Didion is in a Death Valley motel on a 119° day trying to write a piece on morality for The American Scholar. She distrusts morality as an overarching concept and is more interested in its particulars, which she explains via an accident on the previous night. A car turned over on the highway, and the driver was killed instantly, leaving his girlfriend in shock and bleeding internally. Didion speaks to the nurse who drove the woman to the nearest doctor 185 miles away. The nurse explains to Didion that her husband stayed behind with the body because to do otherwise would be immoral.

Didion trusts this notion of morality because of its specificity. A body left alone will be eaten by coyotes, and preventing that is part of the promise we make as a society. Didion calls this “wagon-train morality,” a term which is sometimes used in the pejorative. She turns to two famous tragedies—the Donner party and the Jayhawkers—saying that she was taught that these people died in the wilderness because they had failed in their responsibility to each other. Didion thinks this kind of morality is the only kind that has real meaning.

She realizes this may not be what is expected of her, but she finds it difficult to believe that “‘the good’ is a knowable quantity” (159).