1. Texture

How the surface of an object appears to feel or actually feels; shown in photography by the way light falls on an object and through value changes.
 

Though the wind has always shaped the west Texas landscape, I hadn't anticipated its gusto the night I made camp in the Guadalupe Mountains. I arrived late, my brain and limbs stiff from the four-hundred-mile drive. Only a crooked path lined by cholla and piñon separated the pullout from the campsite. But in that cold distance, I reconsidered. While an evening in my tiny Honda would no doubt be an exercise in contortion, a night in a nylon tent buffeted by the riotous wind looked even less appealing. Once I pinned down the parachute of my tent and mastered the spindly contraption of the poles, however, exhaustion won out, and I slept.

The following morning the campground was quiet even as the wind rushed above the canyon. A thick ribbon of silver clouds sped over the mountaintops like an animated diorama of the Gulf Stream, skimming the craggy caps of El Capitan and Guadalupe Peak, Texas's highest point at eighty-seven hundred feet. Though I'd seen the silhouette of the mountains against the dazzling sash of the Milky Way as I pitched the tent, I hadn't realized their drama. Now I was held not by the clouds—though it was hard to pull my eyes away from the body of their velocity—but rather by the pale cliffs buttressed by hills of oak and Texas madrone, split by canyons of maple and ash, the leaves a tattered weave of scarlet and saffron on this late October day.