One early Sunday morning the telephone rang. It was my beautiful, talented cousin. As usual with her it was brief, clear and sweet.

- “are you still interested in random drifting missions?”

- “more than ever”

- “OK, Francis has a project in California. He’ll interview an up and coming writer in residence in Pioneer town right by Joshua Tree National Park. He needs someone to scout locations. It would be sometimes in the next two weeks. Would you be interested?”

Would I be interested? My heart pounding through my chest is the answer. Let me do the math: the open road + part of California I’ve never been x (people + jobs + processes I don’t know) / literature = mega drift-factor. So, this all takes a split second in that highly inflammable skull of mine.

- “One hundred percent!”

- “OK I’ll tell Francis to reach out to you”

Within the next couple of days, a few texts exchanged and we are set. I’ll leave Saturday evening to be read to hit the road in Los Angeles at sunrise on Sunday. I’ll drive to Pioneer Town right on the north-western edge of the park and recon interesting locations for them to shoot. They will arrive Monday. I’ll have a one-and-a-half-day lead over the crew to find good locations for them to shoot. I’ve never done this. I have zero experience, expertise or credibility. Everything is A-OK.

Saturday comes. I’m packed and ready. Nervous somehow. I can’t help my fantasy machine to heat up. Every cell in my drifter body is screaming for the road. The lust is intense. And yet I am nervous. I want to be useful to those guys, I want to make sure I contribute efficiently to what they are trying to achieve. I realize I’m the outsider. These guys are pros, they know each other, they are experts at their craft. I’m a nobody in that world. In fact, I’m a nobody period. A drifter is all I am. My teenage years are far behind me. I should be solid and confident. Yet I’ve never quite shaken the sensation that I’m always bull shitting my way through life. In every school I’ve attended, every job I’ve held, every social circle I’ve hung around, I’ve felt as though I didn’t belong and that I’d soon be shamefully and painfully unmasked. I’m a gypsy. The only truth I know is in movement, the only time I feel at my place is when I’m adrift. That, I know.

I go to the airport and feel my pulse accelerate. California will always have a magical power of attraction over me. No exotic perfume of the far-East, no intoxicating humid heat of the South American continent, no ice blue lagoon of the North, no architectural wonder of Europe, no trip will ever take that away. There is California dreamin’ in my blood, regardless of how many times I’ve been there and drifted from North to South. Just as Great Britain will always have an empire over my imagination, on account of the Beatles and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle whispering through my ears all along my formative years as a youngling, California has cemented itself in my pre-frontal cortex through the movies, surfing and so many of my teenage heroes, from Jimi Hendrix to Dirty Harry Janis Joplin, from Jim Morrison to Mamas and the Papas…

I land past midnight in LAX. Take a shuttle to the car rental. Drive a few minutes to West Century Boulevard in a cheap hotel right by the runway. Check in, sleep tight, check out before sunrise, hit the 405 North towards Sacramento, then hit East toward Palmdale and Lancaster on CA 14 North.

My goal is to find some scenic spots on the road from the airport to the park so that part of the trip can be documented. The crazy western megapolis is an organic creature of glass, metal and flesh that behaves like a carnivorous plant, attracting its prays with its shiny colors and evanescent flavors, capturing them and digesting them for a thousand years. No matter how much you like it, no matter how well adjusted you’ve managed to be there, extracting yourself from it feels like a relief, a liberation, like survival. Northbound as you reach the San Fernando Valley, the San Gabriel mountain bordering the western end of the Angeles National Park appears as the last wall guarding the urban prison… Soon you climb and at the summit, you suddenly get a gorgeous view of the premises of the Antelope Valley and the Mojave desert. I see a large mall on the edge of the ridge, instantly put my turning signal on and exit at #5 Golden Valley Road, ride a ramp and find myself on the south-west side of a crossroads. I make an immediate right, then a left and enter the mall. There, between a McDonald’s and a Kohl’s lie an empty parking lot. It’s Sunday at sunrise. I cross to reach the opposite side on the edge of San Gabriel, stop the car and cross the railing of the parking to a wide dirt path from which I see, the first rushes of the valley that flows out of the squeeze with the Tehachapi Mountain to the North (the Southern far end of the Sierra Nevada) and will open up into the Antelope Valley and the Mojave Desert. Its unobstructed majesty drenched by a crisp crimson light moves me, even though there is nothing particularly breathtaking about this particular land, mostly dry and still quite urbanized. It’s just that the distance, the proportions, the raw sharpness of the bulging rock reminds you of your place in this world, of how small and vulnerable you are. It looks like a snake slithering out of the scaled spine of a crocodile. This might be an interesting shot for the team.

Back on the road, thirty more miles and we’re now out in the open. Welcome to the Mojave Desert. The change of mood is brutal and immediate. Where have the relief gone? Where are the mountains? Shades of brown on endless flat lands… Green has mostly disappeared and so have dense urban zones. It’s hard to believe that just an hour ago we were in the belly, we were in the pulse, of one of the largest cities of the world, tucked between the Pacific Ocean, the San Bernardino and San Gabriel Mountains, and now… silence! Time has stopped. Everything is still and dry. This desolation is only redeemed by the extraordinary clear blue sky that drops an eerie haze on the whole valley. Light trails of impalpable cotton ponder the blue, far on the horizon the sky and the land meet over lower ridges. There is balance in the universe. Another twenty minutes on the highway before I exit and turn left on West Avenue F. The desert now truly becomes alive. As long as I was on this crowded highway, I felt like I did when I was riding the conveyer belt in the transparent tunnel through the shark tank at the Shanghai Aquarium: safe. You’re in it and out of it at the same time. You are protected by movement and other people like you. Company is comforting. But as soon as you exit the highway, you are suddenly swimming in the desert, and there may not be sharks but emptiness and loneliness are as carnivorous. For longs stretches of time there are almost no cars to be seen, no far away sign for a gas station, no town on the horizon. Only a few houses here and there, sand, gravel, endless fields of short wild bushes, in the distance razor thin electric lines held by match-sticks poles, and always, the road in the middle of which, your last reassuring umbilical cord with civilization: the yellow line.

