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Descending the piney heights of Ruidoso, New Mexico, I left the cool shadow of the Lincoln National Forest and came into the wide-open hush of the desert. The air warmed. The land flattened. Green gave way to gold. Within an hour, I was skirting the blinding dunes of White Sands, a surreal stretch of gypsum desert that looks more like snowdrifts than sandbanks.

From there, I followed long, empty roads across southern New Mexico, the terrain widening into the northern fringe of the Chihuahuan Desert—wind-scoured basins, distant mesas, and that particular kind of silence you only find in places where very little grows. As I curved toward Duncan, Arizona, the land softened. The Gila River had carved out just enough fertility for agriculture to make this valley prosper—until labor politics and immigration enforcement began to unravel that legacy.

As I rolled into Duncan, population 670, I had my heart set on the Simpson Hotel—an old place I’d flagged during route planning, promising charm and character. But when I got there, the door was locked. No note. No lights on inside. A black cat blinked her yellow eyes serenely through the storefront window, unperturbed, even when I cupped my hands around my face to see if anyone else was at home.

The Door Was Locked, But I Stayed

Some travelers would’ve taken the hint and left town right then. But I wanted to sleep in the classic territorial building that opened its doors in 1914 as the Hotel Hobbs.

I shrugged out of my riding jacket and sauntered across the street to the Gila Valley Feed & Hardware. Its facade is classic midcentury: a long stretch of front-facing windows framed in aluminum, beneath a flat blue awning that shaded the sidewalk just enough. Inside, I found a display of Case knives, horse halters and riding gear, and the kind of handwritten signage that tells you everything you need to know:

Discontinued—get ’em while they last.

Back-ordered, but Amazon doesn’t have them either.

I quickly identified the proprietor, a slim man wearing the desert uniform of boots, jeans, snap shirt, and cowboy hat. “They were here earlier,” he said, when I asked about the hotel owners. “Probably just out for a bit.”

He offered me a chair by the window, and customers came and went—there was a big run on black sunflower seeds that afternoon.

Thanks to the imprint of road magic on my early life as Buckskin, a missing innkeeper was nothing to be alarmed by—at least not yet. I still get a thrill from pulling into a new town, from the promise of unknown cafés and creaky beds to conversations with strangers. Younger people who never grew up road-tripping—they fly everywhere, rent a car, then fly out—will never get the chance to experience these thrills.

Road Magic and a Question from Home

When I texted Matt and my grown boys a picture of the hotel’s facade, his vigilant response was instant: Are you sure this is a good idea?

I was. I’d seen enough to trust the place—and the hardware store owner, who had already started calling around town to see if anyone else had seen the hotel’s owners, wasn’t giving me the side-eye or nudging me toward the next town down the road.

I watched the hotel the way you watch someone napping in a sunbeam—quietly, without worry. I occasionally glanced up from a game I played on my iPad, but I didn’t feel stuck—I felt rooted.

Eventually, a dusty white minivan pulled into view, and out stepped Deborah and Clayton, owners of the Simpson. They’d been a few towns over buying a water heater and thanked me for waiting.

Deborah got my room ready with air-dried linens and a thoughtful touch in every corner. As she worked her magic indoors, Clayton and I sat in the garden, enveloped in the scent of desert dusk after he’d watered the herbs and roses. His garden is a patchwork sanctuary—half desert whimsy, half outsider art installation. Cats lounged on sun-warmed stones and slipped through gaps in the walls like smoke, except for Malachy, the queen of them all. She took her rightful place on my lap and permitted me to stroke her beautiful gray tortoiseshell back.

When I texted Matt a photo of her in a state of bliss, he replied: You’ve found heaven.

Tableaus made of found objects peeked out from the shade of olive trees and vines. One corner featured a mural with a wide-eyed face and a Latin phrase painted in red: Hic habitat felicitas—“Here lives happiness.” And for that night, it was a truth.

