Maybe (Maybe Not) Read Online Free PDF

people sailed from Europe to North America between the seventeenthcentury and the Second World War. Even after we got to the edge of this continent, we kept on moving.
    The genealogists in my clan say I can follow my own genes by starting with a Danish sea raider, who rowed off to what became Normandy in the eighth century. From there the gene strain invaded England, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington State.
    Still there’s no settling down. I’ve moved my domicile twenty-seven times in fifty-five years. And that’s not counting short-term addresses connected to college dorms, summer jobs, and military training.
    I moved again this year.
Here’s my change-of-address notice:
    I have been living aboard a houseboat in Seattle. Now, for part of the year I live in another neighborhood—San Juan County, Utah.
    You may not realize it, but you’ve seen this Utah landscape. It’s high desert, red-rock canyon-lands country. John Wayne filmed some of his most famous cowboy pictures hereabouts. And every now and then, there is an ad on TV showing a beautiful woman in an evening gown marooned alone with a late-model pickup truck on top of a thousand-foot sandstone spire out in the middle of nowhere. These places are in my new neighborhood.
    I’ve never figured out how that ad would make me want to buy a truck, but I do know why I would want to spend time in a place that seems so open and empty and far from civilization.
Because
it is open and empty and seems so far from civilization.
    My wife and I lived in a small house in this landscape last year. Twenty miles from town. No telephone, no television or radio, no newspaper delivery. The daily news is what time the sun comes up and the phases of the moon, whether or not there is firewood, and the effect the seasons have on living things, including me.
    If you fly over it, the landscape seems rugged, dry, and barren. Not so. Its best parts are just spread out over time and space. You have to look. Within an hour of my house, I’ve stood in dinosaur tracks more than 140 million years old and picked pine nuts for lunch; watched wild horses run and slept in an Indian ruin abandoned nine hundred years ago. I’ve been where it was so quiet and still I could hear the sounds made by the wings of ravens as they flew overhead.
    It’s not as remote as I had expected. Maybe nowhere is remote anymore. The interstate highway is thirty miles away. In the nearest little town, most people have satellite-TV dishes that pull in more stations than you’d get in a city.
USA Today
is on the newsstands early every morning. UPS and Federal Express deliver “second day.” And the kids in the localhigh school look and dress and think like their peers in Seattle or L.A.
    There’s been a lot of human traffic through this countryside. At one time or another, during the last thousand years, the culture of the area has been shaped by Anasazi, Ute, and Navajo Indians, Spanish explorers, Mormon settlers, cattle ranchers, sheepherders, pinto-bean farmers, uranium miners, mountain bikers, river runners, Jeepers, big-game hunters, and drive-through tourists. Everybody passing through leaves a mark.
    It’s not paradise. The once-charming little centers of civilization have died off or become motel strips. The weather contrasts are extreme. Drought and downpour, 105 degrees in August and 10 below in January. A week of dust storm followed by a week of icy gale is not uncommon. It’s not hard to die of thirst if you get lost in the back country. The fear of rattlesnakes, black-widow spiders, scorpions, and biting flies is barely counterbalanced by the anticipation of wild-flowers in spring and aspen trees in the fall.
    Still, I like it. Something is there that sustains my spirit and lifts me up.
    It’s a matter of locale. I think everybody resonates to some specific landscape. I grew up in open country—hot and dry country—and spent the happiest days of my early life on horseback as a