I mean the hot dry wind. The odor of sagebrush and juniper, of sand and black baking lava rock. I mean I remembered the sight of a Navajo hogan under a bluff, red dust, a lonesome horse browsing far away down an empty wash, a windmill and water tank at the hub of cattle trails radiating toward a dozen different points on the horizon, and the sweet green of willow, tamarisk and cottonwood trees in a stony canyon. There was a glimpse of the Painted Desert. For what seemed like hours I could see the Hopi Buttes, far on the north, turning slowly on the horizon as my train progressed across the vast plateau. There were holy mountains in the far distance. I saw gleaming meanders of the Little Colorado and the red sandstone cliffs of Manuelito. Too much. And hard-edged cumulus clouds drifting in fleets through the dark blue sea of the sky. And most of all, the radiance of that high desert sunlight, which first stuns then exhilarates your senses, your mind, your soul.

But this was only, as I said, the fringe. In 1947 I returned to the Southwest and began to make my first timid, tentative explorations toward the center of that beautiful blank space on the maps. From my base at the University of New Mexico, where I would be trying, more or less, for the next ten years, off and on, to win a degree, I drove my old Chevy through mud and snow, brush and sand, to such places as Cabezon on the Rio Puerco and from there south to Highway 66. They said there was no road. They were right. But we did it anyhow, me and a lad named Alan Odendahl (a brilliant economist since devoured by the insurance industry), freezing at night in our kapok sleeping bags and eating tinned tuna for breakfast, lunch and supper. Tire chains and skinned knuckles; shovels and blisters; chopping brush to fill in a boghole, I missed once and left the bite of the ax blade in the toe of my brand-new Red Wing engineer boots. (In those days philosophy students wore boots; now—more true to the trade—they wear sandals, as Diogenes advised, or go barefoot like Socrates.) Next we made it to Chaco Canyon, where we looked amazed at Pueblo Bonito in January. And then to the south rim of Canyon de Chelly—getting closer—and down the foot trail to White House Ruin. An idyllic place, it seemed then; remote as Alice Springs and far more beautiful.

On one long holiday weekend another friend and I drove my old piece of iron with its leaky gas tank and leaky radiator northwest around the Four Corners to Blanding, Utah, and the very end of the pavement. From there we went by dusty washboard road to Bluff on the San Juan and thought we were getting pretty near the end of the known world. Following a narrow wagon road through more or less ordinary desert we climbed a notch in Comb Ridge and looked down and out from there into something else. Out over something else. A landscape that I had not only never seen before but that did not resemble anything I had seen before.