Olive Sprouts

Wind blows my hair into my eyes. A canyon swerves and slithers below me, and I hold tightly to my seven year old brother’s hand. For once he doesn’t mind, looking down from the rocky, craggy overlook down, down, down at the river far below.
A bumpy dirt road makes our Suburban tilt and jolt and jiggle us, to the pure delight of all five brothers. One gives me an ecstatic thumbs up as we jounce over a particularly large rock. Then we give the rest of the road a miss, and turn around and go back, this time climbing up the hill.
We laugh on the way back as we remember what we read on the funny sign, the one that we rolled by on the way in. The boys disbelieved the picture, they didn’t think it was possible for a road to be open and still have the warnings it did. I hoped all the pilots were still lingering over their Sunday dinners, not testing equipment.
The road back winds through cattle country, through hilly land that is dotted with irrigation equipment in the valleys and cattle on the hills. Barbed wire borders the road, and a house stands in the middle of three fields and a narrow, sloping hill, black cattle feeding spread out over it. The house is two story, painted white, surrounded by trees, protecting from the playful wind, which wants to loosen shingles and slip dust through cracks when you aren’t looking. We are well past the house by the time I finish telling about it.
Now the lands are gently, gently rolling. We pass twenty ravens, cooly stalking through the grass, socializing on a sunny afternoon. Stacks of hay bales stand near another house. Far away mountains look purple blue in the distance, like huge piles of blueberries, the snow being a liberal amount of whipped cream. Farm equipment I can’t identify draws my attention closer. Tall trees that I likewise am puzzled to name reach for the sky, each branch reaching up, instead of branching out as I expect trees to. A field that was hay, and has already been harvested, gleams in the sun like gold confetti. A red barn is seen and then just as suddenly disappears around the bend.
Now there are mountains ahead of us as well as on the side, and we can see a lake, as blue as the mountains in the distance, but bordered by tan and green fields. The essence of cow assaults my nose, reminding me of laundry, the wet rags sharing and compounding
their odor with everything else.
But, as I write this, at any rate, it is almost time for lunch, so I’ll give up odorous comparisons and contemplate such joys as sandwiches and spinach dip, of which the green hills, the color light and creamy, remind me.
I try to think of some way to compare trees with sandwiches, but it eludes them. Although they do remind me of salads I’ve had, swirling vegetables that I classify as "greens". Although sometimes they’re purple-ish red. But never taller than I am, although I am on the short side! ;-)