You are now beyond Hope

Said the sign just outside the speck of Hope. I say speck because it doesn't rate as a dot on my map, so it's not really a town, more like an old fashioned trading post. A store, an R.V. park, a church (the church seems strange, but alright) and that's it. The clerk behind the counter tried to convince me to rent the store owner's r.v. instead of pushing on to Salome: "it's only 6 miles to Salome, but you have to go up a really big hill; "it's going to be 111 degrees today!", "I'll make you dinner!" She almost had me convinced, but I've learned quickly that desert life is difficult: jobs are scarce, towns are few and far in between, and the people seem to be very transitory. Other than actual business owners, it seems that people tend to pick up and go at will, looking for a way to make a dollar. I meet a store clerk yesterday who had only been on the job for a few months; she and her husband moved (they lived in a kind of trailer called a fifth wheel, which they could tow around with their truck) when the wanted, and were hoping to see more of the country that way. And now this clerk, who had just had a baby with her husband and only had the job for two months, was desperately trying to sell me on the store owner's r.v. Maybe he gave her some sort of commission. The clerk said he owned the store, and the r.v. park, and I guess there was actually a golf course too, which he also owned. He was literally the owner of Hope; I guess the clerk was hoping for her own little piece (I pushed on to Salome; the hill turned out to be nothing, and I was in town in no time.)

The clerk I met yesterday, Heather, said some interesting things about the people in Bouse, and the people of the west in general: they seem to a person to have some sort of bi-polar disorder. Friendly one minute, distant the next, as though they really needed someone to talk to, but then realize your a stranger and that they really don't like strangers. Sort of like the desert: it's great to see this wondrous new place for the first few hours of the day, but then you realize you're in an alien environment and wish it would disappear, or that you could be somewhere else.

The desert truly is beautiful in the morning (albeit 5:30 am); 70 degrees, red mesas just starting to reflect the sun, cacti reaching up with green arms to the blue sky, grasping at the moisture carried in the breeze. Lizards with their long tails scurrying away from the road as I ride by, and jackrabbits hopping into the brush as their giant radar dish ears pick up the tread of my tires smoothly passing over the crushed rock of the road. But a few hours after sunrise, nothing moves but the occasional mourning dove. Everything goes into hiding, including a solitary biker headed into an old adobe restaurant for breakfast and shelter from an angry yellow sun.