Sunrise:

As the Earth rolled just a little further, the rind of the sun flowed up over the horizon, a bloody red, syrupy slash. I turned away from it and saw that the snowscape was now an irregular checkerboard of colors; the palest green-white hollows, where the sun's rays -- after 93 million miles -- still didn't penetrate, set between small wavelets and whips of windblown snow that stood up a little and caught the light and glowed as if lit from inside. The glowing snow was a misty pink and the expanse of delicate shades that leapt away from my boots in all directions seemed so bouyant that the entire tundra might just rise slowly and float away. For a moment I forgot the cold and the wind and knew that I was in a magical place.
Once, I'd heard someone call this place a 'wasteland.'
"They must never have seen this," I thought, "Or they did, but were blind."

The Thing:

The Thing--it had no shape I could really identify, and I just thought of it as The Thing--was half buried in snow and 100 yards away. Its outline was somehow too regular for anything else in this snowscape; although there were plenty of regular shapes here, like orderly snowdrifts and perfectly straight cracks in the black lake ice, this one didn't belong. It stood up from the snow, whereas most everything here seemed to hug the ground. And the color wasn't right; it was an off-white, almost yellow. Warned by everyone, for a week, about polar bears, I approached it very cautiously; but soon it was clear, this was no bear. The snow crunched and squeaked underfoot, as if I were crushing styrofoam blocks with my boots, and the thing didn't move.
Finally I was close enough to see that it was wood. Then I could see that it was an abandoned dogsled. I stepped closer. Just sticking up from the snow, it looked like a small boat sinking at sea. The plywood walls were peeling, and rusty nails bent out here and there. The runners were in good shape, however. I wondered when it had been abandoned, and why. Was it years ago, months? Decades? A hundred years? In this environment, wood might easily last that long. And this thing might be here for centuries more. It seemed to me that it was us human beings that came and went, while the things we build remain long after we've moved on, like ghosts."