Vapor trail

Snapped this one a few mornings ago on a dawn walk in the desert. The chalk-mark streak in the middle of a cloudless sky is the vapor trail of a jet on its way somewhere east of here. Watch the sky on a clear morning like this and there is one of these after another.

A hundred years ago, someone like me would be watching a passenger train rumbling by, wondering what far-off adventures lie ahead for the people aboard. Now I think of them as tiny specks inside another silent, moving speck and me and my dog invisible to them in the Earth's shadow.

Coming up: Old West glossary, no. 45