Human Geography

Read Mark Johnson: The young geographer would tell strangers he was hunting uranium. In 1952, that explanation seemed more understandable than the truth about what he was doing in the desert.

Who would believe the broad, flat rocks called pediments had led this slender man, 98 pounds, into Arizona's San Pedro River Valleyto map remote country under a blazing sun? At night, he camped out in a beat-up Ford coupe, and read by Coleman lamp until, tired, he pulled down the seats and slept with his head by the steering wheel, his feet stretched back into the trunk.

Decades before Yi-Fu Tuan became one of America's pre-eminent geographers, before he came to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and taught students to think about landscape in new ways, the Chinese native slept outside ghost towns. The dark outlines of buildings, human places eerily devoid of humans, sometimes scared him. He dreamed of ghostly figures wandering toward him.

One night he heard hooves.

Twin shotgun barrels poked through the Ford's window and a rancher on horseback demanded: What are you doing on my property? The startled geographer apologized and told the rancher his business - not the story about uranium hunting. He was just a graduate student from California come to learn from the desert. The rancher let him stay.

The truth was Tuan loved it there, the miles of mesquite and cactuses, the clean, sweet smell of sun-baked desert plants. People speak of "love at first sight," and mean another human.

Tuan fell in love with a place.

The geographer would talk about loving places; when it came to loving people, he kept silent.