I think I hate road trips. Of the vehicular kind. Not so much the self-powered-on-a-bicycle kind. There is, obviously, a greater sense of adventure, and a more seamless connection to one’s environment—the relationship is felt more acutely; the suffering, if there is any, is different (of course, one doesn’t suffer much sitting in a car other than perhaps from monotony and ennui, so maybe in this case they are similar), and the joys are greater, the pleasures more pleasurable. Less is lost, more is gained and seen. To stop for something, say, to take a picture, is a simpler task. You are not polluting…

Sure, in a car one covers more ground but feels like a slug. Just sitting. Sitting, sitting, sitting. At least today I hiked part way up a mountain. I think my photographs of the salt flats should turn out nicely.
The fifty or sixty year old waitress at the Black Rock Grill, where I’m having dinner, across the street from The Cadillac Inn (a homey, inexpensive, little place that I would recommend, run by a single mother) in Lovelock, NV, is having a conversation with a cook. “We’re shaking our cans out here!” she exclaims (she and the other server mercifully are not). But she is so mirthful. So friendly and amicable. Would that all the people of this world be like her on a daily basis.
The sunset. The Nevada landscape. Can one be separated from the other? They will forever be inseparable to me. I’ve recorded myself rhapsodizing over them… it, while driving.

Nevada is vast. It is like a piece of classical music, Beethoven’s 9th perhaps, become geography. All vertiginous highs and vast, yawning lows (that Great Basin!), and those highs erupting from the dry ground of the valley, apropos of nothing, like stalactites up, up, up! from the floor of a cave, nonetheless, projecting harmoniously, and all the while the shimmering interstate insinuating itself in thread-like fashion through the warp and weft of the land, winding on continuously over tall masses and plummeting back down again whatever the topography be.

A narrow scrawl on a limitless sheet of paper.