My perennial desert nighttime destination is the lost and deserted desert mining camp called "Campo #1". Like Siberia ghost town, I lay some claim upon this forgotten place; I describe it as my place to sleep in peace after a long solitary sojourn through trackless lands illuminated by starlight and moonlight and perceived by my own faint and failing vision and capacity to see and know. But still, I always find that place...no matter how dark the night, or lost or turned around I might seemingly become, or curious about other places in the Deep Water Wilderness where I might go to pass the deep hours of night...I yet always find my way to Campo #1. And I know that if I'm fortunate enough to live to a ripe old age, and they prop me up in the old age home to wait out the long hours to death, I know then that I'll sit there with a knowing and inscrutable grin upon my face as night falls and my mind returns to the deep desert, to the trackless wanderings alone in the night, with no light but nature's pale illumination, and no guide other than my own seemingly lost and shuffling footsteps over gravel and sand and granite and alluvium the depth of a sea. I'll return then as an old man in my wheelchair or bed to the land where none may ever again go but me. My place out there in the deep desert wilds which I found and never share but through stories and pictures and memories and the subtlest of knowing smiles.
My name is Kurt Bell.
You can learn more about The Good Life in my book Going Alone.
Be safe... But not too safe.