I was five the first time I saw them, only a faint glow in the distance. Heading to the Big Bend, traveling west, I' d woken at dawn in the back seat of my family's Rambler station wagon. My parents had driven the night, leaving just aft er sunset to avoid the searing heat of August-and the internecine warfare that would have otherwise ensued in the cramped back seat. My brothers and I had fallen asleep somewhere on the outskirts of Houston, our station wagon trundling west on I-10 out into the

more »

... starry darkness. I awoke to the rainy scent of creosote-and a swell of violet earth curving like a wing across the horizon. "Those are mountains, son, the Del Nortes, " my father told me, sipping coffee from a thermos. "Mountains?" I asked. I fell silent. I stared hard at the great rise of rock, which pulled me with an ineluctable gravity. I am still drawn to mountains, just as I was then, by feral curiosity and aesthetic impulse. Many claim to have found God in the mountains. I don't know what God is, but I admit to having sought her there too. Whatever my search, I have found that the pursuit of scientifi c inquiry-its own, necessarily limited kind of truth-seeking-can be as much an act of devotion as it is scholarly meditation. For to pay attention to the world, to seek its stories, to run your fingers along some crack of rock or furrow of tree bark, to admire a raptor in flight, to look, closely, at the construction of a previously unencoun tered wildflower-to wonder and to seek answers to how these things might have come to be in the world-are themselves acts of devotion, ways of knowing, ways of longing for communion. As Diane Ackerman has written, "There is a way of beholding nature that is itself a form of prayer. " I saw the Sierra Nevada for the first time when I was twenty-three, again driving west, this time with the woman who would become my wife and the mother of our child. Yet I recognized the place, for years earlier the cool air, the sparkling Sierra { ix }