Out beyond the roadside flowers was the collapsed barbed-wire fencing of a dead cattle ranch, the long-deserted pastureland overrun with mesquite. They passed the long dawn shadows of a decapitated oil pump, with a half-dozen rust-streaked storage tanks for West Texas crude, a substance now vanished like the auk. The invisible tonnage of drill pipe was quietly rusting deep in the rocky flesh of the earth, invisible to any human eye, but nonetheless there for the geological ages, a snapped-off rotting proboscis from a swatted greenhouse-effect mosquito.