The color of the desert, she knew, didn’t sit well with many people.
Often they saw no color. There was only an annoying absence of color. So what they saw, or failed to see, pushed them harder into the harshness of the land. The jagged and brittle Mojave offered them none of the emerald extravagances of the more fertile Sonoran Desert.
But out on the Mojave Desert or the Great Basin, this was where she wanted to be, where color was elusive and delicate. It would be good to look out the windshield at everything all scuffed up and blistered.
So she decided to steal another car.
She would sail an impossibly straight highway, unraveled like an endless roll of metallic silver ribbon. She would race off across the slanted land and sink in to the color of the desert others couldn’t see. This was her favored way forward.
She considered the possibility that certain colors can’t be seen.
Perhaps these colors might never be dabbed onto a palette, held in the heart or found anywhere else a human might grasp them.
It occurred to her these desert colors may be so independent and lashed to the hard work of survival on this harsh land. Perhaps they were forever bound to the earth, incapable of existence elsewhere.
So she stole a car, a highly unlikely magenta 2022 Bugatti Chiron and soared north toward Reno.
Once again she looked out at mesas, mountains and buttes. She struggled to identify the colors they revealed. Perhaps thin blue or brittle gray. Were those actually purples and browns or shades of something else?
The way the sky kept changing, various truths of color were shrouded.
Shifts of light came and went too quickly.
A cloud moved. Silent shadows fell. Veils of sunlight rippled down and rearranged all she thought she saw.
Now and then, it crossed her mind that tearing across the desert at eighty miles an hour was not nature’s way. She wondered if the truths of the color of the desert were obscured by speed and windshields.
But when she pulled over to the side of the road, walked back from the highway and sank into stillness, the desert appeared as opaque as ever.
She could still not be sure what this meant and if something had been lost or gained.
