They'd suddenly realized they were nothing and so had come to my ground to find a way to be something. At that time, the administration of the moment was scheduled to fall dead in two months and then become nothing but memoirs, lies, lobbyists, and lost opportunities. This is the nature of our government—the ruler can live four years or even eight years, but then he must go away and be a has-been forever.

The easy part of building a last-minute legacy is by creating national monuments with the flick of a president's pen, a kind of hastily scribbled deathbed note that says: We care.

So with a bunch of other souls, I was suddenly in cahoots with the Secretary of the Interior and various faces of the faceless bureaucracies. I wanted around five thousand square miles. In the dying breaths of that administration, the effort resulted in close to a half million acres of my desert being born again as a national monument.

I would come at night during that period with the sensation of a coal miner endlessly scrubbing to get rid of the grime. I felt I was doing the right thing with the wrong people in order to preserve a place the government would never understand or care about. And a piece of ground my government deemed so worthless it could afford to preserve it.

This book began as my effort to set the record straight. I wrote it in a white heat, the basic temperature of the land I love. It states what I know about a place I will never really know.

Consider it a testament to something far greater than myself and far greater than the government that made a little piece of it official lines on the map and a pleasure ground for the people of the United States.

There will come a day when this monument will be lost to history. There will come a day when this nation most likely will be a ruin puzzling future archaeologists.

And yet the ground will still burn with the honest face of life.

C. B.
July 2005