Musings of a Compulsive Thinker

Sunrise over the Nevada desert

Once upon a winter morning, in the middle of nowhere in Nevada, I come to realize that the desert can be startlingly beautiful in its own way.

There is a hint of the pink-tinged, gold-warmed edge of dawn in the sharp, cool, dry brand-new-morning air. Dusty white frost powders the scrub brush, clinging low to the packed, sandy earth; sparse and brown-green, sagey, yellowed, the brush has a marathoner's wiry robustness, scrappy and thin like the deep, hidden water that the desert so jealously hoards. Thin, delicate sprites of clouds hang wispily around the mountaintops, the kind that burn away before the dry warmth of day. The sun works up slowly, hardly enough for warmth but enough to paint the brown, gullied mountains in a sweet, sugary, candied-fruit shade of orange-pink. It glimmers, shimmers, little baby heatwaves illusioning through the raspy dry air. Thin ice barely covers the green creek that winds in that corrosive, sinewy, side-twisting way through the painstakingly eroded gully in the flat spread of land ahead of the foothills. A low, single-wire fence gives substance to some hypothetical line through the desert; the fence is no taller than the scrubs, just man's attempt to toe a line in the shifting sands, no good hindrance to anything save a few plodding cattle and the uprooted vagrant tumbleweeds.

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Labels: imagine yourself here, ponderings, travel

posted by the alygator @ 10:40 AM