drove up the valley with the eastern mountains obscured by haze, the rice fields are burning, thick smoke billowing up and darkening the sky while planes drop chemicals along the roadside. the valley floodplain is a long flat bowl surrounded by mountains of basalt and granite, oak-shaded creeks bringing runoff and snowmelt down to the river carved out cliffs and canyons to reveal layers of yellow-gray sediment formed when these mountains were an ancient sea, the shells still buried in the rock, clams and snails and squid-like creatures of the late Cretaceous period like ideas of peace fossilized in library books. they say the rice fields are burned every fall to prevent disease and the rice fields are flooded every spring, kept under water through the hundred degree heat of a valley summer. they’re burning bonfires too, piled up like cordwood at the edge of the almond orchards, and the haze will hang in the valley’s perfect bowl until the next rain.