Highway in the Sky

The sun sits upon a throne in the eastern sky, dabbling the land with golden showers of light.  Its rays creep up under the clouds in a flood of heat, bathing the valley with a translucence that shimmers on the morning dew of the grass.  Up ahead the highway is split in half, not by the divide in the middle, but by strokes of lightning that had cracked the pavement at dusk.  A lone truck, catapulted from the horizon at dawn, zips on by at a hundred miles per hour. 

The driver spits out the window into the leeward air, then shouts with delight at the freedom of the open road.   The voices of birds toll like morning bells that hang from the shoulders of angels, who walk along ramparts on the Castle of Dawn.  The sky opens up with a serenity born from boundless opportunity, crisp and velvety over the wrinkled terrace of the Rocky Mountains.  Out there, among scurrying jackrabbits and cinquefoils that reach their petals upwards for energy supplied from the sun, rises from out of the ground a range of mountains that abandons any last sense of civilization, leaving in the dust all the dilemmas that drive society people to madness. 
          The Himalayas stand on the horizon like fists punching their way through the firmament.  There they stand, the Holy Mountains of Nirvana, the promised land where mountaineers and monks seek common ground on elevated surfaces of illumination. 
         The man puffs from his reefer and smiles.