It really was this color - a combination of the setting sun and hazy air. There were plumes of brown smoke coming off the mountains behind Santa Fe, but they weren't sinister ones, just the signs of a controlled burn.
Walks - and I have to say, for this purpose, they're best as solitary walks, but Eldorado being Eldorado, I usually end up sharing part of them with a dog walker or two, although not yet, this fall, the parrot walker - walks have been so important to me for thrashing out my writing thoughts. I've made a few crucial turns, I think: somewhere around this spot, this evening, I tried out the idea of jettisoning a whole chapter. I'm sure it can be its own freestanding article (or two), so that I don't feel melancholic at the idea of abandoning the work that's already gone into it (and some of which, to be honest, has spun off into another article, in any case). But it's a hard thing - or should I say, I find it a hard thing - shelving something that's been part of the book's structure for a while, even if that part of the structure seems ominously flimsy if one leans against it. So flapping around out there is a whole chunk of prose comparing American and British ideas of wilderness in art, and its underpinning by violence - against people, against game birds - and even writing that out, in all its brief banality, convinces me that it really isn't going to fit.
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