.William T. Vollmann

At this time the young man named Matthew discovered a certain kind of sunshine unlike Sacramento's, which to say fiercer and more withering, one of time's best weapons for degrading newsprint yellowish-orange and wrinkling people before their time; once upon a certain August which measured somewhere below far and gone in his ephemeral existence he had been hitchhiking south from Susanville and was set down in Redding where he waited five midday-girdling hours at an on-ramp whose dusty blackberry brambles were actually dripping with melted black sun-made jellies; but in the strange cool May of this current year as he hitchhiked north toward Redding the sunshine had shifted to an opposite otherness from Sacramento's, being somehow greener in its goldenness and more wild, as if the mountains were tinting it.