Imagine yourself rolling along a dusty orange highway, arm slung carelessly along the sill of an open window, the wind whipping your hair about your face in great, steady gusts. Through the portal of the window, low, arid landscape blows past, mile after desolate mile.
Imagine yourself – pack slung across your back, crunching softly through a frozen, moonlit landscape, the light reflecting gently off the paper-thin sheet of ice, just solidified, like new skin, atop the glittering snow.
Now imagine yourself on a knotty pine porch. The sky above you clear and bright, the trees dotting the area just in front of the low cabin a collage of greens and browns, peppered in places with burnt orange and pale yellow, painted thickly here, there, by an American elm, sprouting like a broccoli floret grown to mammoth proportions, a Black ash, it’s nubby ridges a veiny grid work of flecks of crumbly bark, seemingly begging to be peeled from its trunk by idle hands.
Here, amongst the elms and the ash’s, amongst the dense deciduous framework, in the cool, clear lakes, in the rolling wheels of a West Coast-bound car, in the moist leather of that cold nighttime field, and on that very porch, Austin Plaine finds inspiration.
And here, Plaine writes…
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