Lost and found in America
A pamphlet I read in a truck stop described this part of New Mexico as “where the Great Plains meets the Rockies.”
The stretch of road from Tucumcari to Albuquerque was described as “featureless” in the brochure, but whoever wrote that was missing so much. Riding my horse Rain Dance (Rainy) at a slow walk, I noticed the muted shades of rock and plant life. I felt the ever-present breeze, getting cooler by the day. We crossed paths with roadrunners and antelope. On this journey, my dog Gypsy has developed a skill for flushing out jackrabbits hidden to me until their sudden burst of movement.
We’d been traveling on a composite of three roads: old Route 40, Route 66, and Route 54---the secondary road my animals and I had been following for months. In Santa Rosa we came upon a split, marked with a collection of signs.
I jumped from the saddle and pulled out my map, laying it open against Rainy’s side. Route 54 took a deep dive south, all the way to Mexico. Route 40 continued west with 66, going along
