We are shooting across the planet in a white hermetically sealed Honda with the windows rolled up and the skylight firmly attached. The air-conditioning is at full-throttle as we wind our way across the western landscape. Even when we gain altitude and the air cools, the windows remain closed and the air-conditioning on. Only at night do we open the moon roof to look at a rectangle of the night sky. It feels as if I am in some sort of space ship, or shuttle. Not being allowed to feel the landscape, only to look at it. Observe it.

I am being reminded of riding with my mother, when I was a little girl. In the Ford Galaxy 500. She hated for the windows to be open in the car while she was driving. She couldn’t stand the wind on the back of her neck. She didn’t like for her hair to be out of place. As we drove she would chain smoke Winston cigarettes. Later in life we got a car with air-conditioning and it was even worse. I imagined that people drove by us and saw this little girl, face plastered against the window, trying to breath through the glass, turning blue. Sometimes I defied her, as I defy my friend now, and I would roll down the window to let the dust and the wind and the sun blow in on my face and mess with our hair …

I take my half frozen bottle of ice water out of my cooler and take a drink. I am prepared for the heat. I want to open the window and hang my head out. To let the heat whip my hair in snips and snaps, to split its ends. I want to feel the heat on my body, through the linen of my dress, if only for a short time, then return to the waiting domed ship to be saved by the technology of air-conditioning in the desert.

I am being called by the desert. It beckons me. In the past I have always thought of the desert as a desolate place. Too desolate. Lonely beyond repair. But I have come to understand that desolation as being just another dimension, of the many dimensions, in our lives.

I snap pictures of things as we drive by. Landscape. I am always fascinated by the eternity of landscape. Its subtle changing ways. The way that you can go to a desolate place and return twenty years later and it is the same, recognizable, because it is so desolate and nobody, not even you, really wants to be there.

Riding through the desert, I don’t want to miss a thing. But I keep dozing off. And I keep waking to the same but different landscape. Dust devils twist and spin and turn as if they had a sentient, dusty life of their own. We pass ranches of women and a prison. Nary a rest stop in sight.