My trusty navigator and I took a drive last weekend, to Cincinnati, my son and the Cincinnati Bengals. Our drive took us across miles of unseasonably barren farmland virtually devoid of snow.
I’ve been making the trip for decades. I don’t recall any year in mid-February when there was so much brown ground.
“The mountains are calling, and I must go,” John Muir wrote in a letter to his sister, Sarah.
There is a ridgeline a few miles from my home that appears to be a naturally created rock wall. The ridge was created from the eastern U.S. crashing into Scotland thousands of years ago. In some places, one can see the layers folded like a carpet laid flat, then pushed at the edge until it curls into several folds, lain over each other.
[pullquote]In the duff, or between tree branches, barely caught from the corner of my eye, a spider weaves a snare, proving to errant flies and other unaware winged creatures that the seemingly shortest way from A to B is not always the best way.[/pullquote]Atop the folds, in places that have not yet been reshaped by residential development, humungous rocks stand exposed, as though someone had come along with a giant blower and sandblasted around them so they stood free to make later humans wonder how that happened.
