Look Again

From a distance it looks like a long lonely train, slowly crossing the country, but look closely—nothing is moving in this landscape. There are several of these anonymous sprawls along the highway, long blank isolated structures, maybe a couple blocks square. The walls are unadorned, simply punctuated with dark evenly spaced bays repeating all along the perimeter. Enormous trucks back into these spaces and are seized by those greedy flexible mouths. I imagine the contents are sucked deep into that cavernous space, jumbled around, and blown into another truck down the line, night and day, day and night. There are no signs, no graphics, no visible humans. Just dots of truck color along the drab flat exterior, and what remains of the bright golden fields. Once not so long ago there were farms all over this land. Even I remember. Now this space is more valuable as a transfer station serving the nearby interstate highway. Goods coming and going, land disappearing. I think that’s Mt. Diablo on the horizon.

We are on our way to the mountains again, so there are these shots from the highway, and, of course, Bert’s Diner. A guy pulled in just in front of us in this shiny black old truck, offering the perfect photo op.