May I tell you about the picture?

At the top of this blog is a photograph with five primary elements: mountains, sky, pine trees, a big meadow full of sunflowers, and a road.

Of the sky, I will say nothing at all. Dickey Betts said all that needs to be said. A few clouds don’t change that.

The mountains were, at one time, a single mountain. These are the San Francisco Peaks north of Flagstaff, Arizona. The peaks formed as a stratovolcano, which either exploded or (more likely) collapsed into a hollow magma chamber.

The trees are ponderosa pines, part of the largest stand of ponderosa pine in the world, stretching from the Kaibab plateau on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon to the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau, the Mogollon Rim.

I’m going to hazard a guess about the meadow. At some time in the past, I think, this was a solid pine forest. It burned, some time in the past 150 years, and cattle have grazed the meadow and prevented the recruitment of new pines. I made the photograph in August (2007); usually the meadow tends to be grass.

The road has two names. It’s the Loop Road, and also Fire Road 545. It is named the loop road because it forms a loop through Sunset Crater National Monument and Wupatki National Monument. The National Forest Service calls it Fire Road 545 because the entrance to Sunset Crater N. M. passes through the Coconino National Forest.

I didn’t yet have Peregrine fille when I took this photograph. I was headed away from Sunset Crater in a car I rented at the airport in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2007, when I lived in Maine.

Once, on this same road, in about this same place, I was driving with my family while the sun set behind the San Francisco peaks. I know that the sun is 93 million miles away, but what I knew came into conflict with what I am pretty sure I saw: the mountains had swallowed the sun. The last rays of sunlight escaped upward in a glorious beam of light that I will never forget.

It was, of course, a miracle.