It felt too generous to call that patchy brown and yellow after anything you might use to make jewelry. Most summers, our hills were like the set of a Wild West movie. They had filmed some westerns out at Vasquez Rocks, actually, the spiny, sloping formation of stone that my father used to take me to climb as a kid. As well as some movies set on Mars. I took Harry there once, and we got drunk sharing a bottle of raspberry rum and made out, lying on our sides on a wedge of stone, until Harry’s shirt rucked up and she told me, laughing, “I’m getting gravel down my pants.” You could still see the stars pretty well from Vasquez, and the moon was bright, which was good, because we hadn’t brought flashlights. We kept stopping, on our stumbling way back to the car, where we’d sleep, that night, to avoid driving the hour back to school. Harry clinging to me and me wrapping my arm around her waist and saying, “Don’t fall off,” and Harry pointing up at the night sky to tell me, “Look at that, Jane. Holy shit.” Amazed each time by our new angle on the stars.

Harry and I had both lived in California all our lives. When Harry looked at grad schools, she mostly applied out of state. She said she wanted to go somewhere green. She was going to freeze her ass off in Michigan.

We’d decided to make an event of the trip. It was the last time we were going to see each other for a while, and I wasn’t sure how well we would stay in touch, if we would, once Harry was absorbed by her new city, new school, new people. We were going up the coast first, stopping on the way in our favorite cities, and then driving through Glacier National Park, up the Going-to-the-Sun Road, before we began the long blank journey through the Midwest and finally to Ann Arbor, and Harry’s tiny, waiting apartment. I would spend a few days there, help her unpack, settle in, buy furniture from the used shops. Then a flight back to California in time to set up my own dorm.

“It’ll probably burn again next summer,” I said, and flicked my hand at the countryside.

“God.” Harry sighed. “Don’t say that.”

“Would you roll up the windows? I can taste the smoke.” The fires along the freeway were out days ago, but something was burning somewhere. Harry rolled up the windows. Joan Baez, louder now that she was trapped against the glass, sang “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”