I was thinking about this peculiar contretemps recently. In fact, I think about it every month or so, especially when things are going well for me and I am in danger of imagining that I might be an exemplary individual. I think about it more intently when I teach travel writing seminars, because I always use that hateful sentence as an example of a bad lead.

Now, where I live, in Montana, there is an infestation of writers. In general, those authors on the western side of the Rocky Mountains are associated in one way or another with the University of Montana and its world-class creative writing program. These men and women generally produce highly literate and well-reviewed works: essays, poems, novels. No writing down to the lowest common denominator for these folks. Because they are partially funded by teaching, they have the luxury to produce literature. Or so I like to believe.

Those of us who live on the arid east side of the mountains, however, make our livings—such as they are—directly from sales of our books or articles. When our friends to the west accuse us of pandering to the masses, as they habitually do, the usual and purposely ungrammatical reply (attributed, perhaps apocryphally, to Thomas McGuane) goes something like this: "I done a lot of things in my life I'm not proud of, but I never taught no goddamned creative writing."

Well, I can't say that anymore. I teach one or two creative writing courses a year, all devoted to travel and/or adventure. For example, I recently returned home from the Book Passage Travel Writers' Conference in Corte Madera, California. The drive took me through northern Nevada, and then up into southeastern Oregon, and I was looking for a story. Something about travel. Or adventure. Whatever.

In Winnemucca I glanced at the local paper, as I still advise students to do, and found a free lecture to be given that night by "a popular short-wave radio personality." I would learn "things not taught in school." The venue turned out to be a church basement, and only about half a dozen people turned up to learn things they hadn't been taught in school. We discovered that it wasn't going to be necessary to wait for the Y2K disaster. September 9, 1999—9/9/99—was pretty much going to be doomsday. It would start with computer crashes; early computer code used four 9s to signal that the program had ended and was to be terminated. Stoplights wouldn't work. Cars would stall on the interstate, miles from anywhere. Banks would fail. People in the know—which now included the half-dozen of us in the church basement—should take our money out of the bank, stock up on both food and weapons, and begin digging out a bunker, a defense against the starving hordes. We only had three more days.

Was there a story in the end of the world as we know it? Could be, but I wasn't inspired, so I drove north, into the parched cowboy country of southeastern Oregon, to Harney County, a land of high-desert sage flats and sparsely timbered mountains, of fleet herds of antelope, and cattle ranches. Harney extends over 10,228 square miles, which makes it the third largest county in America. It is bigger than Rhode Island and Massachusetts combined. A mere 8,000 people are privileged to call Harney County home, fewer than one person per square mile. A good place, I figured, to wait out the end of the world, now just two days hence.

I had what might be the last chocolate malt of my life at the café in Fields, Oregon, because a sign on the wall said the concoctions were world-famous and because I didn't want to die with a bad taste in my mouth. Fields is located near the southwestern flank of Steens Mountain, locally called the Steens. The mountain, a checkerboard of BLM, state, and private land, is a 40-mile-long fault block that rises gently from the west to a height of 9,733 feet and then drops off precipitously in what amounts to a sheer cliff face. From a distance it looks like a giant wedge rising up out of the sagebrush.

This great block of land was thrust a mile above the surrounding land by pressures created in the mists of geological time when the earth's crust cooled. Millions of years later, glaciers formed near the summit of the Steens, and they slid down the western slope of the mountain, carving out verdant U-shaped valleys and deep rocky gorges so elaborately sculpted they seemed the monumental work of some mad, alien culture.

On the day the world was to end, I drove west up the road that leads to the summit of the Steens. Sage-littered antelope country gave way to juniper, and at the higher elevations, aureate aspen groves shivered in a gentle breeze. Toward the summit, aspen gave way to a grassland matted with hearty wildflowers: asters and daisies and lacy white yarrow. September 9 is springtime at 8,000 feet on the Steens.

Presently I found myself at a parking lot a few hundred feet from the top. It was a steep, breathless climb to the summit, but it took only 20 minutes or so. There was no one else there, and I sat and stared down the abrupt and perpendicular eastern edge of the mountain wedge.

I was looking at the Alvord Desert, which was three miles distant and almost exactly one mile below me. It was a round, flat, and sandy alkaline playa, completely uninhabited. Dust devils spun across its surface in strange and contradictory directions. It might have been well over 100 degrees down there on the sand. I, on the other hand, was cold. What had been a gentle breeze a few thousand feet below was now a gusting wind that whistled and boomed over the summit at about 50 miles an hour. The vegetation all around was of the fragile sort one finds in high northern tundra: sparse, fast-growing mosses, orange lichens on the rocks, and dwarf shrubs, inches high, hunkered down in crevices against the wind and cold.

The sky was a cornflower blue, streaked with the long thin clouds that some people call horsetails. A brochure titled "South East Oregon Auto Tour" had promised that, on a clear day, I would be able to see parts of four states. It was a clear day and there were no conflagrations in any of the states that I could see. Late on doomsday afternoon, things were looking just peachy.

Still, I tried to contemplate the death and dissolution of civilization as we know it. Here I was freezing in the tundra and staring down at the desert. I tried out a few lines from a Robert Frost poem, the one about the destruction of the world—in fire or in ice, whatever, take your pick. But quite frankly, I wasn't inspired.

In fact, my mind was whirling with student manuscripts I had read over the years.