I am writing to you from a hotel in Sandy, Utah, just outside of Salt Lake City. It is cold here, but not as cold as I thought it would be. I am hoping it snows and does not rain tomorrow, since there is a snowboard trip planned for Snowbird, Utah, and yes, there is a storm-a-brewin high above.
I have been writing alot while on the trip, in a small leather-bound notebook made of cellulose taken from Venice algae (so it says). Maybe I will transfer some of the writings to this blog when it is all over, when I have something coherent to say about what I experienced. Right now it is all intangible feelings and nostalgia; I've been on this trip before.
I can say one thing: the sprawling landscape of Utah is much more beautiful in the winter when it lays under a white blanket of snow, with the red rocks glaring through the speckles of snow that couldn't cover all of the jagged faces of the canyons and the mountains.
Today's sunset was more ominous than pretty, which wasn't really a bad thing. It had a character of its own. It looked like a huge, frozen explosion in the sky, with the thick, black stretched clouds trying to smother it into submission. Some of the light would catch the melted snow on the ground, and at the right angles, the road would blaze yellow just for a second. It looked great against the whites and the greys and the blacks, and the dark blues of the mountains in the distance. And then those clouds finally smothered that great frozen flame, and the land was cast in a sort of luminous darkness, with the small scattered towns giving off the twinkling yellow lights that spotted the hillsides, as they slept so silently under that blanket of glowing blue snow.
I wrote feverishly in that failing light, which broke some vessels in my right eye, flooding it with bright red twisting worms.
I should probably sleep now. Tomorrow I snowboard, and hopefully not tumble and die, and then we head further North.
