The landscape changes so dramatically, it’s hard to believe we’re still in the same country, on the same planet. In less than an hour, we’ve gone from fog-clad peaks and a vast expanse of countless shades of green—hues nuanced toward blues into grays and purples—to a succession of monochrome parking lots, enormous and mostly empty, surrounding their respective motels, hotels, diners, supermarkets, and drugstores (the ratio of parking space to space for human bodies bewilderingly biased in favor of the former).
