Tire tracks had suddenly veered off-trail.  He followed them, hoping to come unexpectedly upon some breathtaking vista it would take half a day to take in.  He didn’t stop for the open meadow to the right or the precipice overlooking the canyon to the left, or later for the water gushing down flat rock or for the pool it had formed.  These vistas had somehow become familiar to him from other like places or pictures.  He didn’t stop till the tire tracks ended and, a little farther on, the trail behind him was no longer visible — for he then sensed a ravaging presence lurking in the open wilderness before him, in which he had not even a name.  Anything could happen out there, and nothing in that wild would ever seek to identify him.  He’d be his most anonymous, to himself as well, the deeper in he went.  He was as if standing on a border between himself and his irrelevance.  And was that his mother calling out to him?  If she had been other than a voice in his head, he would have told her that he was stepping outdoors to catch the light of a setting sun on the magnificent side of a mountain… and, conjuring that was what he later said had allowed him to cross the border and hike deeper in.