They were the only travelers on the mountain road, as far as he could see ahead or behind. The road climbed, turned, and snaked in between towering hills, and then sloped down and would at times upon up to valleys and lakes. The sky remained partially clear and bright. Temperature continued to drop. Snow piled up on the side of roads as well as on the hills. The mountain peaks were white.

He thought about writing, about his travels, about the mountains, the lakes, the birds. He could write about Mabel. He didn’t know if his writing was any good. He thought about what and how, he might write.
Someone had made an interesting comment, on a social network that he visited at times, about writers. It stated that the writer needs to feel disappointed. He needs to experience a deeply unsatisfactory situation where he found no recourse at hand.
Only then, may he create good literature.
He had read similar comments elsewhere too. It was a somewhat known idea – that human suffering is the main source of creative zeal.
He did not feel that certain. Perhaps frustration can create a mental state that helps write certain kind of literature. He had also heard the same thing about painters. IT was perhaps a convenient way to explain why and how so many painters and writers were poor and hungry in their own lifetime, but end us getting famous posthumously.
He doubted, however, that this kind of depression was mandatory for all creative artists of all kinds.
He did not know enough about his brain. He doubted anybody else knew either. But the human brain was behind most things a human does, including creating something silly, or beautiful. In fact, even the definition of what should be silly and what beautiful can be argued. In fact, they are often argued. There are many that consider the cubism of Picasso, as silly rather than outstanding. Out of politeness, they would not say so to others.
Sometimes, a handful of folks would try to create a heightened appreciation of certain kind of creative art, not necessarily driven by altruistic motives, but to create a ‘fad’ or a fashion. The motive is to see high demand for that kind of products, so that the promoter can make money by selling those stuff at a high cost.
He did not consider himself to be a famous art critic, or one that claimed to know too much. But he would not pay his own good money, to acquire a Picasso – even a reprint, to be hanged on his walls.
On the other hand, he was biased towards liking the kind of painting his father did in his formative years, often using subdued earth tones, recording simple rural scenes of the arid country of Birbhum district of Bengal. Those scenes spoke to him not just of art – but of a vanishing world that might not return again. Physically, those scenes were fading away, as progress and modernization turned the landscape. That landscape was etched in his mind, as a dirt road lead them towards distant quiet small agricultural plots lined by date and palm trees, and mud-walled thatched roof village dwelling surrounded by heavier leafy trees like Mango, Bombax ceiba, Breadfruit, Rose apple and the like.

He remembered walking through the low land on the dirt road packed with hard soil and lined with the gravels stones, where he could see the distant villages, while on both sides there were first the landscape of soil eroded by running water, exposing semi arid fallow lands that the locals called “Khoai”, with its signature red earth and small irregular shaped red gravel stones covering a hard undulating soil surface. There would be palm trees here and there, and an occasional man made pond with high earth embankments on all four sides, the embankments themselves augmented by a line of palm trees.
Palm trees lining the high banks of a pond was a common feature of the land.
But today, the road was of asphalt, and the sides had a continuous stream of brick and mortar shops and houses. The area had turned into a small crowded suburb full of noise, filth and trash. The air stank of fumes from the exhaust of countless two wheelers and small trucks and cars that continuously moved about, each trying to out-honk the other in an effort to terrorize foot walkers off the road.
He did not wish to go that rout any more. He did not care about that kind of development.
However, he still doubted that one needs to see such degradation of pristine beauty before one can be coaxed to create good art or writing. His father saw the original beauty in his early years and did create what he considered one of the best arts that he liked. He was fortunate enough to have many of them hang off his walls.
A generation down the line, he himself had witnessed the degrading transformation of that landscape. But he was not creating any art out of it. That was not wholly because he could not create art. He refused to believe conventional wisdom, that art is to be evaluated by third party experts before it can influence him. He was not part of the positive feedback generation and did not intend to tread on the positive feedback loop. He had already mentioned in earlier in his musings.
Looking around, he found a similarity, however much different they might seem to a casual observer, between the khoai that his father had painted in his youth, and the high slops of the Cascade mountains around him in the middle of British Columbia. Both were, to him pristine. He knew this was relative. Man had altered the land of his fathers youth a long time ago, but particularly after the place began to grow with an eradication of dacoits and a rise of settlements.
He knew that the landscape around him once had the last generation of virgin forests, with conifers so large that their trunk were as thick as two tall men lying head to toe could not cover. Trees that could have been a thousand year old, even two thousand. All that, and the kind of biodiversity that kind of a forest supported, was gone forever. In its place, were trees that were tiny, and barely fifty to eighty year old. Slow growing, these new trees where called the second, and third generation forests, continuously felled to feed human need for lumber.
He was aware of it and conscious of it. And yet, it was still better than the landscape converted into a manicured golf course fenced off to prevent wild animals, or not so wild humans, from encroaching.
He did not like man made clearings where townships are planned to come up. Even if they are planned and designed better than the way they came up back in Birbhum district in Bengal, they would still be an eyesore to him. A manicured and pedicured one, sure, but none the less an eyesore. Nothing man could conceivably create, could equal what nature did, naturally. That is how he saw it.
He came to realize that he himself belonged to the tribe that was the principal agent of destruction of nature.
That could be a source of major depression.
He thought about it, but did not feel depressed per se. Sad, yes, but perhaps resigned to the fact that evolution could work that way, enhancing a winning trait in a species to an extreme when the trait represented too much of a good thing, and began to have a snowballing effect of a destructive positive feedback loop. Things go out of control and out of hand in a big way, resulting in a crash.
In the past, such events might have caused mega – extinctions. The reason might or might not have been the works of a single species of animal, or even multiple groups of living creatures. It could have been triggered by external unanticipated events.
But one way or another, change in circumstances have happened that the highly specialized creatures were no longer able to deal with. Thus, whole swaths of creatures die out in sudden mass extinctions, leaving the field open for the survivors to occupy and expand, carrying a different set of traits.

He thought he might write about these feelings, along with the views he was enjoying, of the drive through the Cascade mountains and its third generation conifer forests.
“where are we ?” Mabel opened her eyes and asked, as he swerved the car to avoid a dark patch on the asphalt.

“Thats the Coldwater river on our right. We are going down to the Nicola Valley and the town of Merritt.” He said and reached out to caress her cheek.