Flight Pattern

They call the formation Control Tower, and once you hear the name you can't unsee it. It rises out of the coral sand in a single sculptural mass, and the sandstone runs through it in bands that curve and bank and peel away like traffic being routed around a field. I shot it close, filling the frame with the form itself, letting the striations do the work. Midday light is supposed to be the enemy. Out there it isn't. The sun straight overhead turns the sandstone almost white-hot and drives the sky to a deep blue, and the clouds moving through gave me the only thing in the picture that was going anywhere.

That's the tension I wanted. Everything in this frame looks like motion. Layers sweeping, curving, climbing, the whole rock caught mid-turn. And none of it has moved in a very long time. The clouds will be gone in ten minutes. The flight pattern below them is holding a course it set before anything with wings existed.