Balmorhea State Park, West Texas
If you’ve ever been adept at making fire, you’ve been pleased with yourself at least, I’d venture, once per each and every time you’ve made that flame bold up and glow.
So imagine, then, you fellow folk who’ve known the joy of making a burning good night out of nothing more than a few logs, a match, and whatever you may have done in-between (but mind you, little to very no lighter fluid, etc. should have been involved in this feeling of unsurpassed pride), that you were in the middle of most Western Texas, perhaps one of the most quintessential “Western” places you could be (assuming your definition of the West involves cowboys, beans around a fire, truly remote expanses and at least a semi-real danger of having something actually dangerous happen), and you had created such a fire in the midst of a West Texan Plains wind. We’re talking upwards of at least many-miles-an-hour. Cooked hot dogs and s’mores over that nearly parallel to the Earth blowing burning fire. Sipped drinks, lived in and outside of our Bus watching the big grand stars that hover over this two-counties-away-from-Brewster nowhere land that I have truly and deeply come to respect and feel a kinship toward over these past few years here.
Through all of any trouble and turmoil that may arise in the daily to day living that comes with my good gorgeous Lady and I’s meanderings through this world, as right or wrong as anyone might think they prove, I can only say that in the end and when it comes down to it, every glance at the smooth slide of her cheek into that curved up almost always smile, gums blaring, nose slightly flared like a baby raccoon in his first time licking a cactus, makes me just shiver with anticipation to keep living every single second of this day as it comes and with the easy good wonder that whether another one comes or not, at least I’ll have this. But then, when the next moments do come, I just revel it all in the memory, immediate presence and promise of the next, and doing it all in one glowing breath, well that’s a cowboy’s campfire on the real experience of living homeless and on the road if I’ve ever heard the definition.
