We drove from Boise to Denver through Wyoming instead of Utah. I was glad to be spared most of Utah.

Since we'd finished Into the Wild, I figured I'd buy an Utne Reader or Atlantic Monthly to read aloud. Our first fill-up of the day happened right after breakfast at Denny's (the no-chain-law fell by the wayside, round about Seattle way). I went into the store, which had a mini McDonald's outlet, to buy water and a magazine, but it didn't sell magazines. Or newspapers. The clerk, seeing me look here and there, asked if he could help me find anything, I told him what I sought, and he said they weren't allowed to sell magazines because it violates their contract with the Golden Arches.

McDonald's, fighting literacy at a franchise near you.

RDC had been reading Billions and Billions, essays by Carl Sagan (obviously), and wondered if I would enjoy them coming in midway. ("What geeks you are!" HAO observed and I repeat happily.) They were discrete essays, so sure. RDC was in the middle of a bunch of environmental ones, and there we were hurtling through space in a privately owned, gas-sucking automobile, having just taken a pleasure trip. Sigh.

And while reading these essays, we passed a wind farm. We had passed a few coal- and oil-burning power plants during this trip, and they are unlovely things. The wind farm, in contrast, seemed as relaxing a sight as a flock of grazing sheep. The three long rows of turbines grew up at us from over a long ridge, over whose southern end the highway passed, so we looked north through the stand and the turbines shrank away in the distance.

When we have a house, we plan to spend the thousands more to have solar panels installed. Especially if we live in Denver, we could likely sell power back to Public Service. Depending on the site, we might be able to harvest wind as well. I expect that will piss off the neighbors, but not as much as our refusal to nurture a Kentucky bluegrass lawn. I recently learned that the green grass lawn as such originated as a class marker: here is so much acreage that I can afford cultivate only for pleasure, that I do not need for a kitchen garden or to graze livestock. And now it's a yoke around the middle class neck.

At a rest stop near Lyman, Wyoming, I read an apologia on a plaque: You, the traveler, look around and see desolation, but the elk and the antelope love it. I, looking around, felt not desolate but humbled by the beauty. Vast expanses of rolling sage plains that fed cattle as well as the native species. Hills. A huge blue sky doming the infinite circle of horizon, and the breeze fresh and clean. Desolation? Not here. I turned cartwheels in celebration.

Wyoming looks a lot like Colorado, at least in that stretch--like the uninhabited plains of Colorado. I was glad to sense homesickness for my adopted landscape. And glad to see home, once we got there.