Heading west on Interstate 84 in eastern Oregon, the route passes through the Rockies in an unusual way. Rather than trails and roads finding their way through passes between the mountains so as to see the valleys between, which is what happens later on in our route to Seattle, when the lush valleys can be seen suddenly uncovered in their sunshine and shadows, idyllic places rather than the rough places of the peaks that are higher by far than where the roads go through it, Interstate 84 instead finds its way on top of the mountains, moving from high point to high point, these not apexes but extended ridges where the trees to both sides are of the same elevation as the road, no cliffs to see, nor the valleys either, because the trees are enough to prevent looking at a gap or offering a clearing. The result is that the passing cars offer a sense of being on top of the world, a continuous thing that goes for a long distance and so making the whole vistaless view seem miraculous, a deep insight into how there is nothing higher but nothing depressed and so offering a very little angle of vision. This experience is remarkably pleasurable partly because it is so unusual a vantage point, or rather the lack of a vantage point, and even more so because the whole scene seems to float without a top and a bottom, as if there were a natural equality in which people (or trees) were embedded, rather than a natural inequality whereby something is always either higher or lower, these the differences in geometry about something very fundamental about social life, which is that equality and inequality are the two natural states of social existence with inequality the predominant quality. We all float amidst the unusual sight of the equal society of trees surrounding one another and those who observe them rather than some more elevated than others, looking at other companion trees rather than in the distance. Isn't equality grand?