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Tire chains. All that preparation, packing the car with everything I could possibly need for any contingency, and I forgot snow chains. The West is strange. Just this morning I left the beautifully alien desert-like world of Utah and four hours later, hit a snowstorm in Colorado. 

The snow is beautiful too—a different kind of beauty from Zion, but beautiful all the same. It keeps knocking me over, the grandeur of this land, the…breathtaking splendor of it. 

And what did we do with it? We preserved some of it, sure, but at what cost? It’s hard to look at all these places and not see what it cost us. It’s hard to look at perfect white snow blanketing the world and not see the red that stains it all. 

I don’t know, maybe I’m just feeling maudlin. It’s this feeling of dread inside me—not the feeling that I had in Estes Park, this dread is all mine. But I’m dreading going to Denver tomorrow and finding out that Birdie was right, and that it’s too dangerous and I’m woefully unprepared. I’m dreading going to Kansas afterward and finding nothing and no one at all. 

I’m so goddamn lonely. Not the normal kind of lonely either, the kind of lonely I’ve been most of my life. I mean, god, I’ve been lonely a lot these last six years sharing one house with another person and…

I miss people. I don’t know why it took me so long, but I really miss people. It isn’t abstract anymore, the way it was when we were holed up in Pennsylvania—now I see it every day, how empty this place is, how beautiful but empty. How I’m the only one around to appreciate it. And that’s wrong. I don’t know that we’ve ever had it right, but I know this isn’t right either. 

We drove out so many people, killed so many people—people we thought were different from us and people we probably considered family—just so we could take everything the land was worth and then put up a sign saying it was protected now, and you have to move through it by our rules. 

And yet, still, I goddamn miss people. In all their messy flawed selves. And this—where we are now, where I am now—it must have cost us something so much worse than anything before. I’m just not sure why I’m paying the price for it. 

Or maybe I’m the one that got off easy. 

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Anyway, I got tire chains. Picked up a polaroid camera too, finally—I’m going to stay the night in whatever this city is that I’m in and hope the storm lets up by morning. 

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