The “chiffonier” in her room was a stack of boxes covered with muslin curtains. There was “a washstand for private individual use.” There was a mirror a foot square. On her walls were Sargent and Gainsborough prints, and pictures of Ethel Barrymore and Psyche.
In the western outskirts of Rawlins, David Love pulled over onto the shoulder of the interstate, the better to fix the scene, although his purpose in doing so was not at all apparent. Rawlins reposed among low hills and prairie flats, and nothing in its setting would ever lift the stock of Eastman Kodak. In those western outskirts, we may have been scarcely a mile from the county courthouse, but we were very much back on the range-a dispassionate world of bare rock, brown grass, drab green patches of greasewood, and scattered colonies of sage. The interstate had lithified in i965 as white concrete but was kantoor per uur almere now dark with the remains of ocean algae, cremated and sprayed on the road. To the south were badlands-gullies and gulches, erosional debris. To the north were some ridgelines that ended sharply, like breaking waves, but the Rawlins Uplift had miserably fallen short in its bid to be counted among the Rocky Mountains. So why was David Love, who had the geologic map of Wyoming in his head, stopping here? The rock that outcropped around Rawlins, he said, contained a greater spread of time than any other suite of exposed rocks along Interstate So between New York and San Francisco. We were looking at many moments in well over half the existence of the earth, and we were seeing-as it happened-a good deal more time than one sees in the walls of the Grand Canyon, where the kantoor per uur amsterdam clock stops at the rimrock, aged two hundred and fifty million years. The rock before us here at Rawlins reached back into the Archean Eon and up to the Miocene epoch. Any spendthrift with a camera could aim it into that scene and-in a two-hundred-and-fiftieth of a second at f/16-capture twenty-six hundred million years. The most arresting thing in the picture, however, would be Rawlins’ municipal standpipe-that white, squat water-storage tank over there on the hill. The hill, though, was Archean granite and Cambrian sandstone and Mississippian limestone. If you could have taken pictures when they were forming, the collection would be something to see. There would be a deep and uncontinented ocean sluggish with amorphous scums (above cooling invisible magmas).