This was written in the early 90s

"So I bought this place down in Texas. I bought it in a sheriff’s auction. And what did I find in the barn? Well, there was a Beechcraft in there. Twin prop, all in bits. The wings were wrapped up beside the fuselage. And the two engines". Thus, Bill Freese, the bus driver out of Denver, down to Albuquerque, a neat, scrubbed kind of a round man. His Greyhound shirt stuck to him closer than a wrapper to a boiled sweet. "Don't you try and get a drink here," he said at some dim rural stop. "You come back smelling of drink, I've got to refuse to let you back on the bus."

Anyway, the bank was mad as hell that Bill had got a free Beechcraft along with his little ranch outside Austin. They tried to get it back. "But I say, I bought that place lock, stock and barrel". And that includes the airplane he commutes down to his ranch to, from Denver. No bus rides for him.

Greyhounds travel down the creases in the map of America. Here's a boy a charity is shipping east to bury his mother: a ticket but no food money. Here's an old man going back to a rocket factory re-union, with a pair of hips on him which look like they've been transplanted with coastal defence groins. He spits his chewing-tobacco squirt into a little screw-top bottle he keeps in the top pocket of his lumber shirt.

A sort of a hippy gets on. Him, and his wife, and his little two-year old, all wearing a rig-up of cloaks made of blankets. Headed into New Mexico, it's warm after mile-high Colorado, but this guy takes no chances. He has an array of balaclavas and mufflers and woollen caps. He and his micro-tribe fill the bus with a musty, incense smell. "All the love I give you, and there's still this rivalry", he complains to his silent mouse-wife whose furtive charm has not all been worn away.

The bus gets up to the speed limit and sticks to it. The Rockies to the right of you, the plains to the left. The mountains pile up as sharp and clear as breakers freeze-framed as they crash on to a sandy beach. The towns show their entire histories: the cowboy brick of the original settlement, the neat - later - clapboard houses. The fringe of mobile homes and Airstream trailers, bulbous toothpaste tubes in aluminium, shows America's permanent internal frontier.

In Las Vegas, New Mexico - yes there is one - a couple of cowboys get out of a Jeep and laugh at the hippies catching some rays. One comes over. Goes straight up to the man. "Hey, that's a real neat jacket for the little girl". "Little boy", replies the leader of the three-person sect, equable for once. "Still, it's a great suit", says the redneck. You keep finding this: an extraordinary courtesy, dolled up in Stetsons and boots. And the language is quaint, too: "I'll get you there in a heartbeat", says a cabby.

There's no smoking on the bus, and most of the time I was dying for one. It was all the fault of a Rocky Mountain rancher up towards Carbondale, Colorado. "You come from Hereford? Really? Hereford? Come out to dinner," he'd said.

It was arranged whilst I stood glowing and dripping in the changing rooms of the Glenwood Springs hot sulphur pool, in the lea of the turn of the century grand hotel, which is supposed to have been modelled on a Medici Palace. Teddy Roosevelt used it as a hunting lodge, way back when there were bears to shoot here. He arrived by the Denver and Rio Grande railway which crawled then as now through the canyons of the Colorado River.

The Ute Indians liked to soak in the pools. Now, it's locals and tourists who plod up and down in the steam, under the fluorescent lights and soft musak. The air's ten below, and cars and trucks murmur across the town's main bridge a few yards away.

Forty miles from Aspen, Glenwood Springs doesn't pretend to be glitzy. There's a bar where there's no great need to stay sober or polite. I sat reading a local historian's account of the ten best whorehouse madams Colorado ever had, and a man told me his hard luck story and said that he would kill me if I didn't tell him mine.

I picked up good cheap wine from a crusty liquor store run by a pair of growly old dames and went to a politer bar to phone for wheels. A Checker Cab rolled up, with that rumbling gait that makes them the best vehicle in yellow ever made. Out on snow-packed roads, until I was dropped at the end of a track where even a cab which thinks it's a tank couldn't go.

The track went nowhere but up. The West suddenly looked wild. The papers had talked of a jogger eaten by a mountain lion. In the moonglow, and the cold-snap air, tracks of animals led off to right and left in the feet-deep snow. Would four bottles of California Chardonnay fend off the cold? Would they still be chambray-ed, clinking in my haversack? I yearned briefly for my hotel room and its motor showerhead.

Long before the squeak-squeak of my boots on the snow-packed road reached anything like civilisation, a young engineer came along in a velvet-seated Japanese four-wheel drive, with country and western on the FM. He found the dinner party in a few minutes, and augmented the numbers.

Rick Carney, the rancher-host, lives in a rented 1904 Sears and Roebuck catalogue house which had come flat-packed across the prairie, standard with porches and steep gables. It was warm with radiators which looked like they'd come from an English Cathedral. CNN in the corner and big fridges in the kitchen were the only sign of modernity.

Rick says his daughter is the best cattleman for miles. She was too young to be a cancer-widow. The young engineer told Lisa how he was helping blast the new interstate into the sides of the Colorado River. Suburbia is coming to the mountains, and time-defying women in year-round tans and short mink coats and jeans fly in on American's silver birds to Vail to ski and stay in condos which are sprouting everywhere in coyote country.

