me a message that he loves me, almost thirty years after we met at the Nevada Test Site.
Queer culture made it clear that a life can have as its stable foundation friendships so strong that they are a form of family, that family too can be liberated from the conventional roles of spousal contracts and begetting and blood kinship. It was a bulwark against the widespread, wearing insistence that only the nuclear family supplies love and stability—which sometimes it does, but we all know that sometimes it supplies misery and sabotage. This was, of course, in part the result of the exclusion of queer people from marriage and rejection by birth families long before marriage equality became the law of the land and adoptions became more available to same-sex couples. Later in life, when I forgot to tell interviewers that they would never ask a man that or to simply garrote them for being so noxious, I sometimes answered the intrusive questions about why I didn’t marry and bear offspring with reference to being a San Franciscan, to being among people who had less conventional ideas of what a life could look like and what kinds of love could shore it up. It was a tremendous gift.
From that old apartment of mine I could walk west until I came to the Pacific Ocean. I could go almost due south to the Castro, where the theater and many other amenities and a shifting population of friends called me. I rarely walked north, though I drove there to cross the Golden Gate Bridge and plunge into the country—or to visit my mother, so that trips across the bridge meant both liberation and dread. It was an easy walk east to the Civic Center and to the main library, where I still do research, and to the trains to the East Bay. As the 1990s advanced, I spent more and more time driving across the Bay Bridge east to get to the American West, to the mountains and the deserts and the new life and friends I was finding there. Despite everything the world was opening up to me, or I to it.
Audibility, Credibility, Consequence
1
Growing up, we say, as though we were trees, as though altitude was all that there was to be gained, but so much of the process is growing whole as the fragments are gathered, the patterns found. Human infants are born with craniums made up of four plates that have not yet knit together into a solid dome so that their heads can compress to fit through the birth canal, so that the brain within can then expand. The seams of these plates are intricate, like fingers interlaced, like the meander of arctic rivers across tundra.
The skull quadruples in size in the first few years, and if the bones knit together too soon, they restrict the growth of the brain; and if they don’t knit at all the brain remains unprotected. Open enough to grow and closed enough to hold together is what a life must also be. We collage ourselves into being, finding the pieces of a worldview and people to love and reasons to live and then integrate them into a whole, a life consistent with its beliefs and desires, at least if we’re lucky.
The city was my great teacher in the 1980s, and that first book came out of what I learned from wandering streets and neighborhoods, from encountering subcultures and enclaves. The second came out of what the vast spaces of the mountains and deserts and the people there had to teach, and the lessons were magnificent, tremendous, sometimes terrifying, and the places brought new friends and a new sense of self.
At some point in my midtwenties, the childhood passion I had had for natural places had returned with a new intensity; I found epiphanies and a sense of liberty in being in the wild places—forests, grasslands, coastline—of my own region and began to study the cultural history of ideas and representations and desires for nature and place and landscape, first through art and art history, then through environmental literature and cultural histories, and then to write about it.
I began exploring and camping, wandering first in local places and English ideas of landscape and then into what lay over the horizon, the American West, the dry lands and open spaces that lay east of