The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

My most memorable hikes can be classified as 'Shortcuts that Backfired'.

All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.

I've got a crooked elbow and I generally say my prayers with one leg on a brass rail.

I had discovered that I am the kind of person who cannot live comfortably, tolerably, on all-flat terrain. For the sake of inner equilibrium there has to be at least one mountain range on at least one of the four quarters of my horizon-and not more than a day’s walk away.

Walking makes the world much bigger and therefore more interesting.

Because we need brutality and raw adventure, because men and women first learned to love in, under, and all around trees, because we need for every pair of feet and legs about ten leagues of naked nature, crates to leap from, mountains to measure by, deserts to finally die in when the heart fails.

We always used to think it didn’t matter, that when you mined out one area, or farmed it out, or overgrazed it, you could move to new country beyond the hills, keep moving West. But there are no new places to go anymore. The land is full. We have to stay where we are, take care of what we have. There isn’t going to be anything else.

Space and scarcity give us dignity. And liberty. And thereby beauty.

The Machine may seem omnipotent, but it is not. Human bodies and human wit, active here, there, everywhere, united in purpose, independent in action, can still face that machine and stop it and take it apart and reassemble it-if we wish-on lines entirely new. There is, after all, a better way to live.

The earth is not a mechanism but an organism, a being with its own life and its own reasons, where the support and sustenance of the human animal is incidental.

One wishes to go on. On this great river one could glide forever-and here we discover the definition of bliss, salvation, Heaven, all the old Mediterranean dreams: a journey from wonder to wonder, drifting through eternity into ever-deeper, always changing grandeur, through beauty continually surpassing itself: the ultimate Homeric voyage.

And yet-when all we know about it is said and measured and tabulated, there remains something in the soul of the place, the spirit of the whole, that cannot be fully assimilated by the human imagination.

One no longer searches for any ulterior significance in all this; as in the finest music, the meaning is in the music itself, not in anything beyond it. All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.

I am-really am-an extremist, one who lives and loves by choice far out on the very verge of things, on the edge of the abyss, where this world falls off into the depths of another.

...the only birds I can recognize without hesitation are the turkey vulture, the fried chicken, and the rosey-bottomed skinny-dipper.