The Narrative Image

In our last episode, after appreciating the subtle nuances of Kip’s latest margarita recipe, we were treated to the intermittent unveiling of the Milky Way as patchwork clouds streamed over us to the West. Cows, emboldened by the cover of darkness, venture out to the dry lake’s terminal puddle where the last delicate grasses rise from drying mud.  Minds, free from the constraints of day to day routines, become free to ponder the day’s events and images — to decipher messages preserved in stone for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years. We are by no means the first to sit comforted by our campfire in this shallow basin. Doubtless, others sat before us, watching the universe display its bright jewels. Here, perhaps before a more convincing lake, those others noted the arrivals and departures of skittish deer and elusive big-horn sheep — not today’s tame cows that pulverize sensitive shorelines with great bovine hooves and trample into the mud a generous portion of...

Clouds, like insubstantial whales, drift almost inquisitively over the high desert plateau. Perhaps they taste the frosty tips of a sorority of mountains, or,  rising on ephemeral flippers to test the bounds of the stratosphere, they glimpse the face of a goddess. And I, perched on the edge of a reservoir, feel the chill sneak out from the shadows of the vast scar below me, chasing the sun's residual heat out of massive basalt rim-rock back into space. You'd think the gentle breeze could be the faintest evidence of the turmoil of a planet's atmosphere spinning, on average, hundreds of miles per hour against the vacuum of space, but only because your dilettantish comprehension of vacuums is based mostly on an object named Hoover . Regardless, you imagine it really is the sound of the world turning, and try to feel the ground trembling as it turns away from the light. Given imperfect knowledge, given mathematical ineptitude, given mistaken assumptions, I st...