wilderness notes

ascending into a cloud covering the top of a mountain is an amazing experience. i've always wondered what the inside of a could felt like. now i know. imagine it was raining and then all of a sudden time stopped, so you had millions of tiny raindrops suspended in air. as you glided forward in space (perhaps on a chairlift!), you met all of these small drops while their brothers simply stayed in place.

the briefest images can instantly remind me of completely vivid and immediate experiences. examples from vermont:

driving through the fog - much like driving through the fog on the autobahn into munich from vienna. fucking exhilarating, even at 20kph. it took complete faith to keep moving along that road, trusting in god that there wouldn't be a two-story eighteen-wheeler barrelling towards italy. this morning as i drove down the west side highway the hudson was blanketed by a completely thick fog - i couldn't even see the water, much less new jersey. ships at sea in that weather = complete faith.

pulling by the side of a pitch-black highway road recalled the desert expanses of the red centre. during the day everything was surreally tomato-red against a blue cloth sky, but at night it was deathly quiet and cool, too many stars on a black sky with barely perceptible washes of indigo and fatigue green. the night light gave everything an eerie glow, almost industrial if the landscape weren't completely barren.

a small bridge over bumblefuck river reminded me of evenings in guadix in the summer - isabel, spanish girls wearing black and holding calimochos in the plastic containers that, despite seeing filled with x chinese soup later in my life, i would always associate with spain.