Old sage and rabbit brush, with a lonely fence post and a bit of barbed wire. The sun a hot sentinel settling over the blue valley below. The far away hills are dotted with scrub oak trees and juniper.

This land is about as vacant and as vast as any you will see. It stretches, keen as those who who dream of it, as far as their imaginations will allow. The colors suggest fire, but at the same time, loneliness--and it indeed was a land created by fire--the evidence of volcanic activity still apparent. Only a thin veneer of life clings to the igneous rock, truthfully--the bones of the place laid out almost naked beyond and below.

We have come here to the desert--we inhabitants of a burning land--from disparate regions and diffident reasons--to live. And why? For the sake of drama? For that shower of stars in the night air so black that you can almost see tomorrow--and the same thing that was today. For the loss that you feel on a cut-desert road, the plateaus around you, by this time gentle hills in your eyes, gliding down the pavement while your gaze remains transfixed by the cocoon of it all. Road kill skunks remain on the highway at night; the dead jack rabbits mysteriously disappear. Scattered coins remain where you left them, passing through once, then again.

Not many travel these lonely roads by foot.

Farmers from other lands have colonized the river land. From there, they produce miracles of green in an otherwise barren and rock strewn world. The trees by the river bed have the deepest roots of any that you have seen. They spread them like tentacles below the rock. Ebb and flow, they are always nourished. Ebb and flow, the farmers harvest vegetables that must be some gift of God for their growth with so little rain.

For this, too, is a season. This coming to the desert. One of sunsets, of distant stars and vacant highways. A season for you nonetheless.