Anyone who
has driven in West Texas knows that the landscape is nothing to write home
about (and yet I’m doing it, anyway). It’s bleak desert occasionally broken up
by flat-topped mesas, many of which have become the home of windmills.
Most of the
time, that is. Dawn, just east of Fort Stockton, Texas. The sun is a golden
hemisphere struggling to break free of the horizon, promising a summer heat
responsible for hammering the desert into anvil-topped mesas. But the air is
not dry on this morning. Recent monsoons soaked the air, and a low fog clings
to the ground. This is not the fog of San Francisco or of “pea soup” fame. It’s
a veil that barely conceals, and as one gets closer, much like Salome’s
enticing dance, the veils are stripped away.
Yet the
beauty in this fog is not in piercing through the veil, but in looking out
across the valley, where those flat-topped mesas rise out of the fog like
island oases, and fog laps at their sides, trying to swallow them. But they are
too tall.
I’m taking
in all I can; the camera on my phone doing poor justice to the view as my car
surges down the interstate. In a few minutes, I’ll be swallowed inside the nebula
and see the fog as just a slight haze barely worth noticing. And after that,
the sun will climb high enough to boil the sea away as if it never was. But the
mesas remember, and the windmills remember, and I remember.
