I used to say to my former boss that if you’ve seen one mountain, you’ve seen them all, and I thought that way about the desert until my (then very, very young) wife and I lived in Wyoming for a year. The west you describe is, well, the west.

Most people don’t understand how spectacular and arresting the Finger Lakes of western NY are, or the hill country of western Pennsylvania. Those places are my “stump,” as Andrew Nelson Lytle put it. Elijah Miller, who was unfortunate enough to become the father-in-law of William Henry Seward, WALKED from Albany to help found Auburn, NY in the early 1790s. His journal of that hike is beyond even what James Fenimore Cooper describes in The Pioneers (which created the only true American literary character–even Abbey kept copying Natty Bumppo). Walking alone, seventeen years old, through the Iroquois Nation, over one big hill after another and coming upon beautiful blue-green lakes that get to over 600 feet deep.

I’m going to write about him–the man of the wilderness who also tamed it so that there were relatively few women living in single wides with double men who might pose interesting problems for other hikers; then again, my relatives in McKean County PA know which hills and gaps not to venture into.

Great writing, Jeremy.

I’m not sure I can fully agree with Kreeft that it is “ignorance in the face of nature” that gives those attuned to the “natural” world the many pleasures she coughs up. Sure, the mysteries are richly there but they are not the more suspect mysteries of mankind on the make. Personally, when I’m out in either the slickrock or eastern woodlands, clarity comes to me with far less static than in the man-created world. The desert is the most fecund in this regard. Her “xeric profundities” are a long and wide furrow. The patterns emerge , present time and past epochs are revealed in stark contrast, the right-ordered scales and interdependencies of myriad forms of life come front and center and the idea of “Right ” and “Wrong” recede quickly, to be replaced by simply what is. Man elevates his hidebound sense of order and profit above the seemingly hostile chaos of the natural world, impervious to the black comedy that our order is a squalid and niggardly essay in petulant, grubbing chaos when compared against the poetic pentameter of …..not the “natural world” but…dammit to hell….THE world, us included.

We’ve set her apart so we can beat her to hell. Call me a Romantic but beating up that which is lovely and is in the business of birthing is exhibit one in our perennially best selling form of suicide: Hubris.