A Past Adventure, a Shift in Dad

After a shower and shampoo, I saw I’d missed a text from Dad. “Where are you? Did you land okay or are you still on the road? What’d you see today?”

He was concerned about my safety, of course—but more than that, he was emotionally invested in the journey itself. What it meant to me. This was a turning point in our recent history—it had been a dozen years since we last traveled together.

Back in 2013, I was promoting a book I’d written, and the tour brought me to Las Vegas, where Mom and Dad had a winter home. After my speech and book signing, I stayed on for a few days, and the three of us—Mom, Dad, and me—decided to visit Death Valley National Park. I was born a couple of hours from there, in Barstow, California, which is also in the Mojave Desert. Desert people love a desert vacation.

As the skies began to purple over an area called Racetrack Playa, the dry lakebed where the famous sailing stones are found, we consulted our map for a shortcut back to The Atomic Inn motel. Thinking we’d found one, we followed an unmarked gravel road. We took a promising fork, then another. Each fork seemed to lead forward—until the road simply gave out in a desert cul-de-sac, the gas gauge dropping fast.

I remember the relief when we finally rolled into a gas station on fumes. But I also remember the laughter. We’d come close to being rattled, but never tipped into panic. We were alive in that particular way only a brush with real consequences can deliver.

We made it,” Dad said, shaking his head like it was the most fun he’d had in years. And it was. Even Mom—who, as you recall, hates a gas gauge under half—kept her cool.

That was when they were still game—curious, hungry for experience. I didn’t know it then, but I’d miss that version of them. I’d carried that version with me—hoping it would flicker back.

So when Dad later said, “We’re done road-tripping, Sweetheart,” it landed hard. The part of them that once said yes had started saying no.

But something shifted in Duncan. Dad couldn’t get enough of the Simpson Hotel, asking questions, imagining possibilities like meeting there for a family reunion. It felt like the tide was turning. Just a little.

Maybe he was beginning to see himself differently. Not as someone who’d stopped, but someone who could still start again.

I hated to cut him off when he was enjoying his tour of the Simpson’s garden, but dinner was non-negotiable—”a must is a must,” as he used to say.

“Dad, I’ve got to get something to eat. There’s a pizza place in town, but it closes in half an hour.”

I walked fifty paces to Humble Pie, a no-frills pizza joint painted the same dusty blue as the evening sky. The sign was hand-cut, the windows a little fogged, and there was no dining room—just a flickering OPEN sign and the warm smell of melted cheese and oregano. The pizza wasn’t transcendent, but it was hot, honest, and sustaining—just like the place itself. In a town with few options, it was exactly what it needed to be.

Holding Space for Contradiction

I brought my pepperoni-mushroom back, then I had my hosts all to myself. We spent the evening talking. Clayton had been part of Andy Warhol’s Factory crowd in New York, while Deborah came from civil rights roots—her father had marched in Selma. They were artists and thinkers and caretakers of a place that could’ve crumbled, but instead vibrated with life.

As the evening deepened, so did the conversation. We talked about the state of small towns since the pandemic, how even places like Duncan—places you might think would be insulated—had absorbed the same divisive currents as everywhere else. They spoke of neighbors with warmth and history, but also with weariness—the kind that comes from trying to hold a community together across painful differences brought on by COVID and a bitter political climate. There was no neat bow on that part of the conversation. No need for speeches. Just the shared reality that goodness and ignorance, love and prejudice, often live uncomfortably close together.

The evening reminded me that the road doesn’t just offer escape—it offers perspective. And sometimes, the balm of conversation is to simply sit with the contradiction.

The next morning, I took some photos of the garden, patted the two bronze javelinas that flanked the front door for good luck, and made the turn for the old mining town of Globe, about a hundred miles away in the Sonoran Desert. Headed north on Highway 70, I held a quiet gratitude for that magical evening with my new friends.

My night at the Simpson Hotel was a reminder that stillness has its own pace, that solitude isn’t the same as loneliness, and that sometimes, the road leads you exactly where you need to be—if you’re willing to stop. And wait.

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