RP 5/5 amen.

I left the cheapest motel behind and headed at last down the road I’d really come for.

The way it works is this. For a hundred some-odd miles, out to the halfway point at the border it’s all still just a monotony of dry and broken Montana, cow-burnt all to hell with no extant ciénega in sight, except that by the time you make it that far you’re suddenly up over eight thousand feet and the road’s promise is coming to fulfillment and you never can help smiling about that.

So I smiled, but I was dead tired to the point of danger.

Nestled up high in Pueblo Park, I got off on a dirt track and parked under a ponderosa and tried to nap. Even with all that elevation and shade, it was just too much June for comfort and I was parched again, waking cranky if I’d ever actually slept at all.

It was strange, because in all the dozens of times I’ve come this way, I’d never been this out of sorts. Usually the peace of the ecosystem and the sense of being home, winter spring summer or fall, are enough to wipe away any moodiness. This time I was running on empty. But the stop was enough to take the edge off the danger, and so I sat up and soldiered on.

A mile or two back into it, coming down the 40 MPH curves of the San Fran River as it cuts toward very modest civilization, I saw what I was meant to see.

This time it was three giant wild turkeys, the biggest one trailing, gobblin’ across the road like they owned the place and strutting off without haste into the yellow grass of the roadside.

Nothing as spectacular or rare as a coatimundi or a jag, not even a first sighting of the species, not even the adrenal rush of a pack of pigs. But just right enough to cheer me and push me forward to where I needed, will always need, to end up.

In some more perfect world someday, one of those birds will grace a Mimbres platter on Thanksgiving Day deep in the land I love.

In the meantime, I’m moving to a Montana soon. I’m gonna be a dental floss tycoon.

That’s Zappa. The prophet of those who wander without a compass in the times of too little sleep.