The wash looked perfectly dry in my headlights. WARNING: QUICKSAND DO NOT CROSS WASH WHEN WATER IS RUNNING Wind roaring out of the northwest, black clouds across the stars - all I could see were clumps of brush and scattered junipers along the roadside. I left the pavement, turned cast into the howling wilderness. Leaving the headquarters area and the lights of Moab, I drove twelve miles farther north on the highway until I came to a dirt road on the right, where a small wooden sign pointed the way: Arches National Monument Eight Miles. The way I wanted it, naturally, or I'd never have asked for the Job. After coffee they gave me a key to the housetrailer and directions on how to reach it I am required to live and work not at headquarters but at this one-man station some twenty miles back in the interior, on my own. At park headquarters north of town I met the superintendent and the chief ranger, the only permanent employees, except for one maintenance man, in this particular unit of America's national park system. After driving all day from Albuquerque - 450 miles - I reached Moab after dark in cold, windy, clouded weather.

I wasn't able to see much of it last night. The choice became apparent to me this morning when I stepped out of a Park Service housetrailer - my caravan - to watch for the first time in my life the sun come up over the hoodoo stone of Arches National Monument. The red dust and the burnt cliffs and the lonely sky - all that which lies beyond the end of the roads.

I don't mean the town itself, of course, but the country which surrounds it - the canyonlands. Theologians, sky pilots, astronauts have even felt the appeal of home calling to them from up above, in the cold black outback of intersteller space.įor myself I'll take Moab, Utah. A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country, a greasy alley near the Hoboken waterfront, or even, possibly, for those of a less demanding sensibility, the world to be seen from a comfortable apartment high in the tender, velvety smog of Manhattan, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, Rio or Rome - there's no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the fight place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary. This is the most beautiful place on earth.

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