All across the West you can find handmade signs begging you to stop for fresh homemade jerky. They are often labeled “the best” or “world’s best.” I have never stopped for any. At the mouth of the road leading toward Death Valley there is one such sign, connected to a white building that looks like it hasn’t been opened in years. I wondered if people stopped and were frequently disappointed.

I had never been to Death Valley, but I remembered that motorcyclist who had turned toward the park on one of my lonely drives. Hoping to see the sunrise over the lowest point in North America, and visit the park before it became unbearably hot, I woke up before dawn. There was one gas station before you turned off, and gas was usually a dollar more per gallon here than anywhere else. Badwater Basin is the point of the lowest elevation in North America, at 282 feet below sea level. Before you even reach the park, you lose phone service.

I passed the salt flats and stared down at the pickup trucks knotted together in a makeshift parking lot. Before I turned right at the intersection that would take me into the valley, I noticed I still had two bars of service. I called Bethanny and left a message.

I said, “Bethanny, it’s Evelyn. I’m sorry to be calling out of the blue, but I can’t help Daniel. I don’t want to help Daniel. I think he’d be better paired with someone like Nathan or even Lorraine. Just not me. Anyone else. I’m sorry.”

I drove down a windy two-lane highway past a sixty-six-person town whose decline was directly related to the emptying of the once-full Owens Lake. The leftover houses had the familiar attributes of a mass of bungalows in any number of forgotten desert towns—the kind of place that had once held possibility but now had none. It was on a list of forlorn places, the Bombay Beach of the Eastern Sierras, with yards full of tires, rusted debris that once was useful, strange knickknacks assembled like land art, and houses painted in vivid colors now sun-worn. If you slowed down enough, you could see people stirring inside, though none of them were comfortable being curiosities for the people who passed through.

The cluster of houses edged the vast salt-harvested lands and showed no signs of dying off any further. It was the last stretch of people until you reached Panamint Springs, well within the boundaries of Death Valley.