I was young the morning I sailed off with a band of Yupik hunters to look for walrus inthe northern Bering Sea. In the coming years, I would understand better how dangerousit could be to rely on my own way of knowing the world, especially when far from home.And whenever I found myself in those situations, I came to understand that it wasalways good to hold in suspension my own ideas about what the practical, wise, orethical decision might be in any given set of circumstances. The reservoir of knowledgesome, but not all, Indigenous residents possess reminds me of the phenomenon of theking post on a nineteenth-century whaling boat. It ensures structural integrity duringtimes of heavy seas or when the boat is being strained to its utmost by a harpoonedwhale desperate to escape.

THE MAN I MET THAT day was no more a resident of this place than I had been aresident of St. Lawrence Island. You can never say precisely where you are, of course,state your position definitively, even if you've been resident in the same place all yourlife and have, moreover, been paying attention, stabilizing as that information might beto any person's sense of identity. In the decades to come I think it will be less important,however, to know exactly where you are than it will be to know, wherever you are, thatyou are safe.

The man and I parted company that morning in the Mojave with an unusually firmhandshake, looking directly into each other's eyes. It was my guess that he and I did notshare the same political views. Also, I believed his training might incline him to be morecomfortable with the logic of empirical science, while I was steeped in the metaphorsand allusions of the arts and humanities. His employers, I knew, hoped his work wouldidentify areas of interest to mining companies, to which the Bureau of LandManagement might lease some of the lands over which it had jurisdiction. As for me, Iwas thinking more about the rapidly changing desert climate here, from one year to thenext; about mountain lions hunting feral donkeys in this basin, which I had seenevidence of; about ephemeral creeks that occasionally flooded the playa with rainwater;about centuries-old potsherds I'd picked up to inspect, and then put back; and aboutother components of this still undeveloped area that might be of more interest toreaders of National Geographic than any prospects for profiting financially from theleasing of mineral rights to this basin