Sometimes a photograph just can’t do the trick.

I can’t believe the phone captured this so well. It’s the sort of sight that hovers easily in my imagination, yet that I as a photographer always struggle to capture. Yet the sort of thing I feel a lot of authors can capture better than a photograph. How would that go?

On this cloudy moonless night, what could have been a wild desert free of the influence of man was instead a landscape of the lights of industry and commerce; flashing wind turbines on one horizon, a holiday yard display of city lights on the other, all accompanied by the sounds of trucks and airplanes above this interstate corridor. But the sky was as though trying to fight for power over the faculty of sight. Clouds reflected back the haze of human industry, but could not fully squelch that of the brightest distant stars and nebulae that formed Orion, somehow hovering in the fog as though laying down, an apparition like a Victorian haunt in a moralistic ghost story.