" a zest for things rugged and wild. "

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Chase, in his Introduction to ' Desert Trails, ' offers a 

sonorously Shakespearean characterization of

the desert. The fourteen or so pages so rich in

content, must be appreciated a portion at a time.

And then, revisited often. Below is one of those 

portions, as Chase challenges himself, and us

to inquire of the desert what it has to offer and to

then go forth and seek it.

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" But now the pendulum tends to the other extreme. After

centuries of home, security, satisfaction of want, we come

to a revulsion. Ease and tame ways of living have reached,

for most of us, the present far stage, there has arisen a zest

for things rugged and wild.

Hardship looks attractive, scarcity becomes desirable, starkness

turns an unexpected side of beauty. If the sun that has pleased me

      with warmth has the power to blast as well, Homo sum, let him try it on. 
If Mother Earth has rooms from which she would bar me

with threats, let her make the threats good if she can. If the eye loves

verdure and low cool tones of color, let it take a Spartan course of 

whitest light and fiercest color-wave. These things also are also part of

our estate, and we cannot afford to leave them out of the accounts.

Thus the desolate, gaunt and dreadful in Nature at last have their day:

the risk is, indeed, that they may run to overvaluation. Perhaps even the

pranks of those funny fellows the ' futurists, ' ' cubists, ' and ' vorticists, '

in poetry, music and art, might be explained by this clue: civilization has 

got on their nerves, and they simply have to scream. " 

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