Reading Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire and Anticipating Space to Fill

I was reading Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire as I waited for a hit, took a break to go out, walk, shoot photos, and didn't realize until just now that as all winter long I never honored pine trees as I did today, the event of my shooting them goes well with the book. (What are those, white pines?) Abbey spent a season as an Arches National Monument or Park, whichever it is, ranger in Utah, and a certain ash is or was the only deciduous tree in the wilderness he contemplated and explored.

 

It's been nice here at Round Valley all winter and much of the fall. If it wasn't, I wouldn't keep returning. I can almost touch May now. April I'm not big about because the trout fishing from shore remains pretty slow and the bass aren't active yet. Even at Mount Hope Pond last April I caught none. Here in Bedminster, I caught loads of bass in the neighborhood pond, but it's a shallow dishpan and warms like a skillet on the stove. Or like an egg on a desert rock. I wonder what kind at Arches. At Mount Hope, I tried jigging at the bottom of the 12 foot drop, but never got a tap. I messed about in the shallows, too, but nothing seemed to be there. Colonial Park Pond is another story with that silty water absorbing heat and I suspect I'll catch a few. But once the season gets under way, something of stark contemplation with the grand outlines is lost because the green and the pleasure in warmth and scents and visible activities here and there fills in the picture and you tend not to experience the wide edges, wide outlines barren and open more like depicted in Abbey's book.