First Season, 1947

“Adam left Santa Fe on a Tuesday morning in early April with his saddle in the bed of the Ford and sixty dollars in his pocket. He had a rope coiled on the seat beside him and a thermos of coffee wedged between his boots, and the road north was empty and straight and still cold enough that the breath he blew across the coffee made a cloud against the windshield. The Sangre de Cristos stood up sharp and white to the east. The sky was that deep morning blue that the high country makes in the spring, a blue so clean it looked like somebody had rinsed it overnight. He had been sleeping in the truck for the better part of three weeks, which saved money on motel rooms and was about as comfortable as it sounds, which was to say not very. The steering wheel had an inconvenient way of finding his knee at about four in the morning, and the springs in the seat had located every sore spot on his back and were holding them ransom. But Adam had slept in worse places. A foxhole in the Ardennes with ice on the blankets. A blown-out farmhouse outside Bastogne where the wind came through the walls and the rats came through the floor. By those standards, a Ford truck with a roof and four tires and no one shooting at it was a considerable improvement. His feet ached. They always ached. The Battle of the Bulge had frozen them badly enough that the doctors at the VA hospital in Albuquerque said he would be lucky to walk without pain, and the doctors had been right. They had also said he probably shouldn't run, and that remained to be seen.”

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