I learned what it is to be alone. These were invaluable experiences. The few children who grow up on today's remote Great Basin ranches continue to develop this special relationship with wildness, an easy familiarity with weather and land, with birth and death. The tender attention to the vitality of each clump of grass that constitutes rural wisdom grows increasingly rare. It's worth preserving as the West fills in.
Geographers define the Great Basin several ways.
With cold, snowy winters and hot, dry summers, sagebrush and shad scale dominate the valleys between lightly forested island mountain ranges. After years in court, the Mono Lake Committee succeeded in halting that practice. Restoration began in 1994, stabilizing Mono Lake, saving the fragile lacework of creatures that links brine shrimp and brine flies in its salty, alkaline waters to millions of birds that depend on these invertebrates for food. What few river valleys exist here always lead to a closed basin with a central sump, a dead heart. North-south highways thread the basins.