One of finest evocations of life in Western America in recent memory... Powerful and profoundly moving.

In a story, nothing is real until it is acted upon.

It is a skill we learn early, the art of inventing stories to explain away the fearful scared strangeness of the world. Storytelling and make-believe, like war and agriculture, are among the arts of self-defense, and all of them are ways of enclosing otherness and claiming ownership.

I wonder what my father saw in his most secret sight of the right life. It's my guess he wanted to live out his life surrounded by friends and children and fertile fields of his own designing. I tihnk he wanted to die believing he had been in one the creation of a good sweet place. Those old pilgrims believed stories in which the West was a promise, a far away place where decent people could escape the wreckage of the old world and start over. Come to me, the dream whispers, and you can have one more chance.

It is our duty to preserve huge tracts of land in something resembling its native condition. The biological interactions necessary to insure the continuities of life are astonishingly complex, and cannot take place in islands of semiwilderness like the national parks.

In learning to pay respectful attention to one another and plants and animals, we relearn the acts of empathy, and thus humility and compassion - ways of proceeding that grow more and more necessary as the world crowds in.

Writing is a funny business. You sit in your room and listen to voices and write everything down. What kind of a profession is that?