Overcast with patches of rain was what we woke to over in Gallup, New Mexico. With the flexibility to carve up our day in any manner we chose, the quick decision to head home came easy, and besides, we felt well-satisfied with everything experienced during the previous four days. By the time we reached Arizona, the skies were looking promising though some rain along the way would have been welcome if for no other reasons than their cooling effect and the sweet smell of the desert. We left the interstate at Sanders and turned south on U.S. Route 191.

There’s so much we don’t know, such as the fact that U.S. Route 191 runs from Morgan, Montana, on the Canadian border to Douglas, Arizona, on the Mexican border. While it’s a very fragmented road, it holds serious promise for a road trip covering great distances for no other purpose than seeing what lies between in order to seize selfie opportunities at the international borders.

At our first stop in Sanders, we picked up a burrito from a Navajo lady selling breakfast fare from her truck. She only had pork, potato, and green chili available, and while we weren’t hungry since we’d had breakfast at our hotel in Gallup, we both felt it was a good idea to support your local Navajo roadside vendor. The mostly potato burro did nothing for us, so we went on the lookout for a hungry rez dog. We had no luck finding a stray starving dog, so we thought we’d try the horses. Not only were they not interested in a burrito, they weren’t interested in us either. One of them was so disinterested that it went and hid in the tunnel that runs under the highway to allow the horses to cross the road without suffering the fate of chickens.

There’s something dental x-ray-like about how the sun illuminates the rain dropping from those clouds out there with various hues and creates a kaleidoscopic sky, shooting shadow lasers over the otherwise bright landscape. These transient moments of a particular wavelength of beauty are threatened by the passage of time and our own movement as the elements shift into new configurations in the blink of an eye. The car stops, and the light denies us the opportunity to own forever what was so worthy just a second before.