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The The high deserts of the western United States are funny places.

In a single day, the weather might move from warm in the morning to boiling hot at noon to snowing into the night.

Trees are scant. It's mostly just chaparral and clay that moves fluidly from gray to red and then back to gray again.

The gray clay is the worst of it. It makes the whole world lose its color.

But that is the most of what's there. The hard dirt and limestone could make one think

they were walking on the surface of some lifeless planet if it wasn't for that chaparral. Those bushes

of wood that look almost petrified are sharp and hard themselves. They join in with the chorus,

the whole landscape singing its constant overture of death, an overture that sings

death to any who dare to venture into its barren domain. The deserts of America are no

forgiving place. They blanket the better part of Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada. And something

about this landscape tends to shape the people who settle there. Coming from a place

filled with trees, one might be surprised at their own claustrophobia under the wide skies of Utah and

Nevada's basin or Arizona and New Mexico's tabletop plateaus. All the air seems too much, too dry and too

thin. In a twist of irony, the vast, thin atmosphere can feel

like it's pressing down on you, coming for you. The whole region bears the mark of death, quiet,

salty and alkaline, eager to take, to desiccate, to grind to dust, and blow away. The desert is a knife that never stops cutting.

It's a hardened prairie mother who cares only for her own,

refusing to nurse any other who might seek for nourishment.

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