Friday, December 09, 2005
En route
I’m writing this on an airplane from San Diego to Boston. (Posted next day, on the ground - I'm not nearly that leading-edgy.) It’s a daytime flight and while I do hate to blow a day sitting on an airplane, I’m too old for red-eyes. I wind up mostly wasting the next day anyway. Also – and this is frankly a major factor – I really like looking at the country.
Right now we’re passing over (I guess) the foothills of the Rockies. There’s snow fairly far down the sides, but very little of what I can see now is above the treeline, so there’s a stubble of trees over the white ground.
I’ve been looking for a way to describe the angles on the slopes of Western mountains. They’re not sharp, but they’re not really rounded either. “Chamfered” keeps coming to mind, but it’s too goofy and technical a term, and anyway it implies a regularity that isn’t there. They don’t look very much like draped cloth – too angular for that. They look sort of like the edges that a block of dense, soft metal (lead or maybe brass) would have if hammered.
Right now we’re passing over (I guess) the foothills of the Rockies. There’s snow fairly far down the sides, but very little of what I can see now is above the treeline, so there’s a stubble of trees over the white ground.
I’ve been looking for a way to describe the angles on the slopes of Western mountains. They’re not sharp, but they’re not really rounded either. “Chamfered” keeps coming to mind, but it’s too goofy and technical a term, and anyway it implies a regularity that isn’t there. They don’t look very much like draped cloth – too angular for that. They look sort of like the edges that a block of dense, soft metal (lead or maybe brass) would have if hammered.
