Traveling reminds you that the world is big and deep and rich, and full of life and color.  It forces you to look at the world from a different perspective.  It forces you to be brave and independent and inwardly outrageous.

            As human beings, we are captivated by true adventure, the rediscovery of adventure, the painstaking simplicity of loneliness, deprivation, and danger.  We are fascinated with the epic struggle for survival, man versus nature, nature versus nature, and man versus man. 

            We are living in a time where we crave change.  It makes us want to rebel against the people who have put our sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, and fathers and mothers into a bloody battle for selfish, egocentric reasons. We want to rebel against conventions and limitations and order and tameness; but most of all we want to rebel against the civilization that human beings have created and are now forced to live in. 

            The location I chose for my adventure was the desert of southeast Utah.  Why the desert?  It is a sharp contrast to my charming, beautiful southern city on the water.  I love it here, but something lures me to the west; something makes my spirit crave the vast, lawless, wild, wide open space.  Perhaps it is the image of the rugged land adorned with rugged men and women, uncivilized and free, living lives of intense hardship, living lives of robust individuality.  Cabeza de Vaca, a sixteenth century Spanish adventurer, said, during his search for the seven golden cities in 1535, when he approached the present day Texas-New Mexico border, “….We ever held it certain that going toward the sunset we must find what we desired.”

            But I believe Henry David Thoreau put it best when he said, (from his New England home,) “When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet wither I will bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I find, strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and inevitably settle southwest….the future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side….Eastward I go only by force; but Westward I go free.”

              I wanted to travel out of the eastern woods that both confined and protected me, and into a new land, a strange and bare land, the great American desert. 

The West has the ability to free us.  The West emphasizes individuality and freedom in the congested world we live in, where, sadly, an adventure for most people is limited to a Sunday afternoon picnic. 

            I needed to feel the excitement of discovery.  I wished to look at the pristine, unpossessed land all around me with wonder and delight, and feel, space was entirely mine, and I am free.