Sublime

I might return not only with a cleaner understanding of a landscape that had been a fixation since my boyhood, but with a better grasp of who I was, and perhaps a renewed sense of whom I might yet become, before it was too late to grow and change.

In the desert, efficiency, discipline, and wiliness almost invariably win out over brute force.

At the start of this quest, I had no way of imagining that long after it was over I would still be struggling to formulate a coherent response to the miseries the canyon inflicted on us, the satisfactions that would later overtake the memories of that misery, or the yearning and splendor that transcended them all.

The hills immediately west of the Tillman abode are honeycombed with mine shafts that once yielded a bounty of mercury ore. It was the most valuable mine in California during the latter half of the nineteenth century, but the diggings were shut down in 1975, after which the site was designated a forty-two-hundred-acre recreational area and thirty-f