In the double seat in front of us was a black woman and her four children. A little girl with her hair braided in cornrows, with an elaborate set of strings and beads attached - like Cleopatra - looked back at us, smiling at my ridiculous beard. She said, "Where you goin' ?" I said, "Home."My friends and I build a fire with dead sticks from a nearby ironwood tree. Ironwood is slow growing, dense, very hard. A chunk from the heart of it will sink in water. We drink some beer. As the fire dies down we lay three T-bone steaks directly on the red coals, aboriginal style. They begin cooking themselves right away, no hesitation. We open and heat three cans of corn at the edge of the fire.The sun goes down. The air between us and the near mountains become visible as a medium, substance, a thing in itself, transparent but clearly four miles thick. The new, waxing moon, first quarter phrase, shaped like a shield, hangs in the sky at approximately the same point occupied by the sun when we first stopped here.We eat supper. Drink a little more beer. I produce a half pint of Jim Beam from the side pocket of my pack. We drink it, passing the bottle around the fire as the moon grows brighter, the evening more violet.Moonlight and bourbon. The plan was that the three three of us would camp here tonight and in the morning my friends would start driving back to California and I would start walking east toward Bagdad. One hundred and twenty miles by jeep trail, give or take a league, a mountain range now and then.By now the plan begins to seem absurd. Unnecessarily rigid. Why wait till morning, suggests the moon? Start at once, says the whiskey percolating through the purring storage cells of my brain.We finish the Beam. Shake hands, squeeze shoulder, kid around as I hoist the pack onto my back and pick up an extra gallon of water in a plastic jug. A final salute and I march off, the two men by the fire staring after me, silent with envy. Why aren't they coming too? Because they were not invited. "I vaunt to be alone," said Greta Garbo.A half mile from my friends I pause and give them my parting wolf howl, then a snatch song from Madame Butterfly. Un Bel di...He will return. Ah yes! But not just yet. Cruel of me to flaunt my job and pride. But I can't help it. I feel like Antaeus returned to earth. The power of the desert, of the planet, surges electricity up through my boots (Vietnam style jungle boots, old and worn) to heart and head and out through song into the moony sky, completing the circuit.Marching on, north, I follow this condemned jeep road as it meanders towards the mountains. Why do I do this sort of thing? I don't know. I've been doing this sort of thing for thirty-five years and still don't know why. Don't even care why. It's not logical - it's pathological. We go and on, our whole lives, never changing repeating ourselves with minor variations. We do not change. Bruckner spent his life writing the same symphony nine times, trying to get it just right. Seeking perfection, Mozart wrote his single symphony forty-eight times. We cannot change. Saul on the road to Damascus, struck by the lightning of revelation, turns his coat inside out, drops the S and adds the P, and goes right on. Right on fantasizing. And here Iam on the old devil's road to Bagdad. Under a clear sky. Marching. Singing. Marching.Tramp...Tramp...Tramp tramp tramp..................Why do I do this? (My feet hurt.) Why? Well, it's the need, I guess, for some sort of authentic experience. (My hip joint hurts.) As opposed to the merely synthetic experience of books, movies, TV, regular urban living. (My neck hurts.) To meet my God, my Maker once again, face to face, beneath my feet, beyond my arms, above my head. (Will there be water at Cabeza Tank?)- Edward Abbey, Beyond The Wall