry David Thoreau
NOT FAR FROM MY HOUSE IN THE HIGH DESERTS OF northern New Mexico is a large tract of land held by the Bureau of Land Management. It’s wide-open land on top of a plateau above the Galisteo River dam. Some years ago two horses were dumped there and left to fend for themselves. Nobody looks after them, but they seem to do pretty well. They have the Galisteo for water, a few cottonwoods for shade and several hundred acres of scrubby grass for grazing. Now unapproachable, the horses are not wild by birth, but made so by circumstance.
One January morning I was walking my dogs across the BLM tract, following a rutted path that snakes across the vast treeless plateau. As my two dogs and I came over a small rise, we found ourselves less than hundred yards away from the wild horses. We were downwind and both grazers startled when they saw us. I had seen the chestnut and palomino before off in the distance, but never so close. Now I could see the scruff of their red and cream winter coats and the snarls of tumbleweed in their tails.
My older dog and I stopped and stared at the horses, but they ignored us and focused on my puppy Dio, who had been racing on ahead. He was much closer to the horses, curious and oblivious to any danger. Worried, I whistled for him and at the sound, the horses charged.
In my experience most horses will run down a dog if they have a chance. My own childhood pony loved to harass any strange dog, cat or small child that dared enter her pasture. Some horses chase dogs just for fun and some will kill a dog if they catch it. These shared their land with a pack of coyotes and while no coyote could take down a healthy horse, these two evidently had a strong distaste for anything resembling a four-legged predator.
Little Dio took one look