T en minutes after Santa Fe Police Chief Kevin Kerney picked up his rental car at the Bakersfield Airport, he was stuck in heavy stop-and-go traffic, questioning his decision to take the less-traveled back roads on his trip to the central California coast.

Congestion didn’t ease until he was well outside the city limits on a westbound state highway that cut through desert flatlands. Ahead, a dust devil jumped across a straight, uninviting stretch of pavement and churned slowly through an irrigated alfalfa field, creating a green wave rolling over the forage.

Kerney glanced at his watch. Had he made a mistake in trying to map out a scenic route to take to the coast? By now, he’d expected to be approaching a mountain range, but there was nothing on the hazy horizon to suggest it.

It really didn’t matter if he’d misjudged his driving time. He had all day to get to the Double J horse ranch outside of Paso Robles, where he would spend the weekend looking over some quarter horses that were up for sale. He hit the cruise control and let his mind wander.

Kerney had partnered up with his neighbor, Jack Burke, to breed, raise, and train competition cutting horses. Kerney would buy some stock to get the enterprise started, Jack would contribute brood mares, pastureland, and stables to the partnership, and Jack’s youngest son, Riley Burke, would do the training.

The sky cleared enough to show the outline of mountains topped by a few bleached, mare’s-tail clouds. Soon Kerney was driving through a pass on a twisting road flanked by forked and tilted gray-needle pine trees, into a huge grassland plain that swept up against a higher, more heavily timbered mountain range to the west.

Finally his road trip had turned interesting. He stopped to stretch his legs, and a convertible sports car with the top down zipped by, the woman driver tooting her horn and waving gaily as she sped away.