I want to ride to the ridge where the West commences
I can’t look at hobbles and I can’t stand fences
Don’t fence me in.
-Cole Porter

The places we love call to us because they are, in fact, “the landscape of our soul.”

I don’t mean the landscape of our childhood or of some special memory. The landscapes we love speak powerfully to us, they call to us, because the country corresponds to the actual terrain of our interior world, the landscape of our soul. That is why one man feels such a deep connection to the deserts of the Southwest, while another feels it with the ocean, or hardwood forests, or the high country above timberline. When we go there, we feel as if we have come home.

I...