“In the West, nothing done by Americans is for keeps, everything – farms, cities, towns, mines, everything – constitutes a brief raid on the dry land and then becomes tumbleweed, ghost towns, lost mines, real estate empires that go up in flim-flam, and the like.
No one wishes to face this fact so they continually search the past for permanence, for memories to anchor their role in a terrain that does not care about them and has never needed them.” — Charles Bowden, Blue Desert (1986).
