Dry River

A river runs through this country perhaps three days in the year, and spends the other three hundred and sixty-two teaching the badlands exactly what it wants them to look like. Every ridge is combed the same direction. Every side canyon is a clause in the same long argument about water. At sunset the rock takes the light personally and goes a color it keeps for itself the rest of the day. Stand down in the wash and it is dry as a page, and it is unmistakably a river.