Outrunning sunset

The sun sets suddenly here. It slips behind a mountain ridge long before it sinks below the true horizon with a watercolor parade of dissolution. If a lone jogger on the old railroad line, squinting westward in the late afternoon, turns back at this moment, she will see the sunlit eastern hills before her, and a line of shadow racing toward them. In the act of turning she'll have missed the shadow passing over her head. And should she try to chase it, propel herself back into day, she'll find it’s not possible. As she sprints, lungs full of the air of gladly dying leaves, the shadow races up the hills like a kite catching wind. By the time she's given up, catching only her breath, colors speak only gray and she needs electricity to find the way in. Nightfall here is not the slow darkening of tea into hot water; it’s instant coffee. There is no outrunning sunset, only a furious sprint into dark.

Snow Gods

To a flatlander, snowing is a verb. If it is snowing, you are engulfed by flakes, flurries, sharp blizzard flecks, or gobs of wet white if it is warmer. Your vision consists wholly of motion. It can be snowing nowhere except everywhere; you're in the globe, and it's shaking. But this afternoon, from the valley, I saw four great white columns spanning from the clouds down into Mount Jumbo. Translucent but imposing, they slowly turned the slopes white, but they did not move. They were positively Old Testament. And it was positively snowing—for to a mountain-and-valley dweller, snowing is also a noun. A four-dimensional event, and you are omniscient. You see not only here, but there; not only now, but what's to come, or has past. So I suppose that somewhere, an observer with more senses than we, or at least with an even more contrasting landscape, watches six or seven dimensions stretch out on all sides.