The Twenty Third Day in America....

We slept, then came out into night already and everything closed except one emptying restaurant where the manager, and his sister were starting new lives and we drank together a bottle of Jack Daniels, which tasted better when we got to the second one and sang Johnny Cash songs till Andy fell backwards without injury, holding onto his guitar and mid-solo on his harmonica. We covered him with a blanket and when he woke next day his fingers were still on the chords of 'Ring of Fire'.

This was where we turned North again, and saw the Ravens, those most magnificent birds on the planet, sitting on the road signs out of town telling us not to go.

And they themselves were reason enough, even were there not a thousand other reasons, to come back.

We drove through the town of Show Low, named after a winning (or losing, somebody has to) hand of Poker and down through a deep canyon in the Apache lands (Andy was beaten, for money, at pool by an old Apache Truck Driver in Lubbock. He told Andy after the game that he had made a living for a while playing Pool. I was beaten in the same bar by another Truck driver, a girl, who was crying between shots, tears falling on the green felt. She said it was because of something her boyfriend had said to her, something very bad, she said, but she still won the game, also for money) where we stopped and approached the edges in vertigo and wonder and a Raven flew down and walked about near us for a while until we had to go.