Light years away, we ate elk-burger, drank beer, and the youngsters talked rodeo and cattle roping and how you got ponies into trailers, whilst Rick and I sorted out the Chardonnay and the world. Lisa offered a midnight tour of their herd. This was prime breeding stock of Hereford cattle. Shit and snow and ice and hot breath and scufflings and lowings, and those caressing eyes caught in the flashlight's beam, as they grew the sperm which would soon be going down the hill to the prairie for breeders to make hamburgers.

Anyway, Rick growled his way into my affections, and I mumped the last of his untipped Camel, smoked the legend, undone.

In the cool, aquarium light of the old Governor's mansion in Denver, a seventy year retired rangeland ecologist turned volunteer guide, male model and real estate salesman - everyone does a bit of real estate in booming Colorado - stood beside a rubber plant and discussed the oldest issue in the West. How can the wilderness survive the cow?

And then we listened to subscription classical radio in his big white Lincoln Town Car as we cruised, the bonnet dipping like a sailing boat meeting the swell as we crossed intersections, to the oldest restaurant in town, the Buckhorn Exchange, down by the railway tracks. We ate bratwurst and gherkin and sipped down a Bud or two, watched by the stuffed animals the killing of which made a big part of the city's history.

At Greeley, home of the best rodeo in the west, I woke to the mournful moaning of the early morning shunter trains, and went out to the modern west: 100,00 mixed breed cattle in one of the world's biggest feedlot yards, which announces itself with an ammoniac smell several miles away. We cheered up by going out to Bruce's, a sprawling barn of a cafe in Severance, where big women polish your boots, you eat bull's testicles - "Rocky Mountain Oysters" - and a band kicks out the Lynyrd Skynerd classic, Saturday Night Special, and cowboys and girls dance reels. It's like the country everywhere: you spill a man's drink, and he apologises.

Chicago, Denver, Tucson: a small pilgrimage to the houses built by the miners and cattlemen and other crazies once they'd made their money and became respectable. Not that they all did the second: the most beautiful old place in Denver sports the bullet hole where a mistress tried to assail a faithless lover's domestic bliss. And the galleries: the Wild West drew painters who did good, straight, representational pictures of horses and whites and Indians, all sporting flared nostrils and wide eyes, and those damned cattle, likewise.

Nowadays, there are plenty still keen to keep the West Wild. The toughest men of all become writers, people like Jim Harrison, novelist and cookery writer for Esquire, who took me a walk out into the Arizona desert, which isn't a desert at all but a cactus forest. This year, there's even a bit of grass, wiry stuff, but green for all that, getting a living in the shade of cactus as tough as razor wire. Morrison was visiting friends, out of his Montana fastness, and later cooked legs of lamb au jus, and agonised over speciality sauces of his own devising. Half Arizona's writers drifted in to mourn the decline of the grizzly, the elk and the coyote, talking into the night over the embers of the fire in the deserty garden.

Tucson - a cowpat of a city, people said - has a definite centre for all that the rest of it's a fourteen mile square gridiron of highways. They've put air conditioning into the one-floor grand adobe house where its leading citizen used to live. But you can see how it was cool anyway, and sense the pleasure of living the way people used to: cooking and sleeping in the open air, in spite of their Spanish formality - black lace and the Bible and dust.

And so to Tucson's Franciscan church, out on Mission Road, where the signs have been peppered with buckshot. San Xavier's is Adobe Baroque. During the Lord's prayer, we held hands. The man beside me seemed grumpy - was he a drunk, was he in mourning, or just sad-faced? His hand felt hard and warm in mine.

This travel information was true in the mid-90s:

American Airlines have a big-jet service to Vail/Eagle - one of the main Coloradan Rockies ski-resorts - from their two main hubs, Dallas/Fort Worth and Chicago.

I was something of a fan of the Marriott chain before they offered to put me up in various of their different types of hotels: in each price band there seems to be solid value for money. In Tucson, I stayed in a Marriott Courtyard, in which you get more space, or a suite, for not much more than an ordinary room in other hotels. In Denver, Marriott put me into one of their Residence hotels, in which you have a kitchen (with grocery delivery service), dinette and living area (with free Warm n'Glow wrapped pseudo-log open fire) in which to fend for yourself: not especially cheap but good for people fed up with the road and fast food. I didn't entirely grasp the point of the "Concierge Floor" of the Albuquerque Marriott, but the half-indoors, half-outdoors pool was great. UK central booking office: 071 439 0281. In Glenwood Springs I stayed in a decent Holiday Inn: being a franchise operation, this chain is less completely reliable, but usually cheaper, than Marriott's, and I have mostly found it a good network when you haven't time to seek out bargains. Central booking: 071 722 7755

Greyhound are working hard to offer a respectable and polite service. On three long runs, I found the drivers very helpful. Expect delays if the bus gets over-subscribed and you have to wait for a back-up. Greyhound issue Ameripasses in the UK. 0342 317317