January 22, 2005; Fort Stockton, Texas

This morning the battery arrived. Anxious to get on the road again, I hoofed it across town and back before 9:00. With the battery installed, I crossed all available appendages and turned the ignition switch with baited breath. Nothing; no lights, no clicks, bumps or whirs. Nothing. Damn. I read the manual to see that I did not miss anything. Yes, I read the manual. Indeed, I had installed the battery the first time. For once I was hoping to be wrong. Double damn. I even bought a battery tester to make sure the battery was good. It was. Triple damn!

What besides a battery could cause electrical problems? Fuses! Why hadn’t I thought of it before? It was so simple. Too simple, it turns out. All the fuses were intact. At this point I radioed the pilot, Mr. F'enheimer, to drop payload. Hearing the F-bombs hit in rapid succesion made me feel a little better, but the bike was still down.

Now, at my wits end, I called a Harley shop. They suggested that there might be a ground wire loose. A plausible culprit- I was on 12 miles of bumpy gravel not half an hour before. However, I realized that any more amateur diagnosis would probably aggravate the situation. Another call to the insurance company, and a tow truck was there just after noon; enough time for me to eat lunch and try to take the most downtrodden picture to date. Don’t think I got that to work either.

Another 110 miles down the road and the bike was unloaded at Legacy Harley Davidson in Odessa, Texas. I told the tech what had happened, he may as well have had a big cartoon question mark over his head. Not a good sign. Never the less, the bike wasn’t in the stall for ten minutes when I heard the V-twin rumble again.

Turns out the culprit was a fuse block on factory recall from Harley. However, I wasn’t notified since I was not the original owner of the bike. Freebie! While I was there, I got a new front tire and tied up a couple little odds and ends. Total cost of the ordeal was about $375, but I needed the battery and tire anyway. All I really lost was a couple of days.

Back in Fort Stockton, Tom invited me out for a drink. It was Saturday night after all. We went to La Fiesta. An interesting place; the fusion of a Mexican Discotec and a southern honky-tonk. I have been to neither, but I have somehow derived the authority to mak the call. It was a Disco-Tex.

With conversation drowned out by the dominating Latin beat, Tom directed my attention the dance floor. Like a strange ritualistic ceremony the dance floor was empty. Then a new song would start. Two or three ladies would step on the dace floor, quickly followed by almost the entire bar population. Within seconds the floor was a swirling mass of tight jeans, thin blouses, and Sunday-best white cowboy hats. People would generally pair off, but everybody was constantly circling to their left, as if caught in some kind slow-motion dance vortex. Then, to confuse me even more, they all left when the song was over only to return a song or two later. This went on for the entire night; enter, dance vortex, exit, enter, dance vortex, exit. Having been thoroughly confused, Tom took me to another bar.

This time it was a regular pool table & jukebox bar. Now we could converse. I spent the remainder of the night trying to de-bunk Tom’s personal philosophies. Most of the time being spent on fug-ged-aboud-it (forget about it). Tom maintained that fug-ged-aboud-it was a horrible attitude for a person to have, while I maintained that fug-ged-aboud-it was a great attitude to have. In the end our philosophical differences turned out to be purely semantics.

The evening concluded around 2:00am. Tomorrow I would head of to Big Bend again to see what I missed before.