A few summers ago my family and I made a motor trip west from our home in Ohio to the Pacific coast, and returned. We crossed the prairies and the plains, the Mojave Desert and the great salt flats of Utah; we drove through the Badlands and the Grand Tetons, and crossed the Sierra Nevadas and the Rocky Mountains twice. We followed the trails of the pioneers, the Mojave, the Wyoming, and the Santa Fe. We traveled on good roads in a good automobile with a good road map. We had never been in any of that country before, but we were never lost once, nor did we ever miss the road and have to turn around and go back.

As we traveled, though, I kept remembering others who had traveled there before us, pilgrims and pioneers who had ventured into a land that was then unknown. I thought of their stru…