Landmarks: Terrain of the Quest was written in the months and years after a six month sojourn in the Great Basin and Mojave deserts of eastern California and southern Nevada in 1986. The time (also written of in the Vision Quest journal entries) was a deeply formative time for me and awoke an inner nameless aspiration that daily life afterwards could never fully obscure again. As I wrote in another work:
Most of the works that follow were conceived and gestated during the spring and summer of 1986. During those seasons, a friend hired me as a field assistant on a six-month botanical survey of the White Mountains and northern Mojave valleys of California. I went to the desert flush with a child-like enthusiasm. I was hungry then, for what I didn’t know. Nothing in my day-to-day life satisfied. All I knew at the time was that I was dissatisfied, searching, and open to the entertainment of the widest, most naked, and most impersonal forms of transcendental encounter.
It is only now, looking back, that I can say what it was that sated my hunger. Six months out, under the Great Basin sun, in the Mojave winds, standing in valleys so vast and silent that the crunch of my boots seemed sacrilege. Watching the cycle of the days, the seasons, thinking of – of what? God knows what. Thinking desert thoughts, fierce and uncompromising and pure. Becoming a native for a while, a savage with none of the soul-leeching worries of civilization. Exploring, inside and out. Moving and watching. The precious images and impressions piled in on top of one another: the 700 ft. high Eureka Valley sand dunes glowing silver-blue in the moonlight; Jim pulling up short in a remote canyon and pointing as one, then two mountain lions exploded from camouflaged stillness 200 yards from us and vanished just as abruptly; our arrival at a knife-edged ridge-top at 11,000 feet at sunset after a grueling day’s slog through a 5000 ft. elevation gain with 70 pound packs, and wondering where we’d sleep; a rude awakening on the floor of a backside canyon in the midst of a magnitude 6.1 earthquake, 10 miles from the epicenter. It was a deeply-needed time for me, a time of endless still desert light, vistas of dozens of miles, silence, more silence, and a measure of peace. At the end of that six months, there was something alive in me that wasn’t before, something hard to describe, like the silent smokeless flame of a steadily-burning candle. And all of the fragmented images and impressions had coalesced into a seamless and constant vision.
These short stories uniformly took their inspiration from the desert time. All were written well before my opening event of 2001, generally in the early 1990s. I offer them to you, the reader, for your meditative consideration and enjoyment.
Via Perennis 