As long as the RV kept running, B.C. was the best place to hide in the whole world. They often drove for many hours without seeing another vehicle. The road was an endless stripe of light gray pavement curving and weaving and undulating across a countryside that was all mountains. Occasionally, for an hour or two, they would parallel railroad tracks, lightly rust filmed. Sometimes they’d run along rivers caroming through zigzag channels of brown-gray rock topped with acid-green moss that looked knee-deep. Rivers and railways came and went, but the road went on eternally. Every so often she would glimpse a gas station, a cabin, a faded Canadian flag snapping in a turbulent cold breeze, ravens flying overhead, a house sitting inexplicably at a wide spot in the road with senseless suburban touches grafted onto it. Intersections with other roads were so remarkable that they were announced beforehand with all the pomp of bicentennials. Sometimes it was rain forest; other times they drove up valleys with great expanses of rocky, bare red soil studded with sagebrush and supporting sparse growths of scrub pines and open meadows of ranch land that might have been in the approaches to the Grand Canyon. Valleys full of Indians, driving old pickup trucks, gave way to valleys full of cowboys, trotting around on horses with their herding dogs. Newborn calves suckling from their mothers’ udders. Huge geometric reshapings of mountainsides that she guessed must be mining projects. Canyons lined with marble the colors of honey and blood. Spindly steel-wheeled irrigation systems poised at the edge of barren cleared fields, like sprinters at the starting line, waiting for the season to begin. Mountains marching in queues from directly overhead to the horizon, one after another, as if to say, We have more where these came from . Deciduous trees budding out on the mountains’ lower slopes, engulfing the lone dark spikes of conifers in a foaming, cresting wave of light green. Above that, the mountains’ upper slopes jumping asymptotically into curling cornices of fluffy white clouds, as opaque as cotton balls. Sometimes the clouds parted, giving glimpses of places higher up, the trees dusted as if the fog were condensing and freezing on them, just letting her know that they were only scurrying around on an insignificant low tier, and that above them were stacked many additional layers of greater complexity and structure and drama, both sunlit and weather lashed.