This went on for days. But instead of growing accustomed to the smell of bread in the oven, I became more and more entranced by it. Nothing had ever haunted me so. Or, now that I think back, maybe fascination with bread had always been there in my soul, ready to be awakened.

So there I was in Oregon, living the meditation/organic farming lifestyle having given very little thought to where this was taking me. All I knew was that the sweet aroma of bread in the oven kept waking me, making it harder and harder to sleep. I wanted to be part of whatever middle-of-the-night ritual was being conducted just upwind from my room. Finally, I could no longer contain myself. I threw off my blanket and followed my nose. The aroma grew stronger, wrapped around me, and bore me uphill to where I came upon an ancient bread oven. It was situated in a “room” that consisted of a roof and no walls, yet the heat from the oven easily overcame the cold night air. Standing by the oven was a muscular guy with the strong back and hands of a bread baker and the lean muscularity that comes from lifelong manual labor. He reminded me of someone out of Walker Evans’s Dust Bowl photos. (I’ll call him Andres because he is a private man and will be pleased to remain undisturbed.)

Andres looked up. “What are you doing here?” he asked by way of faint welcome.

“Your baking has woken me every night for the past week,” I replied. “It’s amazing!”

Andres stood there without saying anything. Telling him that his bread smelled amazing was like telling him it was winter or that we were in Oregon. He knew that already. I took his silence as an invitation to explain myself.

“I guess I’d like to watch you work.”

“I'm not really interested in having anyone watch,” he said. “If you want to work, well that’s another story. You can do that, but you need to be here on my schedule, and if that means starting at 1 a.m. or 3 a.m. or whenever, remember: The bread is the boss. We make it when it’s ready to be made and the fire is right.”

“Deal,” I said, and I meant it. But true to form, I often slept well past the appointed hour.

Thankfully, Andres cut me some slack. Working at his side was like entering into a bread-making time machine. We made the dough in an unheated sheep barn by candlelight. “Electricity creates negative vibrations,” he said. He explained that bread dough is a living thing and that he wanted everything we did to come from a living thing. Philosophically, it made sense, but as I continued to spend chilly evenings with him, Andres’s New Age common sense seemed punishing. Even though we had a big Hobart mixer (the same model used in many commercial bakeries), Andres insisted that we mix the dough by hand. It was an arduous process. Picture yourself riding a bicycle through a patch of thick mud. That’s the same motion we made with our hands as we mixed flour, sourdough starter, and water. It was downright aerobic . . . and entrancing. After a few minutes, I would break a sweat and warm up, ready to shed my jacket. Cold? What cold?

After mixing, we would fold the dough and let it rest for half an hour. We repeated this three times, then left the dough to rest for many hours as the starter worked its sorcery, digesting starch and releasing carbon dioxide into the dough, causing it to rise.

Making dough turned out to be more time-consuming than I imagined. After three hours I was eager to bake and create that irresistible aroma that had first summoned me to Andres’s oven. “Not so fast,” he said. Andres was a proponent of long, cold fermentation.

As I would later learn when I worked with some of the top bakers in the world, fermentation is the heart of bread making. Making great bread is less about what happens in the oven than how you get the dough ready to bake. Sure, you start by mixing up a batch of dough with some fast-rising commercial yeast, pop it in the oven and, a few hours later, have some bread. But, the longer you allow things to ferment, the more complex and delicious the flavors will be. In order for that to happen, you have to slow down the process. An unheated sheep barn in the chilly Umpqua Valley fit the bill. So will your home refrigerator.

After mixing the dough and letting it ferment until it tripled in size, we were ready to shape it into loaves. The way Andres accomplished this deceptively simple- looking task was like a well-choreographed ballet starring two hands and a ball of dough. He was precise and elegant in his economy of motion and, like many great artists, he made his craft look easy. It wasn’t. It would be years before I could truly shape dough with confidence and precision.

We often worked from one in the morning until one in the afternoon, mixing, fermenting, and shaping loaves, then leaving them in a cold room to develop more flavor for another two and a half days. On the third day, the loaves were ready to bake. Andres would light the wood fire at 9 p.m., and typically about four hours later, the heat was just right. Finally, we began to bake, and soon I was swaddled in a cloud of bready perfume.

That experience changed my life. But I still hadn’t connected the dots from my first-grade drawing to my nights at Andres’s side to the vocation I would later take up. As I look back on my time on the farm, I can now see that there was something literally tapping at my soul. Bread making was calling to me, inviting me to become part of something that’s been around for generations and generations. But at that time, I had too much youthful wanderlust in me to listen to the inner voice that was urging me to bake.

An inner voice was telling me I had to go to Chile. I really didn’t know why, but something compelled me to make that journey—the same way Richard Dreyfuss had to get to Devils Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I spent the next two years on a South American odyssey. In Mexico, I learned to speak Spanish while I watched a friend’s dad drink himself into the grave. His downward spiral sent me a message that we are all here for a finite time, so you need to follow your heart. In Nicaragua I struck up a conversation with a grandmother who told me that, through all the years of war and terror, the thing she wanted most was to wake up and smell fresh mint in her garden. It took some time, but I made that garden for her. Then I breezed my way through Panama, Colombia, and Ecuador as a ranch hand, bartender, short-order cook—whatever it took to get me through the next day and eventually to the next step in my journey.

I finally made it to Chile, crossing the Atacama Desert on a rickety train that struggled up the mountains to Potosí, Bolivia (a legendary city that Cervantes singled out for its extraordinary riches). Much of the silver that Spain took from the New World came from these mountains whose ore—what little is left of it—is still mined by locals. It’s a dangerous profession. The miners start as young as eight years old, and not many make it into their thirties.

And then it happened—it being the same thing that drew me to Andres’s wood-fired oven. At 3 a.m. one morning there was that same siren smell of bread. I followed the aroma and came to a little shop. Inside, through the barred window, I saw a tiny, ancient, pale-skinned Native American woman covered from head to toe in traditional garb, leaving only her face and hands exposed. She was pulling perfectly shaped loaves from her oven, and they were very bien cuit.

Bear in mind that I hadn’t eaten any really good bread since I left the United States. It was all soft and kind of pasty, sort of like wannabe English muffins. From the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego, good bread is almost impossible to find. But somehow, in this city that claims to be the highest in the world, this woman, whose name I never learned, had mastered the bread baker’s art. She sold me a loaf. It cost less than a dime, but it was the real thing. The crust crackled like the bread from the best French boulangeries, and it tasted like it, too. Quite astonishing, all in all.

I realized then how much I missed good bread. And with that, I knew my travels were over. I returned to the United States and listened to that inner voice, the same one that guided my hand as a first-grader when I drew Zach and his “dog.” It had drawn me to Andres’s ovens and to that small bakeshop in Potosí.

And so I became a baker.