of a vast field that may stop at the horizon but probably doesn’t. The field is as flat as a skating rink. The Cadillacs are buried nose down up to their windscreens in the earth. Most visitors bring cans of spray paint. The graffiti is interesting. This is a sculpture both impressive and delightfully weird.
Our next halt is in nowhere. This is the Texas panhandle and Galileo was talking nonsense when he said the world was round. The world is flat, believe me. The road runs straight for thirty miles: not a house in sight, no animals, not even a tree. Telephone and power cables that have nowhere to go weave pointless patterns across this vast expanse of nothing. The boys on the bikes ride in a bunch. Travelling a British country lane the boys and I would be big. We would fill the road. Children and old ladies walking their dogs would find us threatening. In the panhandle we are minute pieces in a board game. The sun sparkling on bike helmets is the controlling ray operated by whoever plays the game. Reach the end of the board and we fall off.
Mid-morning we enter the Palo Duro State Park. Palo Duro is Spanish for ‘tough stick’ and the player of the board game has gouged a stick viciously across the board. The result is ripped red canyon country out of a Hollywood Western.
We stop. I take pictures while Eric and Jack strike attitudes at each other and exchange bike seats. Jack’s is a custom seat three inches lower than the standard model. Jack has long legs that have been cramping over the past day. I have watched from the Hummer as he wriggles from side to side and stands on the footrests or stretches out his legs beyond the engine.
Eric has the standard seat and has shorter legs. He claims to be comfortable with Jack’s seat. I suspect Eric would claim to be comfortable sitting on six-inch nails.
The road we follow from Palo Duro back to Turkey has humps and corners and views forever. Eric and Jack lean into the corners and are gone, chasing each other round the school yard, speedometers registering 120 miles an hour. Don sits on his Harley, solid and sensible as a granite Texas rock. The Harley thunders and competes in vibration with a pneumatic road drill. Only a rock could survive.
Meanwhile, Paul, the lawyer, cruises to the rear cradled in the leather upholstered luxury and law-office silence of his Honda Monster. And I bask in the massive comfort of the Hummer.
Saturday was country and western. Sunday started with Swan Lake turned up high and crystal clear on the satellite radio as I swooped across the void. Now I have Beethoven’s Eroica ramming me through the curves and over the low hills.
My sons would be listening to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. But a big Hummer? And the Texas panhandle? Believe me, whatever the music, this is serious bliss.
Midday and we have circled back to Turkey and are filling our tanks. This is the third time the Hummer has required gas. The tank takes thirty-five gallons and filling the tank takes a while. We are in a dry county. The help at the gas station reports that we must drive sixty-five miles in one direction or thirty-five in the other to refill the beer cooler.
The Sporting Club is across the street from the gas station. Complete a membership form at the club and you can order a beer. The big square dining room with its high ceiling is delightfully cool. The decor is dead heads on the walls together with framed photographs from the good ol’ days of old-timers crouching over dead meat on the hoof (even here, in west Texas, dead Indians are out of fashion – although a dead Mexican might pass muster).
A buffet is set up in the next room: a dozen different salads; fried chicken, grilled pork, broiled silverside, all the vegetables; custard and apple pie. I have the beef. Delicious. The service is typically Texas friendly, full of smiles and goodwill how-are-yous.
A party of freshly barbered weekend Harley riders occupies the next table. They ride top-money bikes with all the fixings: matching luggage, satellite radio, central heating, shoe polish and gold-tap toilets. They travel in company with a Harley support team hauling a Harley trailer behind a three-quarter-ton Ford truck.
Our route onward is a zigzag in search of corners to excite the kids. Paul, the lawyer, tends to hold back a little on the curves. He has ample power and acceleration to catch the pack. Keeping pace in the Hummer is less easy. Hummers aren’t designed for road racing. Beer is legal at our next gas stop, although drinking on the premises is forbidden. Eric finds a patch of grass to sprawl on the other side of a telephone post that marks the forecourt boundary.
Next stop is a 500-acre play ranch that Paul and Don have bought. The ranch is off a dirt county road. The BMWs gambol in the dirt. The Harley irons the dirt flat. The Honda is a little skittish and Paul is a little anxious. I drive the Hummer with the windows down and blast Texas with opera.
Texans like to hunt. Don is a leading member of the Dallas Safari Club. He has shot game in about every country where there is game to shoot: Alaska for bear, Argentina for dove, England for pheasant, South Africa for whatever has big teeth, and all the way to New Zealand for a mountain something-or-other. He and Paul purchased the ranch a few months back as a hunting reserve. They will install a weekend trailer home next month.
Don and Paul transfer to the Hummer for the drive to the trailer site while Eric and Jack scatter dirt competitively with their rear tyres. The site is on the crest of a bluff and has views for miles over what, in Africa, would be called ‘bush’. Texas bush is mostly dwarf cedar and mesquite. The bluff forms a hook and falls away steeply, right below the site to a fifty-acre patch centred on a spring-fed pond. Thin the mesquite and scrub cedar and you could watch the game come to the water – a Texan version of Kenya’s Tree Tops Hotel.
Paul isn’t a hunter. He wishes to sit out on the deck of an evening, sip a cold beer with friends and watch the animals.
Jack imagines mounting a twin-barrel heavy machine gun on the deck so he can blast anything that moves.
We drink beer while Don drives us round the property on the ring road they’ve cleared and down a track that twists between the trees to a second pond. Jack is searching the track for hog tracks. Hogs are domestic pigs gone wild, some twenty or thirty generations back. Jack has a hog obsession. He guns down a hog. He imagines he’s masting an al-Qaida bomber. Wasting is Jack’s solution to most problems and he enjoys a fine turn of phrase.
We leave the ranch around five p.m. and are faced with a four-hour drive home. We are 200 miles short of Dallas on a stretch of road under repair when Don hits a hole and bottoms his oil pan on a rock.
So now there are three bikes and Don drives the Hummer. I shift to the passenger seat, watch the country fly by and pester Don with endless questions. We have travelled 1200 miles of Texas in two days. We have enjoyed ourselves the way boys do. I have met extraordinary courtesy, kindness, generosity and good humour in every place we stopped. We have burnt enough gas to raise the planetary temperature a couple of degrees. And I have been saved from disaster by an angel: she of the Bourbon Street Café.
To Mexico, Tuesday 9 May
I leave tonight by bus for the Gulf of Mexico port of Veracruz. I have done in Dallas what a visitor should: watched a baseball match (my first), admired the play of light on the glass facades of Pei’s magnificent tower, and glutted on Tex-Mex and barbecue ribs. Today I am invited to
