in the desert there is everything and there is nothing. Stay curious. Know where you are...your biological address. Get to know your neighbors...plants, creatures, who lives there, who died there, who is blessed, cursed, what is absent or in danger or in need of your help. Pay attention to the weather, to what breaks your heart, to what lifts your heart. Write it down.

On the Colorado Plateau, with its considerable share of wildlands, a natural world more or less intact, the most exotic terrain may be the plateau's own history. During my recent journeys this history felt foreign and unnervingly off-the-Map, even as I lived in its heart. Gaze out from the mesa, and you will meet my duplicitous lover. You will see eternity, a desert that like no other place exudes the timelessness of nature as the final arbiter. Scrape off our century, and you will find its usurper, pressed into a nugget of inorganic matter, the single greatest threat to the continuity of life. The history inscribed itself on the Map's most alarming folios; ignoring it was no way to earn Home.

• 1997 Whiting Writers' Award
• 2003 Pulitzer Prize nomination for The Anthropology of Turquoise Meditations on Landscape, Art & Spirit (2003)
• 2007 John Burroughs Medal Award

• "GROUND ZERO", Salon, February, 24, 1999

Anthologies