THE TOWN IN the Eastern Sierras I found was built by movie studios in the 1940s or ’50s and still provided appropriate fantasy backdrops for the Western ideal today. The fantasy was still sellable here, unlike on the other side of the mountains, which featured a different kind of seeker of God. The town functioned as a stopover point for a trail that cut up and down through the entire West Coast. Backpackers frequently crossed the street, looking for showers and one-night stays in the twin-bed rooms of motels that lined the road, which traversed the town on its way up north. There were all-purpose stores with fishing gear and warm clothing for people who had forgotten theirs. All the things you needed for being outdoors, really. With cash registers manned by men in their eighties who had only done this: helmed their shops, caught fish, ridden horses, and provided gear for those who wanted to do the same.

When I got to the house I was staying in, just twenty miles from the ranch I had e-mailed my parents about, I was determined to fall in love with the area. I walked up trails from my rental and jumped from boulder to boulder to find the best vantage point from which to see the sprawling valley below. The Owens Valley was famous for having its water stolen to service Los Angeles, just three and a half hours south. What was left were glistening white sheets of saline lakebeds rimmed by snow-capped mountains. I was only a hundred miles from Death Valley and a little over two hundred miles from home, but it felt a world away.

The boulders here were soft-curved from sand and rain, and I leaned back on one of them, staring at the Sierra Mountains, which looked both close and forever away. Through the bright-blue sky careened long threads of spider webs, caught in the light of the waning sunlight. They flew by me one by one, and the place felt magical. I could live here, I thought. I could disappear here, I thought. Throughout the sandy and rocky sagebrush terrain were remnants of people. Rocks arranged just so. Rusted cattle fencing that had been knocked over by wind and had begun its slow descent into land, covered by layers of sand, sediment, and slow-growing cacti. It was a predicament I had seen in other places across the desert I had visited in the Southwest. The will of the desert to take the land back from people, to turn it back over to vast nothingness. And yet there was always an endless line of electric poles traversing the expanse, bringing electricity to civilization somewhere.