“There is not a tree, nothing but sage.  As moonlight unto sunlight is that desert sage to other greens.  Not a house, windmill, hill, only that jade-gray plain with lilac mountains on every distant horizon.  The mountains companionably move along with you as the dirt road flows behind.  The plain, like a great Lazy Susan, turns gravely, and as it turns it brings into view primroses blooming in the sand, and cactus pads with great red and yellow blooms showy as hibiscus.”

– Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose