I was driving to the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment biennial conference at the University of Oregon, fourth day out. A small deer bounded out of the night, smashed a headlight.

A lot of research next day revealed that headlights for Dodge four cylinder pickups are no longer in stock. I crossed Montana, a big state and Idaho, another big state, found a Dodge dealer and repair outfit in Twin Falls, Idaho. They found a headlight from a junked Dodge pickup, installed it, charged me less than a fortune and I was legal again. Feeling liberated, and very lucky, I headed south from Twin Falls, into Nevada.

No, this is not a road trip story, but I would like to tell you about a few western places where I poked around on foot, off road, going to and returning from the ASLE meeting. The reason is that at the meeting one of the plenary speakers, Robert Michael Pyle, opened his talk with this: ""We all ought to get outdoors much more often."" He followed that with demonstrations from his own experiences. He is a wilderness defender, but he was making the point that one does not have to find untrammeled wilderness in order to connect thoroughly and enjoy immensely nature's goings on. I liked that. I liked that very
much. The trick is to stop, look, listen. Aldo Leopold said that the question of what to do with wilderness land is the same question concerning what to do with any land. That's not an exact quote, but his meaning is clear enough. Let's put it into the context of the current world environmental terror injustice crisis: To save wilderness everything has to be saved. I know, you can make theoretical arguments against that sentence, but I seriously doubt if those arguments would make a person happier or deeply satisfied. I'm reminded here of something my conservationist mother said: "We need happy people."

Well, that's true, isn't it? We can't stand tall for environment and literature without some happiness in our lives, can we? Walking the talk has to show some shades of delight. Happiness lurks, among other places, in an alert intimacy. Simply being outdoors with mist or rain or hammering sun can bring a strong draft of happiness. Just be there. And, often, there's a surprise, not always a good one, but we do need those tests, don't we? Eons of evolving created mammals and among those amazing creatures, one turned out to be us. We're equipped, let's use it.

So, back to Twin Falls and south into Nevada. Jarbidge Mountains, Pole Creek Ranger Station. (They used to call them patrol cabins; that was when federal land managers ranged outdoors on horseback or webs or skis, boat or canoe, or afoot. Now most of them are inside, spick and span). The pole creek station looked abandoned. (Federal budget problem?). I parked and walked ridges overlooking the Jarbidge river. You
can't see the river; it's hidden, way down there, by great folds of land and vegetation dominated by tremendous cliffs, conifers and mountain mahogany. The wind was light, scented by pine. The sun was out. Just being there was it.

Creatures seen: Raven; Golden eagle; two unidentified birds chasing the eagle; ground squirrel.

Skip to the meetings. They go on for five days. Great time. Now I’’m homeward bound, driving southeasterly in Oregon’’s great high desert country that reaches across the Columbia and meets more desert lands to the south. I came to a "special interest" parking area. The sign told me and other visitors that a tremendous geological event had occurred here. A lake had broken out, gouged a very deep and winding canyon, draining itself. Ages of desert wear and tear went by and now a paved highway rides its rimrock. I walked through sandy soil, noticing early summer herbs and grasses and came to a startling sight, a spread of rusted cans in rich bright brown sunglare. Not one item of plastic there. The solid jumble of cans looked good, spread out among other earth colors, a roadside dump from another time.

I was looking for a break in rimrock, found one and worked my way down the steep jumble of cliffs and old junipers. A slow care-taking process. The bottom of the old fossil river was pale dry sandy soil winding among junipers and mountain mahogany. I stood still, next to a massive juniper. Subtle sounds, mere wisps of air motion. Nothing from the highway. Why? I don't know. The silence persisted; I stayed with it. Suddenly a cry from around the next bend. Prairie falcon. Later, I saw it, patrolling the cliffs.

I drew a peace symbol in the sand to mark the exit and walked a couple of bends of the old river, amazed at the size of the junipers. The shapes of things. Climbing out was easy, four-footed and slow. Found one piece of obsidian.

Tracks and signs: rabbits (cottontail size); two sand-grain ant colonies; ant lion pit under a rock overhang (out of the rain?); one big-footed human; range cattle; deer.

U.S. 195, south toward Lakeview, Oregon, noticed that no fencing paralleled the road. I found a parking place and walked toward the near-looking high ridge, but that ridge kept its distance as the land opened up, a complex of windblown sand that had built valleys
interconnected by passes, like a miniature model of mountainous terrain sparsely vegetated by brush, grasses and a few herbs adapted to sandy life. Miniature yes, but with a design of its own, having been constructed by wind rather than by uplift from the restless crust of earth. I always know it's going to happen, this opening up, this drastic spreading out and enlargement of land that at first looks so narrow and confined, and yet I'm always a mite surprised. We need a word for such surprises, a word that suggests a
reconsideration of expectation, of self. Power adjustment?

Tracks and signs: rabbits; coyote; front leg of range cow, thoroughly dried tendons, hide and bone.

