We came down from the high country in Utah, out of Provo Canyon and onto Route 189, and the land began to spread out, and we saw again how vast the space, how empty, with towns sprawling out without any sense of verticality, and new developments tightly packed together seeming like outposts rather than suburbs of Salt Lake. The landscape dwarfs human habitations. When the snow comes churning through, and the wind, a constant, picks up, the raw power of this geography is reinforced.
The Mountain West gives off a sense of loneliness. It’s where you want to cluster together. Paradoxically, it’s also where you go to get away and to be left alone. Unlike the soft hills and greenery of Pennsylvania, it is an entirely undomesticated place, one that feels at the mercy of vast, inhuman powers, and one where a person might come to believe that ruthlessness is called for in order to survive.
