There’s a certain way I look at the big mountain that marks the end of the valley when we’re driving the long side of it. If I can get the right perspective on it, I trick myself into thinking it’s the moon, hanging in space, just beyond the horizon. It’s too far to touch, but it’s still so close that I can see all the crannies and textures and scrapings and gray rock that make it up. It’s almost like we could go there, not by rocket, but as in The Distance of the Moon by Italo Calvino:
“There were nights when the Moon was full and very, very low, and the tide was so high that the Moon missed a ducking in the sea by a hair’s breadth; well, let’s say a few yards anyway. Climb up on the Moon? Of course we did. All you had to do was row out to it in a boat and, when you were underneath it, prop a ladder against her and scramble up.”
On the east side the big mountain is just, well, a big mountain, like you might draw not as a child, but maybe as someone a little bit older who understand that mountains and pyramids aren’t the same thing. But on the north side, I see the rounded curve of granite against the sky and then, I see the moon, floating in space, just… there.
What a gorgeous photo!