The Onion

The road out was long, rough, and barely marked, and for most of it we weren't sure we were even in the right place. Then a mile on foot from where we parked, and the whole thing opened up at once. We came out on the cliffs and there were miles of them, white and orange brain rock folding away in every direction, more terrain than we could have explored in a week. We got there early. There was nowhere else to be, so we stayed and waited for the light.

What we'd walked into was a landscape stacked in layers. At our feet, the brain rock, folded over on itself like something the earth had been mulling for a long time. Just past it, the same colors pressed into thin slivers, layer on layer, closer to baklava than stone. Then the ground dropped and gave way to a wide swath of dark red sandstone mountains dotted with scrubby juniper and creosote. Past those, open desert running flat to the horizon. Past that, the range that walls off Utah from Nevada, going blue with distance. Behind us stood the black peaks of the Pine Valley Mountains, cold and high and completely out of place above all that heat. Four landscapes at once, each a different age, and by sunset the sky had gone gold over all of it.

I was a visitor that evening. I knew nothing about the place except that it had made the drive worth it. Four years later I'd be living a few miles from that spot as the crow flies. It was scenery like this that did it. I just didn't know yet that it was working on me.