Storm clouds overhead? Good. What’s July in the desert without a cloudburst? My old truck creaked and rattled on. Bouncing too fast down into a deep wash I hit a pointed rock embedded in the road and punched a hole through one of the tires. We installed one of the spares and rumbled on.

Late in the afternoon we reached Natural Bridges. We drove down a steep, narrow, winding dirt lane among the pinyon pines—fragrant with oozing gum—and into the little campground. One other car was already there. In other words, the place was badly overcrowded, but we stayed. We spent the next day in a leisurely triangular walk among the three great bridges—Owachomo, Sipapu and Kachina—and a second night at the little Park Service campground. It was the kind of campground known as “primitive,” meaning no asphalt driveways, no flush toilets, no electric lights, no numbered campsites, no cement tables, no police patrol, no fire alarms, no traffic controls, no movies, slide shows or press-a-button automatic tape-recorded natural history lectures. A terrible, grim, deprived kind of campground, some might think. Nothing but stillness, stasis and stars all night long.

In the morning we went on, deeper into the back country, back of beyond. The “improved” road ended at Natural Bridges; from there to the river, forty-five miles, and from there to Hanksville, about another forty, it would be “unimproved.” Good. The more unimproved the better, that’s what we thought. We assumed, in those innocent days, that anything good would be allowed to remain that way.

Our little road wound off to the west, following a big bench, with the sheer cliffs of a plateau on the south and the deep, complicated drainages of White Canyon on the north. Beyond White Canyon were Woodenshoe Butte, the Bear’s Ears, Elk Ridge and more fine blank areas on the maps. Nearby were tawny grass and buff-colored cliffs, dark-green junipers and sandstone scarps.

As we descended toward the river, the country opened up, wide and wild, with nowhere any sign of man but the dirt trail road before us. We liked that. Why? (Why is always a good question.) Why not? (Always a good answer.) But why? One must attempt to answer the question—someone always raises it, accusing us of “disliking people.”

Well then, it’s not from simple misanthropy. Speaking generally, for myself, I like people. Speaking particularly, I like some people, dislike others. Like everyone else who hasn’t been reduced to moronism by our commercial Boy Scout ethic, I like my friends, dislike my enemies and regard strangers with a tolerant indifference. But why, the questioner insists, why do people like you pretend to love uninhabited country so much? Why this cult of wilderness? Why the surly hatred of progress and development, the churlish resistance to all popular improvements?

Very well, a fair question, but it’s been asked and answered a thousand times already; enough books to drive a man stark naked mad have dealt in detail with the question. There are many answers, all good, each sufficient. Peace is often mentioned; beauty; spiritual refreshment, whatever that means; re-creation for the soul, whatever that is; escape; novelty, the delight of something different; truth and understanding and wisdom—commendable virtues in any man, anytime; ecology and all that, meaning the salvation of variety, diversity, possibility and potentiality, the preservation of the genetic reservoir, the answers to questions that we have not yet even learned to ask, a connection to the origin of things, an opening into the future, a source of sanity for the present—all true, all wonderful, all more than enough to answer such a dumb dead degrading question as “Why wilderness?”