The deep orange hues of the setting sun painted the butes a deep shade red, their long shadows crawling over the grey, empty road ahead.
It had been early morning when Diego had left the flickering lights of L.A. behind him, his body and mind heated and tensed, heavy with worries, and now he was thankful for the setting sun.
His helmet and leathers, still dampened from the searing heat, were now cooled and soothing and his troubled thoughts had quieted, turning deeply inward.
Father had called this trip his Willoughby. To Alejandro, it was simply his son's means of escape, a place Diego's mind had manufactured when he could no longer cope with his stress. The word carried an implicit, double meaning, a warning to his idle, feckless son who might lose himself in his fantasy.
For Diego, it had always been real. At night, he dreamed of the riding in the vast, lonely desert and by day he planned, studying maps and taking courses on wilderness survival, his whole life spent in prepartion for the moment.
For a time, Alejandro's words had laid heavy on his mind and heart, speaking to some small part of him, anxious, filled with an aching dread, and odd sense of doom and fate. Many days, he simply stared at the bike in the driveway, fearing even to dream.
In the end, even Alejandro couldn't silence the inner voice, and the sweet dreams returned. He began with small excursons, traveling just far enough to see his world reduced to a small strip of shimmering light. Just long enough to hear the warning shouts in his head quieten to small and soft whispers.
Now, with each mile, each turn, and each bluff and bute, that life fell further behind him. Tonight, L.A. was so far distant that it might only have existed in some day of the past.
On this road, in the dying light, the last vestiges of his doubts, his tensions were falling away and the welcoming lassitude of peaceful fatigue was claiming him.
The moon was rising now, casting the landscape into subtle hues of silver and grey; the soft warming scents of jasmine and colitas rose up around him, lulling his drowsying senses.
It was time to pull over.
His wearied eyes scanned the horizon, and found a small flicker of light.
Soon, a slender, wispy trail emerged from darkness, the soft, welcoming glow beckoning from some point along it's length.
Diego came to a stop, pausing before it, a small ghost of his earlier dreads flittering around in his mind.
Then, he pulled out into the dusty sands, leaving the road far behind him.