When I was very young, perhaps four or five, my family moved into a newly-built house on the western edge of a development in Vallejo, California. There are photos of me and my two sisters inside the unfinished skeletal structure, beaming from glassless window openings and playfully posing in what would become our living room. When the house was finished we moved in but the backyard was still dirt, and there was a wooden fence along the back of it, and I have a distinct but probably false memory of stepping onto a cinder block with my hands on top of this fence and pulling myself up and being just able to peer over it, and looking westward at the orange setting sun just as it started to dip below the horizon of rolling brown hills. Just beyond the fence there was a somewhat steep twenty foot decline before the land flattened out and ran to the horizon, a huge expanse of broad flat earth between me and these distant hills now receiving the sun's descent, dotted with scrub vegetation and occasional clumps of small trees but no buildings or other evidence of human occupation. This zone of emptiness always unnerved me, it seemed to me what the desert in a foreign land must be like, a place of loneliness to which you might be banished and never told why. The fence separating our property from this unnamed territory struck me as obviously insufficient to keep whatever forces of desolation were at work in that uninhabited wasteland from infiltrating our lives. I remember the rays of the blazing deep orange sun threading between the wooden slats like a threat. I never felt comfortable in that yard because of what lay beyond the fence.