During a change in my life I found work in this isolated place where I had no personal connections. I knew the location from reading a map, but had not investigated the district further. I had not seen my future workplace, and never inspected beforehand the apartment provided to me as part of my compensation. I went in cold and blind because I badly needed employment and a place to live. In that circumstance I packed a vehicle with my few belongings, accepted the job at age fifty-nine having a bit of cash in my pocket, one change of work clothes, no bank account and no family to accompany me. I quickly found desert winds among the town’s chief characteristics. They started as morning breezes, slowly gathered momentum until they blew hard and dusty every evening past midnight.

I discovered the town sheltered domestic refugees by the hundreds, providing sanctuary for people injured elsewhere by tragic circumstance or self-inflicted wounds, some in nightmarish categories: drug addiction, divorce, debilitating disease, bankruptcy. They had chosen the road, drifting from California, New Mexico and Texas on the lookout for cheap housing in which to hunker down and heal. In that sense I blended with the population. The inhabitants bent toward the right-wing politically — had modest amounts of education — and as a group seemed to lack curiosity. Surrounding this city I found tiny communities of people nicknamed desert rats, scattered throughout a wasteland vast and without shade, living in shacks and mobile homes along dirt roads far from concentrations of fellow human beings.

It took me a year to locate the photographic composition above which I believe defines the essence of the place. A similar panorama can be viewed from each of the city’s neighborhoods; none provide this characteristic foreground including rusty fence posts, minimalist architecture and the detritus of automobiles. South of town the sierra rises precipitously in a series of pinnacles. A surprising alpine climate and greenery exists up there, altogether different from the dry plain below. Upon the peaks in winter snow falls and many days throughout the year cloud-forms decorate the sky above the mountains. In the opposite direction, behind me to the northeast as I captured this view, a high-altitude playa stretches out — enormous, seeming to lack boundaries, a landscape which could well serve as a visual representation of Infinity.