The old-time New Mexicans had a saying: "Hay las sierras debajo de los llanos"—There are mountains below the plains. Modern travelers crossing the Southern Plains on the interstates from Oklahoma City to Albuquerque or San Antonio to Santa Fe might doubt it, but the New Mexicans were right. Below the level of the flat horizon, great canyons carve mesas and buttes, spires and badlands through the architecture of the Llanos of West Texas and New Mexico.

This plains canyonland country, although not drawn on a scale comparable to the now-famous gorges and canyons of farther west—the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, the Snake River Gorge, Zion and Bryce and Canyon de Chelly and all those other stupendous canyons of the Colorado Plateau—was in technologically simpler times well known across the Southwest. The canyons were oases of water and trees and wildlife in the limitless expanse of the High Plains, the sanctum sanctorum of 120 centuries of Native American occupation. You've seen portrayals of them, although not in the flesh since Monument Valley or California usually stunt doubled for them, in dozens of Westerns. Tucked away in the recesses of the plains, they're mostly forgotten now except by landscape artists, victims of an odd quirk resulting from privatization on the western plains, the tendency (especially marked in Texans) to speak in terms of counties and ranches rather than landforms and rivers.

But they are still here, the old names clinging to them out of a time that recedes from our view like embers winking out: Largo, Tule, Blanco, Los Lingos, Palo Duro. And of a sudden, newly distinctive, recognized as an ecological subregion in the Southwest, and as the one subregion on the Southern Plains where the best expression of the wild diversity of the original plains yet exists.

On the face of it, there are good reasons why I should not be writing a book about the Llanos canyonlands. I am not a native of the Southern Plains, in the sense of being born here, but am instead a "downstreamer." For two centuries, and on one side of my family line for nearly three, my ancestors have been woodland folk from the lower Red River. My mother's family, Hales and Temples from the AngloCeltic border class, almost springs from the ground of the western Arkansas hills. My dad's, Zylkses and Lafittes and Floreses from the long-ago ethnic mix of the Louisiana-Texas frontier, has been associated with a Louisiana Red River tributary called Bayou Pierre since the eighteenth century. Which causes me to wonder if some cumulative environmental gene imprinting might not be at work on me. Shouldn't my blood reflect, just slightly, the chemical content of the waters of Bayou Pierre, or the minerals of Petit Jean Mountain in the Ozarks? If so, why is it that I find the arid, sunlit canyons so intensely compelling? Brought up to the moist and the verdant, I am in love with the sere and the minimal. Did some long-ago ancestor, perhaps my great-great-grandfather, Pierre Flores, the product of converging lines of Indian traders and Red River pioneers, decide to go see where the Red River came from? And actually trace the river into Palo Duro Canyon, imprinting my DNA with a recognition code that struck me, a century later, with staggering puha, as the Comanches would say?

I don't know. But for years I thought that something like this was the explanation for a recurring childhood dream of mine, of a landscape image like a Georgia O'Keeffe painting, no action or people, just a suspended dreamscape of a vermilion canyon wall under a cobalt sky, with white clouds like hanging cotton balls, pervading all of a sense of ... Indians! In high school I decided that I must have seen, when very young, a dramatic postcard or a National Geographic photograph that had made a strangely profound impression. Later, in college, I resolved on the more metaphysical explanation that the dream was a genetic memory and anticipated the rush of recognition in my wanderings through the West.

At a Christmas gathering in the early 1980s I learned that at least part of the answer was not so metaphysical. In 1952 an aunt had moved to and lived for a short time in West Texas. As a four-year-old I had been taken along on a visit and somewhere, no doubt, had seen the dreamscape, a subliminal memory that I retained. But that did not explain to me why that particular image should have resonated through my dreams for so many years. So I still subscribe to the idea of ancestral imprinting and think that this is why I have always faced west, so to speak, and have had the sense of something very powerful whispering to me from that direction and no other.

I moved, in 1978, to West Texas and almost at once began to explore, with the weirdest sense of déjà vu, those canyonscapes of my childhood dream. And in 1983 I bought a small place in Yellow House Canyon, one of the headwater canyons of the Brazos River. Over five years, in a give-and-take as gradual and unceasing as the erosion of the overhanging rimrock, the canyon has worked its ancient magic on me, the kind of magic that has been reaching out of these canyonlands and wrapping around the human psyche for 12,000 years. This adult experience has combined with the child's fixation to become my motivation for writing this book, which is not, of course, the same thing as my goal in writing it.

I want to draw environmental attention to this country. If, as historian Alfred Runte and others have argued, the establishment of public parks and nature preserves is an expression of higher culture, on a par with the creation of great music, art, and literature, then as the rest of the Southwest has long suspected we are not guilty of having created much high culture on the Southern Plains. History, as I will endeavor to show, explains this neglect, and I won't dwell on the issue here except to say that there are compelling reasons, both ecological and societal ones, for a large-scale and imaginative alteration of the present situation. Some of those who stand for the status quo on the plains may find the philosophical basis of my arguments radical or offensive. That's a timeworn (and wornout) position on the plains. I will address it merely by saying that it is true that I am not especially impressed by the status quo in a landscape that I love. And to borrow Thoreau's defense, why anyway should I speak for the status quo? As he said, any churchman (or banker in Amarillo and Lubbock) would do that. I prefer to speak for the wild and for the sensuous heart.

Beyond that, this is a book of exploration and discovery, to a certain extent personal and experiential, of the human interaction with a landscape through time. I cannot lay claim, as Frederick W Turner does in Beyond Geography, to writing "spiritual history." But this might be called a natural history of the spirit of a place in the American West.

Dan Flores, January 1989
Yellow House Canyon, Texas