I hesitate, even now, to call that scene beautiful. To most Americans, to most Europeans, natural beauty means the sylvan—pastoral and green, something productive and pleasant and fruitful—pastures with tame cows, a flowing stream with trout, a cottage or cabin, a field of corn, a bit of forest, in the background a nice snow-capped mountain range. At a comfortable distance. But from Comb Ridge you don’t see anything like that. What you see from Comb Ridge is mostly red rock, warped and folded and corroded and eroded in various ways, all eccentric, with a number of maroon buttes, purple mesas, blue plateaus and gray dome-shaped mountains in the far-off west. Except for the thin track of the road, switchbacking down into the wash a thousand feet below our lookout point, and from there climbing up the other side and disappearing over a huge red blister on the earth’s surface, we could see no sign of human life. Nor any sign of any kind of life, except a few acid-green cottonwoods in the canyon below. In the silence and the heat and the glare we gazed upon a seared wasteland, a sinister and savage desolation. And found it infinitely fascinating.

We stared for a long time at the primitive little road tapering off into the nothingness of the southwest, toward fabled names on the map—Mexican Hat, Monument Valley, Navajo Mountain—and longed to follow. But we didn’t. We told ourselves that we couldn’t: that the old Chev would never make it, that we didn’t have enough water or food or spare parts, that the radiator would rupture, the gas tank split, the retreads unravel, the water pump fail, the wheels sink in the sand—fifty good reasons—long before we ever reached civilization on the other side. Which at that time would have been about Cameron, maybe, on U.S. 89. So we turned around and slunk back to Albuquerque the way we’d come, via the pavement through Monticello, Cortez and Farmington, like common tourists.

Later, though, I acquired a pickup truck—first of a series—and became much bolder. Almost every weekend or whenever there was enough money for gas we took off, all over New Mexico, over into Arizona, up into Colorado and eventually, inevitably, back toward the Four Corners and beyond—toward whatever lay back of that beyond.

The words seem too romantic now, now that I have seen what men and heavy equipment can do to even the most angular and singular of earthly landscapes. But they suited our mood of that time. We were desert mystics, my few friends and I, the kind who read maps as others read their holy books. I once sat on the rim of a mesa above the Rio Grande for three days and nights, trying to have a vision. I got hungry and saw God in the form of a beef pie. There were other rewards. Anything small and insignificant on the map drew us with irresistible magnetism. Especially if it had a name like Dead Horse Point or Wolf Hole or Recapture Canyon or Black Box or Old Paria (abandoned) or Hole-in-the-Rock or Paradox or Cahone (pinto bean capital of the world) or Mollie’s Nipple or Dirty Devil or Pucker Pass or Pete’s Mesa, Or Dandy Crossing.