Well out of view of the boy, I leaned in against the side of the trailer with my palms against the cold metal. Then I spent a well-earned minute swearing, mostly at myself. I did have choices at the truck stop and just like some of the people who pissed me off in the past, I made the easier one, the wrong one, because I refused to make the choice between hard and harder. The harder choice would have been to call it a day and go home. Sure, I’d thought about it. Like a good many people, when faced with a hard decision, most of my thinking involved trying to come up with a good excuse not to do what I knew I should do. The refrain of woulda-shoulda-coulda repeated itself over and over in my head.

I walked around to the rear of the trailer as another northbound semi split the creeping dawn. An inspection of my hydraulic lift gate and trailer door indicated no damage—none at all. But I knew we had been hit, and hit hard. Then I saw it, up high on the right rear corner of the trailer—a souvenir of our near-death misadventure. Half-buried in the aluminum skin of the trailer, like a chromed artillery round, was the side mirror from the semi. My legs quivered with the inescapable proof of just how close we had come to an ugly end. The difference between life and death had come down to weight and speed, and less than an inch. Experience will help you make the right decision. And when you make the wrong decision anyway, it might save your sorry, stupid ass.

The other driver hadn’t stopped after our trucks made contact. It would have been dangerous to even try. Maybe he was speeding. Maybe not. I doubted he was going all that fast. The visibility and road conditions only made his speed seem fast. He’d lost a mirror and that was all. Down the road, probably at the Stop ‘n’ Gone, he’d pull over and assess the damage. And think. And maybe change his underwear. At some point I’d have to get a ladder and surgically remove the mirror. For the time being, it would have to stay where it was.

I walked out to the front of the truck and paused to watch the sun come up over the desert. In less than a minute the snow stopped and the wind dropped to barely a whisper as wide patches of blue opened up between the clouds overhead. Even as I watched, the white expanse of snow-covered ground began to stretch out before me farther and farther until the sheer cliff face of the red, mica-flaked mesa a hundred miles distant was revealed, its flat top still obscured by clouds and behind them the first piercing rays of sunlight. As forbidding as the desert might be in summer, it was nothing compared to the silent and cold emptiness of winter.

Even as I stood there surveying the vastness of it all I was drawn toward it, into it, like it was some crazy lover forever promising passion and never love. Yet it was always there, beckoning, and sometimes I thought it was that constancy that drew me, that simple need to know what I could never know in a place, from a landscape, that didn’t care either way.