BY THE ROAD.

It was the winter that Bernhard Goetz shot the four guys on the subway. The "subway vigilante," as news stories called him, had just surrendered to police, and everybody had an opinion about what he did and whether he was wrong or right. I was living in northwest Montana, in a house on the side of the Swan Mountains, as far up as you could go before national-forest land. Past the Swan range, behind the house, began the Bob Marshall Wilderness, one of the largest national wilderness areas in the lower forty-eight states. At the foot of the mountains was the valley of the Flathead River. From clear across the valley you could see the light above our garage door.

When I moved to Montana from New York, I'd thought I was going back to some earlier and better version of America, to an Ansel Adams photograph suspended in time. Of course, Montana isn't like that, nor (as far as I know) is anywhere else. Nowadays, the particular nuttiness of the age surges everywhere instantly, like a magnetic field. Sometimes half the drop-offs at local U-Haul rental places come from California, and whenever upheaval happens there--an earthquake, a riot--the number of refugees seems to go up. A lot of people in Montana aren't so much living there as they are not living somewhere else.

That winter, the Bernhard Goetz winter, it really snowed. A hard snowfall makes you feel excited and cozy for only about ninety minutes, I found; after that, it becomes irritating, then worrisome, then alarming, and so on, sometimes all the way to panic. Writing, with its limitations at expressing tedium, can't accurately convey the feeling of watching a steady, hard, unpicturesque, windless snowfall come down for days at a time. Snow piled high on our front deck and on our roof. Sometimes the roof's snow mass, warmed underneath by the heat it was insulating, would slide down until it met the snow heap on the deck and then freeze there, shutting off the front of the house like a security gate. The driveway to that house was two hundred yards long and included a switchback. I kept it shovelled through the first several snowfalls, but then gave up. Getting it plowed cost more than I could afford, so my wife and I began parking our cars at a wide part of the road about a quarter mile ...