2 g fa
There is a road out of Kingman that most people only use to get somewhere else. Stockton Hill runs north out of town, past the last of the houses and the last of the streetlights, and then it just goes, straight and patient, up toward Dolan Springs and the Joshua trees.
I took it Sunday evening with no plan beyond seeing how far the light would hold. The town quits all at once out that way. One minute there are mailboxes and a feed store, the next there is nothing but creosote and the road running out ahead of you like somebody unrolled it and forgot to come back for it.
The Joshua trees start about fifteen miles up. People call it a forest and it does not look like one at first, just a few of them standing off at odd angles like they wandered out and got lost. Then there are a hundred. Then there are more than you can count, spread across the flat with their arms up in every direction, none of them touching, all of them holding still. It is the only forest we have got out here and it takes a while to agree that is what it is.
I pulled off at a cattle guard where the fence has been down long enough that nobody remembers who owned it, and shut the engine off. You do not get real quiet very often. That was real quiet. The Glide ticking as it cooled, and then not even that. Coyotes started up somewhere off to the west, worked at it for a minute, and quit.
There is a pickup abandoned a half mile further along, sitting off the shoulder with the hood open and the tires gone flat into the dirt. It has been there every time I have ridden that road, which is going on four years now. I always think I will stop and have a proper look and I never do. Some things out here are better left as scenery.
Rode back in after full dark with the headlamp doing all the work and the temperature finally dropping into something reasonable. End of August, and the evenings are starting to give a little back. That is the part of the year I ride for. The desert stops being a thing you get through and turns back into a thing you go out into on purpose.