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working cowboy and dude wrangler. I have photographs of my fatherand his father and his father and his father—all on horseback in work clothes.
    I’m not a cowboy now—don’t pretend to be, but I am most at ease in that raw country and feel comfortable in my own skin when I’m surrounded by that rough environment. It’s where I go when I get confused. It’s enough just to be for a while in a place where all I can hear is the wind blowing, and all I can see is a long way off in the distance on the earth around me in the daytime and a long way off in the distance in the night sky above me. It is there and then I know I am not lost.

A telephone call last October. “Mr. Fulghum, our first-grade class would like to involve you in a field trip.” It’s the chairlady of the Outside Education Committee for the first-grade class in the only elementary school in our small nearby town in Utah.
    A field trip! Yes! Talk about magic words! Next to Show-and-Tell, I liked field trips best when I was in school. Actually, I’d been thinking about field trips quite recently. About a month before receiving this invitation, I stood on the sidewalk of the town and watched with envy as a fire truck rolled by very slowly with its sirens wailing. This was to please the first-graders who were sitting in back on top of the hoses, holding on for dear life, grinning from ear to ear, thrilled beyond words by a trip down Main Streetwith the firemen. A small voice in the back of my head said, “Take me, too.”
    I remember with astonishing clarity my own field-trip experiences of fifty years ago. To a fire station, a bakery, the Coca-Cola bottling plant, a dairy, the police station, the city dump, and a construction site. During second grade, we visited an automobile-repair garage, rode a city bus around and back to the place where the bus was kept at night, and toured the county museum. We walked up and down our main street going in and out of businesses to see what was going on behind the scenes where groceries and goods were being unloaded and unpacked. And, of course, the zoo—we went to the zoo several times. And when the circus came to town, we were there to watch them unload the animals from the train and set up the tent.
    Looking at a book in a classroom could not ever compete with a field trip.
    How sorry I was when education shifted to matters that could only be studied in school in the classroom. How glad I was to take geology in college and go out on field trips again—to walk on and touch what I was studying.
    When my children were young and the call came from school for parent volunteers to chaperon field trips, I was their man. Once a field-trip project involved building a fifteen-foot-high hot-air balloon outof paper—then flying it at a nearby park. The balloon caught fire up in the air and floated toward a landing on the roof of a nearby house. The fire department was called. Very exciting! When calm had been restored, the students wanted to do it again. Not just the balloon, but the whole catastrophe, launch, flaming balloon, fire department, and all.
    When I became a schoolteacher myself, of drawing and writing and philosophy, I learned to drive a school bus so I could take my students on field trips. At the heart of my drawing class was the notion that an artist begins by looking carefully at the real world. An artist never looks away or turns away. An artist’s job is to see. And to go out in the world and see it firsthand, just as it is; to report with line and words what is seen. To be
in
the world, not just study
about
the world, that is the artist’s task. So we got in the bus and sallied forth.
    Even as a parish minister, I held to this notion. When I was in seminary, I read about something called the French Catholic Worker-Priest Movement. These men had regular jobs during the week like everyone else—plumber, electrician, teacher—any useful job at all. On the weekends, they celebrated mass. They chose to be