Thus Far and No Further

Keep it like it was. — Edward Abbey

Sometimes you have to remember how it was not so very long ago. Say, when my friend Mark Austin first saw Utah, in 1957, on a cross-country trip when he was six years old, one of those journeys you remember as a kid in which joy and strangeness, terror and wonder and awe commingle, and in your adulthood you don’t actually know what happened. Austin and his father entered the canyonlands of southern Utah in a creaky wood-tone station wagon. The woody lumbered across dirt roads, jostling and bouncing, and it was so hot that where the sun touched the panels of the car for too long they seared the skin. On the road the dust splashed, gathering in the cab, setting the father into coughing fits and the boy into a paroxysm of delight.

Outside the window there was another planet than earth. A blasted broken-stone planet of the aliens, without water, lifeless it seemed, a red-rock