There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence . . .

Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?

Every book that anyone sets out on is a voyage of discovery that may discover nothing. Any voyager may be lost at sea, like John Cabot. Nobody can teach the geography of the undiscovered. All he can do is encourge the will to explore, plus impress upon the inexperienced a few of the dos and don'ts of voyaging.

We write to make sense of it all.

We do not write what we know; we write what we want to find out.

The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process.