It's raining right now, enough to stop a ball game but not enough to stop progress. Nor will it have much effect on anything except to benefit the crops on the fields extending to infinity in every direction. I've read somewhere recently that 75% of the earth is under cultivation. Somehow thinking of figures like that spoils the idea I have in my head of alpine peaks with little shrouds of snow sinking and drifting over granite spines.
The middle of Nevada has mountains just like that. They're practically unknown, surrounded by miles of desert. There are no towns out there, only wild horses and deer drifitng around in the flat valleys between mountain ranges. There's a sense of space out there. A sense also of utter timelessness.
Watching horses graze from a distance you can easily imagine them to be extinct herbivores on neolithic plains, or on plains newly risen from the sea which covered them at one time.
Of course the Sierra Nevada taken together are a more important and impressive range of mountains. I don't have to go far from here to see those razor-edged summits, snowy all year. But those mountains seem less vast because there are cities on all sides and the air traffic over them is nearly constant. The clouds are different up there but ultimately all contrails look the same.
The Sierra feel civilized. Highway 80 and the other highways cut through them like cracks on a broken window.
In central Nevada there are no real roads, only a little track blazed through dust and in most places some rock on that.
When I was a kid, if we were playing ball and it started to rain, we would try to keep playing as long as possible.
If parts of the field got too wet we tried to avoid them. The hardest thing was to look into the sky and follow the ball with rain getting in your eyes.
The middle of Nevada has mountains just like that. They're practically unknown, surrounded by miles of desert. There are no towns out there, only wild horses and deer drifitng around in the flat valleys between mountain ranges. There's a sense of space out there. A sense also of utter timelessness.
Watching horses graze from a distance you can easily imagine them to be extinct herbivores on neolithic plains, or on plains newly risen from the sea which covered them at one time.
Of course the Sierra Nevada taken together are a more important and impressive range of mountains. I don't have to go far from here to see those razor-edged summits, snowy all year. But those mountains seem less vast because there are cities on all sides and the air traffic over them is nearly constant. The clouds are different up there but ultimately all contrails look the same.
The Sierra feel civilized. Highway 80 and the other highways cut through them like cracks on a broken window.
In central Nevada there are no real roads, only a little track blazed through dust and in most places some rock on that.
When I was a kid, if we were playing ball and it started to rain, we would try to keep playing as long as possible.
If parts of the field got too wet we tried to avoid them. The hardest thing was to look into the sky and follow the ball with rain getting in your eyes.