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That we say, "Ahh!"

Long ago and far away, George Sheitlin drove from New Jersey to Berkeley, California, to go to school.  While I had driven down from Tacoma, and had been doing my best not to fall asleep at the wheel, George had taken pictures of clouds.  Something there is about vast expanses of flatlands that frame huge cloud formations; that enable us to see, not just the clouds, but both sides of them as they stretch from there to there!  George drove across Iowa and Nebraska, but he never pointed his camera down.  

 It is what makes Montanans to speak of the Big Sky Country, and people like Harley to praise horizons in South Dakota.  In North Dakota, Canada is what lies on the other side of everything you can see, all at once.  

 It happens here, too, in Tucson, that desert "islands"--the surprisingly tall mountains that rise from the desert like pinnacles rise from the seabed, wrinkle the air with tumbling water, crowding it up against the high places, shoving it higher still, and we say, "Ahh!"

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