WHEN I FINISHED WRITING MY LAST BOOK, LIMITS OF THE Known, in February 2017, I had my doubts whether I would ever write another one. Seven months earlier, I had learned that my stage 4 throat cancer had metastasized to my lungs. In cases like mine, the immunotherapy drug my oncologist put me on had a success rate of only 15–20 percent.
Yet during the spring of 2017, Sharon and I survived not only “normal” life in Watertown, Massachusetts, but hiking trips to Tucson and Cedar Mesa, then a rock climbing outing with old friends in California. By the beginning of summer, I was thinking about a new book. In August my doctor declared that, against the odds, the immunotherapy had seemed to halt the growth of the cancer cells on my lungs.
I wanted to make a long journey with Sharon, partly because we had grown closer than ever during the past two years, in which she had given up her career as a psychoanalyst to nurse me from one crisis to the next. My first thought was an aimless road trip around the West. For all the journeys and expeditions I had pursued during the previous fifty-plus years, I had never concocted a voyage out of driving from one place to another. The car had always been a means to an end.
But would a lazy ramble from Montana to Arizona make for a readable book? In the midst of my doubts, the old story of Domínguez and Escalante reawoke in my brain. Yes: I would retrace their amazing 1776 journey across the American Southwest, nearly all of which was repeatable by road, and carry on a running dialogue with the Franciscan missionary who kept such a rich and quixotic journal of that ambitious quest.
I tried the idea out on my agent, Stuart Krichevsky. Though we’d become good friends through the course of two decades and fifteen books together, I knew that Stuart was no literary yes-man. I’d also learned to trust his judgment. Whenever he frowned and uttered an unequivocal “no” in response to my latest pipe dream, I would drop it after only the feeblest protestations. (Though I’ll always wonder, Stuart, what might have been if you’d let me compose my tributes to Schubert and the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers.)
To my delight, Stuart was gung-ho about D & E, though he knew only the barest outline of their story. At once I booked our flights to Albuquerque and plotted Sharon’s and my itinerary for September 2017. If Stuart was on board, I knew I could also count on his loyal and efficient assistants, Laura Usselman and Aemilia Phillips. A month after Sharon and I finished the D & E journey, we spent one of the happiest evenings of our year with Stuart at the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival, where he organized a soirée with two of his newer writers whom I’d nudged in his direction, the immensely talented adventurers Roman Dial and Kate Harris.
It takes, of course, not only an agent but a publisher to make a book happen. My friendship with Starling Lawrence at W. W. Norton and Company was only five years and four books old, but when he waved his starter’s flag at D & E, I realized that our road trip was ready to launch. Cancer could wait.
I’ve had several excellent editors during my nearly four decades of writing books for a living, but Star Lawrence is in a category of his own. As an editor, he’s a New York legend, and as a novelist himself, he’s a provocative (if underappreciated) visionary. His faith in my latest boondoggle thus came with the imprimatur of a man who cared deeply not only about stories but about words, and whose caustic appraisals of bad books were balanced by his quiet enthusiasm for good ones.
At Norton, Emma Hitchcock and Nneoma Amadi-obi admirably performed all the machinations it takes to bring text to print, and Erin Lovett served as a hearty and diligent publicist. I also benefited from Allegra Huston’s usual impeccable and insightful work as my copyeditor. It’s great to have a reader who catches all my glitches and at the same time responds to the narrative.
While I wrote Limits of the Known, I was so weakened and handicapped by cancer that I had to hire an assistant to perform all kinds of research for me. I lucked out big-time in recruiting Madeline Miller, a post-doc in earth and planetary sciences at Harvard who is also a climber, a scuba diver, and a brilliant sleuth. This time around, though I felt stronger and could travel, I knew I needed another assistant to help me dig through the arcana that would deepen my understanding of the 1776 exploit. Again I lucked out big-time, when Adam Stack signed on. A newly minted Harvard PhD in anthropology, Adam too is a climber and outdoorsman, and he saved me many a fruitless hour by untangling such knots as the identities of Ute tribes recorded in Escalante’s journal. Adam also drew the excellent map of the expedition on page x.
Both before and after our journey on the D & E trail, I consulted with Stephen Lekson and Matthew Liebmann, two of the smartest and most original archaeologists in North America. Both Steve and Matt have become mentors to my passion for the prehistoric and historic Southwest. I’ve always felt a sense of awe about such scholars, whose insights about what was going on in Chaco in 1100 AD or Jemez in 1680 are so much deeper than mine. The pros in the field can be dismissive of dabblers like myself, but Matt and Steve have always shared their wisdom with me unstintingly and showed the keenest interest in whatever lark I might be pursuing.
Two first-rate scholars of Southwestern history, Rick Hendricks in Santa Fe and John Kessell in Durango, met with me during our trip and gave me valuable insights. In Bluff, Utah, old friend Jim Hook put me onto a rare and anomalous grove of cottonwoods that may have sprouted about the time the padres were in the field. (Those trees are still going strong at the unthinkable age of 240.)
During a short break in our journey, Sharon and I joined up with Emmett Lyman and Sarah Keyes, two rabid climbers in their late thirties who’ve become good friends. With them carrying all our gear, we accomplished a three-day backpack to one of the most stunning Anasazi ruins in the Southwest, a journey I thought I would never make again. That idyll deepened my rapport with the wilderness into which D & E had plunged. And on the San Juan River, Emmett gracefully scrambled up a cliff to take the close-up photo of the haunting Navajo petroglyph (see photograph in insert), which may echo the passage of the padres so long ago.
As they have so often before, Matt Hale and Ed Ward read my book in manuscript and gave me “feedback.” In Santa Fe, as we prepared for our trip, Sharon and I spent several happy days with Irene Owsley, an ex-student of mine who’s become a first-rate photographer. Irene’s enthusiasm for Southwest mysteries gave us the kind of boost we needed to set out on the road.
Finally, how can I ever express my debt to Sharon? Every day of our thirty-nine-day journey, she took care of me in one way or another, from cooking hot dogs on our Coleman stove to driving while I pawed through my books to demanding blood draws at hospitals to ensure that my sodium level hadn’t dropped to a lethal low, as it had just a year before. But each day on the road was like another class in our endless seminar in all things Domínguez and Escalante.
In July 2018 I learned that my cancer had returned, in the form of a metastasis to my adrenal glands. I went back on the immunotherapy drug that had stopped the growth of the nodules in my lungs, but whether it will work its magic a second time remains uncertain.
This is the first book among the thirty-odd I’ve written in which Sharon is a central character. I hope it does justice to her intelligence, her insight into motivation, her compassion for the unfortunates of the world. I think she knows how deeply I love her. And she must sense how grateful I am in knowing that whatever the course of my illness, I will have spent the last years of my life at her side.