As They Crawled Along The Plastic Radiant Way

Grateful Dead: Oakland, CA. 12/26/79
Grateful Dead: Oakland, CA. 12/26/81

John watched the pale black road, and he remembered a single moment during his time away in the wilderness. He wished he had told Doris about it---a single moment in Needles, California, months and months ago, facing west in the late afternoon. There had been a heavy rainstorm over just a small, localized patch of the desert, and from the patch beside it, a dust storm blew in. The sun caught the dust and the moisture in a way John had never seen before, and even though he knew it was backward, it seemed to him the sun was radiating black sunbeams down onto the earth, onto Interstate 40 and the silver river of endless pioneers that flowed from one part of the continent to the other.
John felt that he and everybody in the New World was a part of a mixed curse and blessing from god, that they were a race of strangers, perpetually casting themselves into new fires, yearning to burn, yearning to rise from the charcoal, always newer and more wonderful, always thirsty, always starving, always believing that whatever came to them next would mercifully erase the creatures they'd already become as they crawled along the plastic radiant way.
--Douglas Coupland
Miss Wyoming
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Zoroaster Temple from the Utah Flats route variation
Grateful Dead: Oakland, CA. 12/26/79
a dusty-lensed view of the inner gorge
Grateful Dead: Oakland, CA. 12/26/81
Cope Butte with faint rainbow
Cape Solitude