Inside the park, there were a dozen RVs lined in a row on one side and a restaurant and convenience store on the other. These were the last standing structures you would see for nearly sixty miles of windy roads in a landscape that resembled Mars more than anywhere else on earth. The first hills are covered in black rocks, which give way to mineral-red hills, and finally sherbet-colored mountains. I drove for over an hour through windy terrain, past RVs shepherding families through vacations, couples on road trips, all hoping to catch the sunrise. But I was alone. I stopped on the side of the road to get out of my car and traversed bone-dry cracked-mud terrain. It was completely silent here, and I imagined people before me getting out of their cars and walking into the desert expanse and never looking back. I didn’t go far; I was afraid. I needed to pee, but I felt I was too close to the road. The sagebrush was spindly in the way only desert sagebrush could be. I left my driver-side door open on the soft shoulder of the road. Who would take my car out here? Where would they go? The ground was chapped in rounded squares, with layers curling up like chocolate shavings. Nothing lived out here as far as I could tell, though I did see crows perched on signs that spelled out the distance to the next stop or overlook. The park pamphlet had a section on invasive burros. They had been introduced here sometime in the 1880s and had grown in number to ten thousand. But now there were only five hundred left. When I looked at the parched land, I couldn’t fathom even that level of desire for survival in days that stretched into 120-degree temperatures.

I found a sand drift, and when I couldn’t take it anymore, I pulled down my pants and squatted. I could leave a piece of myself here, mix my DNA with the desert’s. I looked up and saw a fighter jet flying low; it flipped up and around, and I wondered if the plane could see me down here. A flash of color among the endless beige.