An Alternate Universe

I happened to look outside one morning in the early fall of 2006 and noticed this magnificently thick fog covering everything.  There wasn't any wind to speak of.  I grabbed the camera, jumped in the truck and headed out to the country in search of a neat shot.  I went hiking up into the hills on the Nebraska side of the Missouri and stumbled around wide-eyed like a kid in a museum.  I met a stray dog along a trail and once he caught a glimpse of me, he bolted.  He (or she, I guess) was probably just as surprised to see me emerge from the fog as I was to see him.  I would have loved to capture the look on his face for posterity, but I just wasn't ready.  Later, driving down a dirt road, several deer crossed in front of me but, again, I was too slow.  Two priceless shots no one else but me will ever see (at least not in the exact same confluence of time and place).  The dirt road took me down along the river shore, right below the new bridge connecting South Dakota and Nebraska several miles south of Vermillion, SD.  I caught this scene right as the birds began to conjure up their twilight symphonies, and just before the river folk began to sip their morning coffee.  All this bridge is is a giant slab of concrete, which is really no more significant than a small slab of concrete, but the largeness of objects forces us to the edge of awe simply because we take a moment to appreciate its existence, like we would the existence of the universe itself.  I'm reminded of Rene Magritte's painting of the giant apple filling up an entire room.