AT THE TWIGHTLIGHT'S LAST GLEAMING

Growing up in Los Angeles, I would never have believed a photograph of what I saw this evening.

I took the horses out early tonight in hopes of terrifying someone.

We occasionally get dirt-bikers out here, racing up and down the roads, raising tons of dust and making that ultra-annoying WWWWWHHHHEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWW high-pitched noise.

I admit the noise is the worse part for me. My partial deafness is concentrated in the mid-range - which means high and low pitches come through where normal voices and sounds don't. They come through EXTRA irritating.

But when we get bikers who are out here obviously to 'just have 'fun', I will either go out, stand in the middle of the road and force them to stop -- or follow them with my truck. block them on some dead-end path -- and give them a stern lecture on how these are NOT public roads, these are PRIVATE roads which we LIVE on, and if they wanna run their little cycles they are gonna have to go ELSEWHERE like the Sand Dunes outside of Yuma and do so QUICKLY before the county sherriff I have called shows up.

I'm 5'9", in my fifties, and believe me, I can make anyone under the age of 43 and 2 months on a bike SHAKE in their little black boots.

Which is what I was intending to do when I took the horses out, but as an additional threat, cut them off with two horses, neither of which has ANY fear of machines, motors or people.

But before any dirt bikes returned, I caught sight of the clouds glowing in the last beams of the setting sun.

And suddenly the silly dirt-biker didn't matter at all.