Steins, Ghost Town

The next day, on to Steins, a ghost town at the border of New Mexico and Arizona. A weird fossilisation of remnants - inhabitants from the 1900s, the 50s and the 80s all left tidemarks of junk behind. Built in the 1860s, The town died in the 1950s for lack of water, after the trains stopped stopping. Hippies moved in in the 80s, then left when the land was sold. There are wooden and adobe ruins out by the railway, bottles everywhere, corrugated tin roofs and cracked, dessicated wood. The houses were built close together because of the danger of Apache attack, and over the nearest hill is a high peak, the border of 'Doubtful Canyon', so named because of the serious danger of Indian ambushes during vital trips for water. The climate is so arid here that everything lasts forever - an 1880s book of Scottish Chiefs still sits incongruously on a bookshelf, and I wonder what sort of inspiration it gave its original owners - small chairs from the 19th century left outdoors for 100 years and still intact, one chip of cracked blue paint left to give away their original, cheerful colour.

We are told by our guide that it takes the surrounding cactii 65 years to grow to around 8 feet, and the ones with arms are over 200 years old. If you could cut into their skin and extract the imprints of centuries of sound, you would hear the hoofbeats of Apache horses. I eat the fruit from the top of a small, squat cactus. It tastes like a jalapeno without the heat, and the seeds are nutty. The Indians ate them raw as fruit, the settlers made marmalade with them. Unpredictably, it doesn't make me ill.

Odessa, Lordsburg and Annie

Riding with Annie is great, she plays me 'the Wild, the Innocent and the E-Street Shuffle' and explains that Bruce Springsteen is a product of the New Jersey seaboard, his band played wooden-decked beachfront bars to begin with, and they tried to preserve that rabble rousing, festival feel. I'm still not convinced by him, but it's good to have some context. Later, in the darkness, we are singing along to 'Return of the Grievous Angel' and as 'Hickory Wind' comes on, a tear comes to my eye. When Annie was young, she says she thought she heard God calling her name, she was convinced that she had been earmarked for something special; the irony being that this is perhaps a universal experience. I think her music is amazing; we talk a little about lyrics, how they come from buried images, imprints of the world that sink in, disappear, then without warning float up again like a bridgehead between other lines, and the song, with a will of its own, begins to make sense. We both use the metaphor of water to describe this, and it's an opaque, mysterious water carrying debris like a flood, only some of which we can rescue; and the items we choose are chosen with the logic of dreams. (Reading this back, I have no idea whether Annie would describe her own lyric writing this way, it's very possible she just nodded tactfully as I rambled on)

We stay at Lordsburg, eerily/ wearily similar to Odessa, despite the intervening 8 hour drive. We watch Katharine Hepburn in the mind-collapsingly tedious 1930s comedy 'Quality Street', I am asleep before the end, beer still clutched in my cold dead hands.

Austin, Denton and into the desert

We stop at Texarkana, play shows in Austin, then Denton, and drive on through a wilderness of pale blue rusting metal, discarded oil derricks, long ridges of sand, scrub and cactus, leading up to far away mountain ranges. As an enforced tribute to the Bee Gees, we stay at Odessa on the first night, in a motel 6. Over the hotel car park, a vista of unintelligble silver and light, an evil empire space base from Star Wars: in reality a compressed air factory. Oil refineries glitter on the horizon. I ask the hotel staff if there is a bar nearby and they laugh out loud.. of course not! Odessa prides itself on being 'the Sahara of the South West'

Annie and I are riding together, and she forgets we are low on gas until the gauge is reading zero. We look for any exit with a petrol station, and find only miles of dereliction: 50s era cafes and stations all boarded up, the wood fissured and cracked by the heat and dryness, paint flaking away through 50 degree summers. There are 300 miles of desert between us and El Paso. Just in time, we find a small town that provides us with gas and breakfast. We drive all day and reach El Paso in darkness, which, it seems to me is the best way to see it, a sea of light breaking against the Rio Grande, the spiky mountain range - cleft rims behind which some last red rays fall away over Mexico. El Paso seems to last forever, glittering below the freeway, falling steeply down and down. A ghostly train keeps us company to our right, driving in perfect tandem with us, noticeable only through the occasional gleam on the windows, which we first spot with a sudden shock. Everyone is completely exhausted by now, probably because we are drinking in each others rooms late into the night, even on our nights off.