We talked about our boyhoods in Pennsylvania, and about how without ever having consciously planned things this way, each of us had fled Pittsburgh—he to a small town on the coast of Maine, and I to the deserts of the Southwest—in the hopes of finding a place where nature and the land hadn’t been treated so poorly. A place where outdoor recreation involved more than shooting cans and bottles that had been dumped into a river, or schlepping through fields that doubled as junkyards and waste pits.
