The yellow bus

The bus is doing maybe thirty. There's nowhere to be in a hurry to, here. The road runs out into the rocks ahead and bends behind a fin of sandstone the size of a small cathedral, and somewhere past that it bends again, and again, and you go where it goes.

The cliffs were here before the road. They were here before the country that built the road, before the language we use to name them, before any of us. You can feel that, driving through. Two hundred million years of patient compression, then a few thousand years of wind doing the slow work of carving. The bus, the asphalt, the license plate that says EXPLORE, all of it temporary. Charming, even. Like a child playing house in a cathedral.

I love places like this. Not because they make me feel insignificant, exactly, but because they let me. There's a relief in it. The cliffs do not need me to admire them. The road does not need to be traveled. I can just be here, briefly, in a yellow bus, on the way to somewhere I haven't decided.