For 20 years now, I have been heading from my native Vermont to the American West—Utah, Arizona, Nevada, Southern California—to hike and camp in the desert. Or, as the New Testament would have it, the eremos. That is the ancient Greek word for wilderness, a lonely place of naked rock, blazing sun and humming silence. And maybe, if you pray and pray, if you genuinely open yourself, it is a place of divine presence, too.

Camping with the Desert Fathers, Leath Tonino