That’s why the Southwest will forever remain a pioneer’s territory, and that’s why it’s crawling with astronauts and the men who might become them.

It doesn’t hurt that in the waiting until they get to touch space, space will touch them. Living in the desert is like a test drive for life in orbit. Here, like nowhere else on earth, the line that seperates up there from down here is blurred, a vanishing point lost in all of that highway shimmer.

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They come from our empty places, our hidden small towns and the folds in the map, as far as you can go away and still be home.

Of course, there’s another, better reason why astronauts are born lonely. City kids don’t have the room nor any need to dream. The lights and the chaos burn away their imaginations. The only decent dreaming gets done out here, in our wider landscapes, in our deserts and canola fields, those beautiful places where we don’t even have to look up to see all of the sky at daybreak and every last star at night.