A city without perspective is a threat, for its people were born unto order, a sense that must produce an overabundance of left-brain confinement and an absence of imagination.

Is it no wonder that Los Angeles, a coastal city, lives as though its ocean is just a painting - with no relationship to the Pacific, the source of its primary economic influx? A week before we left for the White Mountains, I interviewed John Wood, a creation scientist, about his views on ecological issues. I wanted to understand the mindset of those who rejected evolution, and therefore the wildly successful study of biology, and everything that I saw here with my own two eyes.

He told me that he was, "distinctly suspicious of the so-called environmentalist movement because of their anti-free-enterprise orientation and because of their proliferation of unsound scare tactics." I told him that environmentalism had little to do with scare tactics; "Earth-day is monkey ecology, and so is Greenpeace. Do not defer to the fringe to make your arguments. They are not the core, they did not sit 365 days of the year in a small post in Antarctica collecting data."

I told him there was "evidence to suggest that evolutionary lineages are being broken at in a way that may impair your ability to drive to church on sunday mornings or even make god doubt your respect for his work." I told him that evolutionists didn't see a conflict with creationism because the two looked at very separate areas, but when he responded with talk of the communists and the tree-huggers, I responded by mentioning the word 'monkey' as much as possible and gave up trying to learn anything more. He said I was mean-spirited and hateful. I said that real scientists face criticism every day. "The search for truth demands doubt, and how can you make conclusions before drawing reasonable hypotheses?" I had confirmed stereotypes. Creation scientists had nothing to say of value, but their influence on the sedants of Los Angeles was huge.

After all, in the Southwest we are prone to elect our religious - and often protestant fundamentalist creationists, to office, and after so many city blocks and strip malls, is it not easy to accept his pseudo-science?

We parked in a small lot at the edge of a vast bristlecone forest, and began the hike up along a narrow path cut into the steep dolomite grades. At the ridgeline, we could see hundreds of miles - first the Saline Valley, and beyond that, Death Valley.