The title of this book is taken from a line in a poem entitled For The Old Man, dedicated to my father. The poem, and this series of photographs, is a portrait of a certain area in the Sierra National Forest, near Yosemite. My father, and his father before him made yearly visits to this location, and I have also made the same yearly pilgrimage since the age of three. I have been photographing and writing poems about it for forty years.
      It is one of the most beautiful wilderness areas on earth. It is also a place which holds deep spiritual meaning for me and for those close to me.
      There are campgrounds which we have occupied for years, suddenly plowed into bare dust. There is a lake, and a mountain named Madera Peak that I love. There is sudden snow, and the wind in the pine. There are mushrooms the size of basketballs and moss so green it glows.
     From 1973 on it has been repeatedly raped and permanently destroyed by the logging and forestry industries. A place that I thought was eternal was dying before I was middle-aged. My children, and their children will never see it as I saw it. For me, such degradation of the earth is a kind of death; all things, especially great beauty, are mortal.
     Shortly after returning from the Nam, Flo and I walked to one of the old campsites. It was by a small stream, the Portuguese, near a flat rock which the Indians had used as a camp. My brother Rick and I used to hunt for arrowheads in the cracks. Everything was cut to the ground. I could find no familiar landmarks. They cut a road through both Indian camps and littered the ground with the refuse of dead trees. The loggers had learned to camouflage the extent of their destruction by leaving narrow stands of trees to block the sight of the next patch of devastation. But the patches went on and on.
     That day, when I saw that one of the most ancient and dense parts of the forest had been turned into desert, I died the little death. I had outlived the forest, a place that was, in my imagination, ancient and eternal. I felt old.
     This is the place where I will die no matter where I die.