High Desert Journal
Written by Phil Brick

Excerpt:
"It's a crisp autumn morning, and I'm leading a caravan of Chevrolet Suburbans full of college students up a dusty road to Rowe Mesa, in the Carson National Forest near Pecos, New Mexico. I have been on the road with these students for nearly three months, leading a semester-long odyssey throughout the interior American West for our environmental studies field program, Whitman College Semester in the West.

"Traveling with 21 hormone-crazed students is no subtle affair. As we wind up the road, our vehicles kick up tremendous clouds of dust, and I'm pretty sure I can hear the thump da thump thump bassline of a car stereo two vehicles back. I often wish the students would turn down the music and spend more quiet time looking out the window, soaking in the vast expanses of bunchgrass, pinon and juniper that unfold before us. But students these days know something I apparently don't: you can't engage a car's transmission without first mobilizing a good soundtrack, the more bone-rattling bass, the better.

"So, this is generation X. Or, was that Y? Or, Next? I can hardly keep track. I suppose that if you really want to insult someone, you assign them an absolutely meaningless label and be done with them.

High Desert Journal Website