Driving is hard. It's too hard to concentrate in this heat, but this is summer, and I can't complain: It's summer's job to be hot. I can feel the sweat on my back, and under my thighs; the way it glues me to the seat, the faint tang it adds to the humourless air. I'm not fond of long car trips.

I don't like driving any longer. I recall liking it, loving it in fact, wanting to throw myself in a vehicle at any hour of any day, and drive to some place I've never been. I think it's just these last few years with Miranda has changed me. I know she never liked cars at all. She used to fly, or catch the train (never the bus- I don't blame her), or ride her mountain bike. Maybe that's rubbed off on me. I guess a lot of things have.

She's there beside me now, curled up in the seat as best she can. I can see her head bouncing on the window, vibrating with the car. It's funny, she always used to complain about our bed back home, how it hurt her back, how she couldn't sleep. Now here she dozes, sitting in an awkward upright position, head bouncing against the window in time to the bumps. I do it too; it's just one of those things.

Why would anybody live here? The land is just flat. There's nothing to see. Oh sure, there's trees and power lines, but there always are. You take them for granted. This land, it's dark grey-brown soil netted with farms and roads, it's just dull. I've always been a mountain person, and so, I guess, has Miranda. Surely there has to be a better way to farm. What I mean is a more efficient way to farm. Look out there at that tractor. It tows the plough or whatever it is, stirring up the soil, which blows away in the wind. Those conservationists are always ranting on about how valuable the topsoil is, and how we should look after the environment for the future generations. If they're so smart, why can't they invent a better way to till the land. Why can't they invent some sort of factory that can grow grain? Why can't you make use of all that space up in the sky- build giant pyramids out of concrete and grow grains and rice in terraces alone the faces, using giant mirrors to reflect the sun onto the dark faces…

This happens. I get in a car and drive, and my mind wanders fantastically. If the images in my mind were real we would all be living in a surreal interpretation, a mosaic world of overlayed fantasies, a place where nothing was real and everything existed. I start to imagine that I am the last person on the Earth, here in my little car, putting around, consuming the fruits of humankind in a kind of dejected, burnt out joy, knowing my eventual punitive destruction would mean virtually zilch to the world, the universe at large. Just another grasshopper going splat against the windscreen of time. Damned things.

I should pull the car over and get out, go for a walk. In fact, I should get Miranda to drive for a while. I don't think she'd get lost if I went to sleep. She's got a much better sense of direction than I have. I couldn't find my way out of a sleeping bag.

That's what I'll do. Now, to find an appropriate spot. If only those imbeciles who build this road had installed some form of rest area, or left a nice big tree standing near the road, I could pull over and sit in the shade. Maybe they should build a big long roof all the way along the side of the road where people could pull over, so they'd be under cover wherever they stopped. They could get the money for it by cutting back on those stupid city road projects that go on forever. It couldn't cost that much to do…

Again, my mind is slipping, but farther this time. If I keep this up I could doze off myself, and lose control of the car. I'm not terribly worried about the car. I mean, it is a rental. It's not worth anything to me but the five hundred deposit. I doubt they'll give that back anyway after that kid keyed the boot. No, it's Miranda I worry about. If I was at fault when we crashed into something and she was hurt in any way- well, you know. Miranda is… precious.

I'm going to pull over.

"What's wrong?" I hear her ask as the car comes to a halt on the grass beside the road. "Why are we stopping?"

"I just need a break. I keep daydreaming. I'm in no state to be driving you or anybody else around. Getting tired, I guess."

"Do you want me to take over?"

"No. I just need to stretch, to take a bit of time out."

"There's cold water in the esky. Do you want some?" Without my reply, she gets out of the car anyway, and I pop the boot for her, and accidentally open the fuel cap too. I open the door and get out onto the soundless road. I can still hear that tractor, going round and round, stirring up dust.

I walk to the back of the car to close the fuel cap. Miranda hands me a little green plastic cup full of cold water. "Quiet out here, isn't it?"

I listen. There's the sound of the engine cooling, little clicks and pops every now and then. There's the sound of the wind far off, rustling the leaves and the grass, and the low grumble of that tractor. I nod and drink the water.

"It's an empty landscape," I say, perhaps trying to inhabit the silence.

Miranda smiles at me. She has the most beautiful smile I've ever seen. Her big blue eyes light up, and I am again instilled with that sense of wonder at this woman. We're coming up to our forth year together as man and wife, so that would be about six all up, and she still fills me with that joy every time I see her. I hope this is all there is to life.

It isn't. The drudgeries of everyday life still exist for us to contend with, and we are two separate people, we do have our differences. Maybe that a good thing. It highlights these little moments, makes you seem all the luckier.

"I don't know," she says thoughtfully. "I mean, there's the road, and the trees. The land itself has it's own kind of beauty. It is its own purpose, there's beauty in that. The way the wind ripples through the grass, the way the dust curls and eddies. Everything is unique to this one moment, and in the billions of years past or to come, this moment will never occur again. See, look at the birds. They fold and slide on the air itself. There aren't any grand-looking buildings, or neat palms lining the road. It's a kind of natural completeness though, not empty. Do you see."

I don't think I do. I know what she's trying to tell me. It's the same thing she's always tried to say to me, how everything is beautiful. She seems to see the inner interplay between the natural and human-made objects of the world. She's explained the concept to me any number of times, how to truly see something for what it's worth you must see it how it is, as it stands, with no preconception of the object. You must see the object in the objects terms, the entity it's own purpose. It's not something I can do. If I could only see the world through her eyes, then I would understand.

I don't answer her. To me, this is still just an empty landscape.