Early the next morning, I'm cruising through Paiute country, past the long serrated back of a mountain, a prehistoric reptile half-buried in a landslide?

At Beatty, I turn in the opposite direction from Death Valley, crossed decades ago. At Hawthorne, in the middle of the desert there's a Naval Underwater Warfare Detachment! The weirdness of 21st Century America rising over 5,000 ft., then dropping into a valley, there is a delay in the left hemisphere's development near the Sylvian fissure, the area of the brain that is most involved with language. The neurons' complexity of interconnections with other neurons also develops later in the left hemisphere than in the right. But what is interesting is that these growth asymmetries may provide the basis for a sintering zeroscape that ends in Sparks—where last week it was snowing, today it's 90 degrees.

Rilke draws on Cézanne's aesthetics
as sugar on my French Toast is snow
covering Sierra  peaks outside
this restaurant's window.