It was raining as we soaked our

way and dog around the block, after which I punctuated breakfast with packing,

said goodbyes and set off into Friday’s wet and stupid traffic.  Though the wet was pretty much done by Vacaville the stupid persisted unto Truckee, after which 89 was blessedly unpopulated

…Sierra Valley, 70 to the usual gas at Hallelujah Junction at 395, after Doyle nothing all the way

up the desert save an SUV kind enough to pull over just before Espil’s.  UPS went by, waved as I

closed the gate, and the rain caught up in the night.  It continued

sporadically

until late afternoon around the time I found all the truck and trailer documents

to be mysteriously missing – the Immaculate Bandit’s long shadow.  Sunday morning

walked over to make sure they weren’t mixed in with the Jeep docs I’d returned to the Parker

after finding them in a hardhat in the repo…they weren’t but coming back noticed the right front tire on the ’82 going flat [long shadow, again] so later on took it off and loaded it for town.

Washed-out afternoon light reminiscent of other earlier equally uneasy spring days

at Radar Ranch and elsewhere…same as it ever was.

Monday, hazy sun, the annual sheep drive arrived,

clanging and jingling melodiously up from Lovelock and after lunch

town, not shown.  No one was at the gas station  [the flat had a free ride in and out] but Bryan’s box went off to Bagram and I told the Sheriff about the missing docs, not that anything was likely to be done about them.   The wind dried things out enough to visit the Yellow Chair, painted with an enamel by now surely illegal as it’s survived outside for over thirty years and

after dinner Espil’s water truck, chasing the sheep, rounded the bend at last light.

March 26 Tuesday, grey, forty degrees with magpies at eight and later more of that flat light

evocative of old oil paintings from Radar in the nineties, trying to capture high desert atmospherics…

Spits of rain, unknowable creatures burrowing up from the wet gravelly ground,

unease of early spring, so it goes…

….the wet.

March.

typical

and, typically,

gone again.