Editor's Note

There's a passage near the end of Larry McMurtry's classic novel Lonesome Dove that sank in deep the moment I read it, and stayed there.

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It's late in the 19th century, and two old friends, Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call, are transporting a herd of cattle from Texas to Montana across a nearly empty continent. The land, largely depopulated of buffalo and Native Americans, is about to be repopulated by farmers and ranchers. Both men -- rough, super-competent, self-reliant -- know that the time of the frontier, their time, is done for. The continent-size wilderness that stretches before them waiting to be explored would soon be under pressure from all sides.

As they lope along on horseback, no fences for 2,000 miles, McCrae, the talkative one, asks Call, the strong, (and deadly) silent type, a question.

"When was you the happiest, Call?"

Not being a man prone to ponder his own emotional state or to give much value to anything beyond whatever task is at hand, Call can't even grasp the concept of a vague, inclusive state of "happiness." He responds with puzzlement. "Happiest about what?" he wants to know.

But McCrae has the wisdom and self-knowledge to understand the uniqueness of their position at a particularly poignant hinge in history: The inexhaustible wildness of their world is about to begin a long, slow slide to exhaustion.

He knows exactly what he has to be happy about, and his answer struck me hard, because in some essential, stripped-down way, it is the root of all happiness.

"Just about being a live human being, free on the earth," McCrae says.

That came to mind as I was reading today's cover story by Chico Harlan, about kids who'd been taken down, hard, by the opposite of the wide-open wilderness of Augustus McCrae. These are kids raised where wide open had long since been replaced by fetid alleys and broken glass. Now they live in a place where everywhere they look they see high fences and locked doors.

When we discovered that Oak Hill, the District's juvenile detention center, was reversing a history of overly punitive detention by sending groups of its inmates on hiking, rafting and camping adventures in what's left of the Western wilderness, I was intensely curious. Did the great wide open have any of the healing power I imagined? For eight days, these teens, whose constricted lives had pounded them into a self-destructive crouch, would be live human beings free on the earth. Could that be the faintest beginning of a chance at happiness?

Turn to Page 12, and see what you think.

Tom Shroder is the editor of the Magazine. He can be reached at shrodert@washpost.com.