Sunset In West Texas

We’re somewhere in west Texas, heading west on I-10, and I was planning to whip out my computer and write up our time in Austin. But as we hurtle westward, the sun is starting to set, and it is spectacular, so I’m going to write about that instead. Especially since the pictures I tried to take of it from the passenger seat of the car are not really turning out the best. It must have something to do with the fact that the speed limit is 80 mph.

It feels like we’re driving into the sun. I-10 heads straight west here at many parts, and as the sun sinks lower and lower, it gets continuously larger, burning a bright orange that hurts to look at, leaving sun spots in my vision as I look back down to the computer to type. Every time we head back west, I feel like the light is going to incinerate us, reducing us to ash that will sprinkle down on the concrete. But then we turn a bit, or I look away, and we escape.

The land here is dry, with patches of ground showing up through the scrub, and pushed up into steppes with flat tops and bands of exposed rock dividing the hillsides into stripes, brown alternating with dark green. The stripes glow in the sun, and the scrub gets reduced to a dark haze, especially at distance. It is raining every so slightly, adding to the haze in the distance, making even the air glow where nothing else is around. Every once in a while lightning will flash to the south, whitening the light for a fraction of a second into the harsh glare of a flash bulb.

Looking ahead, nothing is visible now but the golden flame of the sun, obscuring the road, the hills, and the sky in the most intense orange imaginable. But look behind, and something beautiful appears. Two rainbows arc from north to south, perfect arches rising from the hills high up into the sky and back down again, one inside the other, the inside one strong, the outer one weaker, more ethereal. The outer one almost disappears in the clouds, leaving its progeny to proudly shine alone, but only for a second, until the outer rainbow reappears to frame its coltish daughter.

The sun is sinking behind the western hills now, easing the view, making the western horizon glow pink, then orange, then blue and then white up into the clouds before the clouds themselves start to glow the darker orange-brown of leaves in late fall. The blackness of the hills is seen in relief. Their texture disappears, leaving only the sharp lines of the ridges against the glowing sky, the knife edged boundaries of the earth and the sky.

Behind us the rainbows are gone, leaving the sky looking like a bruise as it transitions from black, to deep navy blue to umber. The hills behind have stolen the color from the hills ahead, catching the last of the sun’s rays and growing deeper and deeper green. Eventually they fade to black as their borrowed color seeps back down under the horizon again until the morning. The light grows ever lower in the west as well, leaving a line of windmills silhouetted against the sky as the blue gets smaller and smaller, now only a thin band between the orange of the horizon and the deep pink of the bottoms of the clouds.

The clouds look angry back in the east, like giant black gods riding westward to snuff out the last of the light. Lightning flashes to the south as the dark conquers the light, turning pink to purple, forcing the colors down behind the hills. Eventually the black will force out even its ally the gray, reigning supreme in the sky until the sun rises again in the east and the morning comes.