The sun’s bright and these dark glasses, smudged.

Truckers honk at my bare legs stretched out like pale and slimy seals, sunning themselves seaside.

We drive through the early evening, watching with our progress, the sun waddle into the west and disappear.

The day began endless hours ago, miles behind us on the flat flax color of Nebraskan cornfields. Over the acrid coffee of the Ogallala jiffy mart.

My head ached with the bluntness of the light there. The parched stillness of the air.

The sun sits directly above us and begins, around midday to bear into our skin despite the tinted car windows and layers of steel.

Hours later, I look at my arms, my shoulders, my hands, and realize they’ve been colored unequal by long hours in the driver’s seat. Now, with one side of me singed red and blistered from resting on the plastic window ledge, and the other arm still white and shaded by the car roof and wheel, I stop for sunscreen. Pause to purchase protection that’s too little, too late.

The heat persists and we drive on through it, reaching Colorado with the sunset. Without our noticing, everything changes and when next I think to define what I see, I realize it’s all mountains and little corn.

Soon the difference is impossibly missed and we’re bobbing up and over mountainous green. This place is basic, but bowl-over beautiful. Like skin. The earth’s skin. Taught and brown. Blue veined. Varicose where it runs off and twists down hillsides in spiny purple lines.

The colors move with our car wheels, changing into coral colored mesas and dunes.

We reach the canyons. Drive passed vacant road stands and wind blown Winnebagos.

The Navaho land.

Dead dog on the roadside. Coyotes strung up like flags.

I am angry. How can they? I ask. How can they trash the most beautiful… it’s theirs, after all.

The earth’s skin.

What makes this earth so familiar to us? The fact that it is us, I suppose. Even if we lose connection and slip into man made masochistism and rage. Even when we splurge and purge until there’s little left to hold onto. To get back to.

The long lines of cars, pushing themselves in congested droves through the gateways of each national park. And once there, putting themselves behind camera lenses, camcorders. Distancing and disconnecting. Protecting.

The earth’s skin. The fear of our own.

It’s difficult to comprehend how we humans have the capacity to hold the knowledge of such expansive beauty inside these small, fallible frames. I would not want to live here I say aloud, thinking the land might break me if I tried. Thinking I might shatter like an opera singer’s water glass if I walked out my door each day to face such splendor.

This is a sentiment I’ll repeat over and again until the canyons become junked car bodies and California and I’m freed from the burden of beauty carried by grand canyons and rocky mountain roads.

The burden of beauty. The sun, the sky and the loss of time as it changes, makes clear it’s own illusion. Own invisibility over invisible borders.