Highway through Nevada

Dry heat and scrubby fields. Silver stark naked sky, not a cloud in sight. And the moon hung there a burnished gold ball of need. The trees that silhouette in the moonlight look like deliberate cutouts, like apparitions of themselves thin, twiggy and ... desperate woman souls of ages past.

Driving to Vegas through this landscape feels like a journey through a tunnel of extremely painful pleasure. You open the window of your car and and you can smell it, the aroma of the desert. The description of a beautiful haunting desperation.

You can easily imagine a a tiny home somewhere there among the scrubby fields, a newly wed couple that live there and try hard to make ends meet. She is a raven beauty and he is an intense sort of a cowboy. Their home is a dilapidated little place with broken window panes and creaking doors. But each night in the gorgeous desert wind it transforms into a paradise. Then one day he comes home after a hard day's work and finds her gone...gone forever with someone else with more money in search of an easier life. He sits alone in the house with no lights on, only the moon light from the copper moon sweeping in through the open door and the windows.

The pain he feels is a sound of the coyote cries in the far away distance, the warm desert wind and the moonlit glow.

I am always on the look out for the cowboy time and time again when I travel through Nevada, I keep trying to spot him in the dark distances.

This is the way I feel all the way until the dark dark night is suddenly split to shreds by the blinding lights of Vegas, the territory of the raven beauty. This is where she lets it all down, her guard, her shame, her inhibitions. She reigns here in all her glory, writhing in eternal seduction, and wanting more and more and more ...

She is bejeweled and more glorious than the sun. He is lonely and aching and he is the desert himself.