The Names

8

We stood by the side of the road, pissing in the wind. A hunter in a camouflage jacket came up out of the woods, called a greeting. Steam drifted up from the riverbed."Where do we go next?”"We cross this range, we eat lunch, then we drive south.”"Good," he said."You like that idea.”"As long as we drive. I want to keep driving. I like the driving.”The mountains here contained a sense of time, geologic time. Rounded, colorless, unwooded. They lay in embryo, a process unfolding, or a shriveled dying perhaps. They had the look of naked events. But what else? It took me awhile to understand in what precise way these pale masses, southwest of Argos, seemed so strange and irreducible, in what way they worked a mental labor in me, forcing me to shift my eyes time and again, keep to the wheel, look to the road. They were mountains as semantic rudiments, barest definitions of themselves."Maybe it'll be warmer down there.”"How far down?”"All the way," I said. "Where Europe ends.”"I don't mind the cold.”Tap had nothing to say about the landscape. He seemed interested in what we saw, even engrossed at times, but said nothing, looked out the window, tramped the hills. Eventually I did the same, talking about anything but what was out there. We let the features gather, the low skies and mists, the hilltops edged with miles of old walls, fallen battlements, that particular brooding woe of the Pelopo