When the road goes from asphalt to crushed gravel to dirt, the sensible person turns around. I plow straight on ahead. I'm in search of a place everyone else has forgotten, and you can't get there on a freshly paved highway.

Sometimes, sadly, you can't get there at all. I discovered this on a recent evening with the sun hanging low and the pup licking the desert air. I'd latched onto a road that promised to take me nowhere, which was precisely the place I wanted to be. On this day, though, nowhere was somewhere I'm not supposed to be: an Indian reservation. As seductive and tempting as it was to keep on going, it felt wrong. I turned around.

It's a bittersweet feeling to live aside a forbidden nation. But there is sweet justice to it, too. And so I'll be content to gaze longingly at those roads that stretch out into nothingness and imagine all the nowheres I'll never go.

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