Exerpt: “I used to pine for other times. I used to ponder the time travel question. If I could pick one place, one time, where would I go? It used to be my home, just before Father Escalante walked through. Maybe I would go to the Sand Canyon Pueblo in about 1285 A.D. in order to see if the inhabitants welcomed or rejected the climate refugees that emerged weak and sickly from the copse of junipers on the ridge. Maybe I would go back further. Stand in Barrier Creek at the end of the Pleistocene as springs gushed out of the rock. Maybe I could sit there for a few thousand years and wait for the Great Gallery to appear. My nostalgia for the infinitude of my own home has no limits. 

         But now, as the turquoise sky fails to beget any snowclouds, and on the fourth of July no one has to put on a sweater when the fireworks start, I pine for things I have seen. Would I travel to 1995 if I could? Sit at the Wedge in a July thunderstorm and smile? Stand in a silent street in Moab and weep as the snow piled up on cars and houses?

         I have dreamed for two nights in a row of October snowstorms. I dreamed that the whole desert, from Reno to Alta to Grand Junction, was covered in three feet of snow. Then I dreamed that the Wasatch got a light dusting. I was pleased and disappointed, for all semblances of normalcy today are tempered somewhat by the realization that they are misplaced in time. The rain comes today just as it always has, but weeks late. It feels the same, but it feels somehow different. It’s too warm. Today’s rain invokes sorrow for every drop has been handled somehow by the human. Each individual drop was taken in our hands, weighed, examined, judged, given a job. Each individual drop was earmarked, a shadow of carbon ziptied to it.”