Amuse bouche…

An excerpt from yesterday’s editing of A New Eden, Part II of Idolatry.

Context: the two are on horseback:

“She stayed beside him as they rode through a grove of stubby limber pine, above which the view opened to a golf course falling away in sculpted steppes to a narrow gorge. Long lush tracts of freshly mown fairways, bordered by poplar, willow, juniper and cottonwood, were bookended by neat rectangles of tee boxes and undulating greens, bordered with lavender, firewitch and red valerian. Bunkers of clean, smoothed sand had been stamped into the layout, strategically positioned to challenge a player’s ambitions and daring. A cascading creek meandered through the heart of the course before plunging in a thirty-foot plume into the gorge, on the far side of which, perched in an alluvial fan, a half-dozen holes more were accessed by a gracefully arched bridge of steel, with abutments of local stone. The course’s verdancy was sharply delimited and intersticed by the rawness of the dun desert and its stubble of unforgiving sage and greasewood—a breathtakingly stark contrast between the improved and the unimproved, between the man-made and the natural, between the golfer’s heaven and his hell.”