“This is nuts.”

Sitting on my motorcycle just after sunrise on a cool, misty August morning, my travel bag stuffed with extra jeans, socks, T-shirts, tools, and maps and strapped to the bike’s sissy bar, we—the bike and me—seemed set to take off on a trip across much of the northwestern United States and southern British Columbia. The turnaround point was to be Victoria, on Vancouver Island, where I was to meet my wife and daughter, my sister-in-law and her family, and various of their cousins, nieces, and nephews. I expected the trip to cover about 3,000 miles....

Family lore has it that when I was four years old, a visiting aunt asked what I wanted to do when I grew up. Without hesitation, I declared that I would go out West, be a cowboy, and ride horses. A short time later, on my first day of preschool, the teacher asked my name. “I’m the Lone Ranger,” I replied. “No,” the teacher shot back sweetly, “what is yourrealname?” “I’m the Lone Ranger,” I reiterated. The exasperated teacher turned to the girl seated next to me and asked if she knew my real name. Terry, who happened...

I arrived at the Blane, Washington, border crossing at about 10:00 a.m. Leaving the United States three days before had been an easy and pleasant experience. Never having had airliners crashed into any of their major buildings, Canadians evidently do not worry as much about terrorism as Americans do. Plus, the Blane border crossing sits astride Interstate 5, the main north-south highway in western Washington and into Canada, a setting quite different from the rural border station at Osoyoos. As I approached the customs station, my heart sank. I pulled to a stop at least a quarter of a mile...

Phineas had planned to go with me to Victoria but bailed at the last minute, pleading some nonsense about finishing a grant proposal that would pay his salary for the next couple of years. Over the following months I rarely passed up an opportunity to rub it in, regaling him with tales of the scenery, wildlife, characters, and harrowing escapes I had experienced. When I told him I intended to start my next trip right after classes ended in May, it was clear that he would happily risk unemployment rather than endure another round of my taunting. By then, I...

Phineas and I were on the road again in the last week of June 2007, bound this time for the Four Corners region, where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah meet. Throughout the region, sandstone mesas and monoliths rise hundreds of feet from the desert floor. Some look like giant fingers pointing to the sky. It struck me that way up on top of them is where the surface of the earth used to be. Before that, in the late Cretaceous period about 80 million years ago, “way up there” had been the bottom of a sea that covered much...

When I was a young boy, my dad dragged me to the neighborhood barbershop every other Saturday morning. He had his thick, wavy hair trimmed to proper business executive length and then had the barber zip his clippers over my thin, straight hair to form it into a sort of buzz cut. The shop smelled of hair tonic, shaving cream, and aftershave lotion. Side tables had stacks of sports, hunting and fishing, and car magazines; on a shelf in the back, a covered box contained magazines kids were not allowed to look at.

On one of the shop’s walls hung...

Montana’s Warrior Trail, US 212, extends 160 miles from the Little Bighorn southeast to the Wyoming border. Along the way it passes through the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Reservations. Many of the Northern Cheyennes who had been with the Lakotas at the Little Bighorn surrendered with Crazy Horse in May 1877. They had hoped they would be allowed to live with the Lakotas on the Great Sioux Reservation, but the government instead shipped them to Oklahoma to live among the Southern Cheyennes. Their stay there was a time of misery, privation, and death. The Indian Bureau did not provide adequate...

I happen to know where that ridge is.

Ride or drive westbound on Interstate 70 from Topeka, Kansas, for 10 miles or so. You ascend a long, steady rise. The landscape changes as you top the ridge. Look around you. You have left the Missouri River Valley and rolled onto the Great Plains. The change is subtle at first, as the tree-filled valley gives way to the plains, undulating for a few miles and then becoming flatter as the road speeds you westward.

“Don’t fence me in.”²

I also happen to know many other places where the West commences. One...