I was captivated by this scene for some reason, and I spent a good deal of time thinking of how best to shoot it. On the final day of my trip there to Glacier National Park, I decided on this treatment.

There are many interesting things to me here, and you can probably be thankful you were not beside me to hear me go off on a theoretic (a new Neal Stephenson word). We enjoy beauty and puzzle over beauty at the same time. In a world of entropy, it is calming to take beauty, break it apart into what makes it so, and then piece it back together again to bring order to the chaos.

But, I could not bring myself to work on the puzzle at all. I just drank in everything I was there to be with for the moment. I thought a little about the nature of wanting to make a puzzle, just to solve it, a notion that is meta-puzzling in itself.

Other guests that come into this view no doubt sit down and work on the puzzle, possibly thinking they could finish it, but also with a sneaking suspicion that they are just putting a few pieces together for the next guest that comes to visit. It seemed to be sort of an altruistic long-term battle against entropy.

So I chose not to mess with the puzzle, and simply to focus on the beauty of things as I held them in my mind’s eye. Puzzles tend to work themselves out on their own, which is a comforting thought, I suppose.