Wild, wild west

Another week, another trip, and now back home again on a beautiful sunny autumn Friday.

Was in Boise, Idaho, and for the first time really saw Boise in all her beauty. The fall colours are magnificent, the surrounding country so big and wild.

(In Boise you don't have roadsigns warning "wildlife crossing", or red triangles with pictures of running deer... you have signs saying "Game Crossing"...)

Was able to secure a window seat with no neighbours for the daylight flight back through Denver, and again on the second leg from Denver to La Guardia, New York.

Within moments of takeoff from Boise airport, you are flying over hills and land with nothing, and no-one, in sight. No roads, no towns, no villages, no visible signs of human interference. Across the bare salt-flats of Utah; nothing and no-one. Then the wrinkly, crinkly Western foothills of the Rockies... somehow I always expect the Rockies to loom huge and tall and spiky, but from the air they are like the wrinkles around an elephant's eye, and you are over them before you know it. Looking back West from Denver, with your back to the flatness that stretches over the curve of the earth, the Rockies are tall and pointy and imposing like mountains should be, but from the air they are somehow tamed.

Around Denver everything is square. Many-acre squares containing curving new suburbs or farmland with one barn, off center. One square had a flattened pyramid of earth, excavated from the square-next-door. A little further east, the squares contained irrigated circles, the square-outside-the-circle uncultivated and barren.

And then we crossed a weather front; on the left, to the West, clear skies and sun on the earth. To the East, a thin, constant layer of low cotton-wool cloud. Like someone had pulled a lace blanket between the earth and the sky. And the earth below the blanket glistened with frost.

And soon it was dark.

We passed the cloudy sky and the air was crystal clear. Outside my window, the Plough was bright and resting correctly on its base, like a saucepan.

The closer to the east coast, the more lights appeared. More squares, but smaller. Then villages and towns and almost no areas bare of light, apart from the Lakes.

We came into La Guardia over New Jersey. Lady Liberty was small and shining bright, Manhattan beautiful and picture-perfect in the late night.

And then I had to wait two hours in the airport for the shuttle home... watching CNN with the homeless and shuttle-less, waiting for morning.