Following solid sand ridges or dipping into their valleys, I kept stubbornly on, wanting the base of that faraway skyline ridge. Finally forced myself to give up because of sun glare. My shades were in the truck; a person could go snowblind out here. Sheldon Antelope Refuge, Nevada. No fences, the range cattle are gone, though there are still too many un-owned horses and burros using the over-used land. I had my pick of basalt-rimmed mesas. Rain had been good to this desert this year. Imagine tall wild onions blazing hot purple flowers in the pale green of sage, or against the bone-dry shreds of dead sage branches. Imagine golden composites in the form of hefty bushes scattered across this chocolate brown of basalt, tawny patches of dry, gritty soil and fragile seeming grasses hanging onto little pedestals of dirt in the glare of grit and black-black shards and flakes of obsidian. I walked quite a while in that brilliance, long enough to damp down highway alertness. A new alert state intervened, tuned to a new situation. There's one of the simple gifts that stepping out of your vehicle can offer. Just walk long enough, it will
come.

North of Rifle, Colorado. Fences, black cattle, some irrigated meadows. Found a steel gate, was able to slip through the bars, the only (knowing) trespass of
this entire trip. Followed a dirt road through sage. Three kinds of butterflies suddenly there. One was, I think, a blue. I am not a lepidopterist, but to see three species at once was a nice little surprise.

Tracks and signs: coyote; range cattle.

Further north, a "point of interest." I joined two men who had stopped to read the sign. This place is the original homestead of Thomas H. and Cora Voice Isles, 1894, 180 acres patented under the Timber Culture Act of 1873. I remarked that it might be a good idea for the current federal government to pass a similar act, granting land owners generous stipends for any number of environmental improvement projects. One of the men agreed, the other stayed silent. Two to one in favor? No way of knowing, no further discussion of the idea. I think it was deTocqueville, in the early years of our republic, who claimed that Americans typically veer away from real argument. Now that we have
governments breathing down our necks while "getting off our backs," I'm not surprised at our shyness. But in those early years? What were they afraid of then?

In the interests of full disclosure I’d better go back and get on road long enough to tell about the one bad trip. Arriving a day early for the Eugene conference, I, an inlander, decided to go on to the Pacific Ocean. After the usual messing about with routes and
construction delays I found a road that promised a state park. The road wound through a warren of moderately upscale private estates that blocked access to the ocean. Finally, the park, spaces among trees for parking of various species of motor home. I found a vacant place for the pickup and walked to the fee area. Well, what do you know? I didn't have correct change to put in the envelope that would then be slid into the iron pipe whose massive slot-mouth emerged from firm embedment in mother earth. I found the camp hostess; she had no change for my twenty. "We don't carry cash here." I could understand that. She cheerfully gave me directions to a private enterprise that would solve my problem, but by then I was barely listening, resentment on the rise.

Wandering around, keeping an eye out for a trespass to saltwater, I came to a timber structure, a sort of stage from which to view the scene, and a sign telling the citizen to refrain from climbing over the barrier rail. I took the whole thing as an insult because I
didn’t want passive viewing; I wanted to wet the soles of my shoes in Pacific salt sand and hear the breakers roar. Returning to the pickup, I drove out of there, fuming.

Look, if the citizens put in charge of our lands ("...this land was made for you and me." Woodie Guthrie), are so starved by federal and state legislatures that they have to collect fees (don't ever forget, we've already paid taxes), this attempt to have a signboard and an iron pipe do the whole job is simply and blatantly pathetic, and aggravating. Well, the whole fee idea is silly anyway. Read Scott Silver for essential data on fees and related matters; here, in the Zephyr.

But there, a little creek sneaking seaward through wet sand, no fencing, no instructions, no warnings! And a patch of gravel turn-off too. I put the pickup on the gravel and crossed to the creek, jumped it and, amidst cries of sea gulls and the faint sound of surf, I
walked along high tide line and came to a boulder wilderness of wet barnacles and small mussels. A group of seven or eight kids of all ages were happily and noisily digging a huge pit in the sand. Parents lounged casually nearby. This was our little slot of seacoast neither barred by private gates nor guarded by government fee stations. On my way back to the truck I noticed that two women and a small child had discovered the little access opportunity, had backed their car onto a slope of graveled terrain. I told them the creek was easy to cross. They were determined, ready for anything.

Tracks and signs: two large dogs; two humans; one racoon.

Driving back toward Eugene, late in the day, turned wrong at a junction, proceeded eastward for many a twisty mile through beautiful forest and meadow lands. I was in no shape to stop and enjoy. Came to a sign: Elk Viewing. I pulled over. Elk were there, the bulls in gorgeous velvet. However, giving the elk barely a glance, I approached the nearest parked vehicle and asked if this road would take me to Eugene. A tall, urbane, sun-tanned man gave brief, coherent directions. I turned to go, but the man asked if I'd
ever seen elk. I said, dismissively, grumpily, that I'd grown up with elk, back in Wyoming. I wanted to call back those words, that tone. Too late. I was waking up, and now I was noticing the man's beaming face. He was happy!

"They're in velvet," he said. "They're magnificent animals."

"They are," I said, and meant it.

Back home in far north New York state, another surprise: the ash tree that's been slowly dying for three or four years has suddenly decided to live, even its topmost branches that had looked dead, are leafed out in dark green. Looking at that tree, can't help thinking that we varmentalists might rise again too, truly green, not in pale discouragement but in deep, rich confident life color.