September 29

What a beautiful damn place to wake up. I don’t usually write in the mornings, but this is too pleasant. Hills that rise and fall like the surface of a potato chip, to steal an analogy from McPhee. The country is arid, and the ground covered with sage and tawny grass. The air is fifty degrees and smells wonderful. Blue sky with a few clouds stretched across it from west to east like pulled taffy. In the distance Colorado 13 shoots vehicles north and south like an asphalt conveyer belt. Across it, through binoculars, I can see two herds of pronghorn antelope. Beyond one of the herds two swells about ¼ mile apart run parallel to the west. At their crests stand ridges of solid rock, rising six feet out of the soil atop the swells. The rock ridges look like old lava flows, but I bet I’m looking at a giant sedimentary rock that got flipped on its side millions of years ago and then weathered unevenly, some layers, like the two I can see now, resisting erosion more successfully than others. There are so many ways to look at the world around us.