Road Report

Sara and I returned to Durango, Colorado, yesterday after driving six days from eastern Long Island, visiting relatives along the way. Notable were the tremendous numbers of trucks on the highways, the haze that hangs over much of the landscape, and, in Colorado, the destruction of spruce forests by beetles that flourish in the warmer dryer conditions. My most vivid visual memory, formed in eastern Colorado, fifty miles east of where the Rocky Mountains begin to loom through the haze to the west, is of a gently rising grassy green slope culminating in a distant ridge graced with power-generating windmills with immense, slowly turning, arms. Later we pass some, close by on either side. I think they are beautiful and wonder whether my esthetic judgment is affected by associating them with efforts to slow global warming.