Free Hold the Enlightenment by Tim Cahill

silver and gold in a gentle aureate breeze. Toward the summit, aspen gave way to grassland matted with hearty wildflowers: asters and daisies and lacy white yarrow. September 9 is springtime at eight thousand feet on the Steens.
    Presently, I found myself at a parking lot a few hundred feet below the summit proper. It was a steep, breathless climb to the top, but it took only twenty minutes or so. There was no one else there, and I sat on the summit of the Steens, staring down the abrupt and perpendicular eastern edge of the mountain’s wedge.
    I was looking at the Alvord Desert, which was three miles distant and almost exactly one mile below me. It was a round, flat, sandy, alkaline playa, completely uninhabited. Dust devils spun across its surface in strange and contradictory directions. It must have been well over 100 degrees down there on the sand. I, on the other hand, was cold. What had been a gentle breeze a few thousand feet below was now a gusting wind that whistled and boomed over the summit at about 50 miles an hour. The vegetation all about was of the fragile sort one finds in the high north tundra: sparse, fast-growing mosses, orange lichens on the rocks, and dwarf shrubs, inches high, hunkered down in crevasses against the wind and cold.
    The sky was cornflower blue, streaked with the long, thin clouds some people call horsetails. A BLM brochure had promised that, on a clear day, I would be able to “see the corners of four states.” It was a clear day and there were no conflagrations in any of the states that I could see. Late on doomsday afternoon, things were looking just peachy.
    Still, I tried to contemplate the death and dissolution of civilization as we know it. Here I was, freezing in the tundra and staring down at the desert. Robert Frost had written a poem about the destruction of the world in fire, or in ice, whatever, take your pick. But, quite frankly, I wasn’t inspired.
    In fact, my mind was whirling with student manuscripts I had read over the years.
    …
    “There are no words.”
    Last year, one of my writers’ workshop students had led off her nonfiction travel piece with that sentence, which I thought might be improved. She wanted to describe her feelings upon first landing in Antarctica. The piece as a whole was awfully good, I thought, combining, as it did, a problematic relationship with her father, who was along on the trip, and the desire to see a massive ice ridge named after her grandfather, who had been in Admiral Byrd’s party. It was a real quest, filled with real emotion, and the woman had the talent to make it work.
    But the lead? “There are no words.”
    “This,” I suggested to the students at the writers’ workshop, “does not fill the reader with confidence in the writer’s ability to describe the interior or exterior landscape of her journey.” I stifled an impulse to put my objection more bluntly. I would be risking another tearful exit if I said: “There are no words and here they aren’t.”
    I carefully polled the other seven students in the class. “There are no words.” Good lead? Or bad? And the fact is, most of them liked it.
    A few nights later, my friend and colleague David Quammon came to my house for dinner. David has won awards for his essays and criticism, and for his science writing; I think he’s won awards he doesn’t even remember anymore, or doesn’t care to talk about because he’s pathologically modest. David’s news was that he was building a new house, probably (I thought with that total lack of envy writers are noted for) to hold all his damn awards.
    He asked me how the writers’ conference was going. I said it was exhausting. I couldn’t get certain manuscripts out of my mind, not because they were so bad, but because they were so close to being good.
    David shook his head. He believes that no one can teach writing, that it is a solitary endeavor you do over and over again until you start getting it right.
    “Tim,” he said,