The valleys and plains they passed along Highway 40, though dry, gave more of a lonely impression of open ocean than of land. The sun seemed to be fixed on life, sucking the water from everything. The main streets of the old western towns were littered now with impermanent chain stores. Absent of a building code, it looked as if the businesses that came there had all snagged themselves on the destitution, unprepared for the kind of customers who leave their Christmas lights on all year long. Since the beginning people had been coming to the West, mistaking the impression of endlessness for opportunity.

In her naivety, Aria had expected to see cowboys herding cattle on the plains, but the people who would be driving those cattle, growing gardens or canning their own food seemed to have been swallowed up by the wave of modern society and left behind by it. Now the cowboy, who once conquered the Native American, found himself conquered, his life made obsolete. To Aria’s dismay, they lived in trailer parks or houses that were falling apart on the outskirts of what could hardly be called cities, living on cigarettes and chew and easy-access television. Instead of working the land, they worked on oil rigs or metal shops or corporate dairy farms because it was all they could afford to do.

The West was conquered barely over a hundred years ago and still, Aria could see it was already full of a hard-won, gunshot, broken history and the kind of wounds that never heal. But beyond the hot crackle of the grasshoppers, she found there to be a slow, heartbreaking beauty; a vastness that could never be possessed.

They traversed an unpeopled wilderness where the night sky was so dark, the stars were a bright, white dust instead of interspersed lights, not just those which could outshine the nebulous glow of the city. There were sunsets and wildflowers. Animals outside cages, people outside metal and glass. A violent dance of nature, where life itself was distilled to its raw, original self.