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

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.

We tell stories to talk out the trouble in our lives, trouble otherwise so often so unspeakable. It is one of our main ways of making our lives sensible. Trying to live without stories can make us crazy. They help us recognize what we believe to be most valuable in the world, and help us identify what we hold demonic.

We live in stories. What we are is stories. We do things because of what is called character, and our character is formed by the stories we learn to live 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?

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.

Don't worry about meaning. If a story's any good, it can't help but have meaning. Let the PhDs tell you what your story means.