Driving in the desert is a unique experience. Both oppressing and calming in a single thrust of the throttle, it is the one place where meditation comes easy to anyone. Soft focus on the road, mindful of the surrounding spaces but relaxed, the mind expends without drifting along with random thoughts, it just floats in the moment and… release… I bring the car to a stop, get out and practically startle myself when I close the door, surprised by the deafening noise the almighty silence makes at it swallows me whole. I walk a hundred yards into the field, enjoying the subtle crunching noise the sand makes under my feet, absorbing the surrounding heat, letting my eyes roll along hundreds of miles around… Right there, in the middle of nowhere is an abandoned sofa that could have as well have fallen from the sky. I take a deep breath… unzip my pants and urinate into nothingness. Still on the edge of sheer bliss or absolute panic, the relief grounds me, earth me, roots me at a cellular level. At this very moment, I am one, with the desert.

To add to the surreal sensation, the rental is a hybrid car. The primal satisfaction of burning fuel has been spoiled by the rise of environmental consciousness. But right here, in the middle of the Mojave, as I press the “power” button that turn on this Ford and it comes alive with no noise, no growl, no vibration to indicate that this metal ogre is feeding of fossil combustible, I feel the desert tightening its grip over me and I regret the roar of a V8 engine.

I keep driving, aiming for far away sticks that are planted at the base of the hills on the other side of the valley and which I guess are wind turbine. From time to time a reassuring mailbox poll signals the presence of humans near-by, the dystopian landscape is contradicted by a ferociously green tree… Mostly, I could be on Mars driving the space rover.

The fact that I landed on another planet is confirmed as I get closer from the turbines and wide fields of solar panels. One field, then two, then three… and the silence now challenged by the low frequency vibration of electric energy being processed… Where am I really? A parallel dimension? The Twilight Zone… Suddenly I’ve had enough of the wanderlust, I feel I need to go somewhere, anywhere! I’ve taken some good pictures and marked a few spots that I imagine could be interesting shots in a literature TV show… then again what do I know? I just hope the team will find some value in this otherwise… well, I’ll have drifted for nothing; which is the best way, the only way to drift really, and the only thing I’ve ever been good at.

So I turn around and head back east towards Helendale on the map. At some point I’ll also have to aim South, but for now, more desert. I cross again the CA 14 on which I came and long for its reassuring and comforting traffic, but I have to push through and keep my lonely journey. After losing track of time again, I suddenly feel my surroundings look familiar. At the end of a tight curve I notice a big sign reading “Edwards Air Force Base”. In a flash, I’m right there with my heroes from the Right Stuff! Chuck Yeager/Sam Sheppard is somewhere in the sky trying to break the sound barrier with his Bell X-1. From up there sailing in this infinite skycean he can surely see me!

On the east side of the highway, the landscape became just slightly more bumpy and hilly. It is no longer absolutely flat, yet the desert relinquishes none of its power. I keep driving. Make a left, a right, another right and another left, to maintain my general course, and find myself meditating again when I see in the distance a gathering of small buildings. I can’t help but feeling excited at the prospect of seeing people, maybe a gas station with stuff for sale and corny music from an old transistor radio! As I approach the place, I do find a gas station… obviously long since abandoned… a small junk yard looking ranch (El Rancho Ararat) and a Spanish looking old church that also looks familiar… I park the car in the dirt on the side of the road and exit in a cloud of dust. I could almost hear the sound of my spurs, the rhythmic cling of a creaking metal sign swinging in the wind and the far away hyperventilating breath of a steam locomotive… But this ain’t Once Upon a Time in the West and neither Harmonica/Charles Bronson nor Frank/Henry Fonda is coming out to greet me. No one is here. And the wind is mute. That church though… A flash of white lace… wait, I almost got it… a slash and a squirt of blood… That’s it! Kill Bill. This is the church where The Bride/Uma Thurman is getting married when she is ambushed, savagely attacked and left for dead… The pressure of the desert releases a notch as I find myself in yet another cinematic landmark… This land is so hostile, so desolate yet so beautiful and strangely attractive… it can’t be real. This place can’t have happened, it must have come out of the delirious imagination of a furiously deranged writer.

And I love it. I am mesmerized, hypnotized. I’m in a delicately powerful trance, my mind still tap-dances on the sharp edge that divides enlightenment and madness.

I keep driving deeper into this arid realm of celestial dust. Nothing makes you feel in physical contact with the universe quite as much the desert. The ocean has my heart. The mountain has my mind. Both squeeze the juice out of me and remind me how small and powerless we are. But the desert has my flesh and whispers to me how it has digested billions of us and turned them into sand. I drive. The safety of my air-conditioned hybrid bubble seems both vain and hilarious as I am a malfunction away from a potentially life-threatening situation. I have seen no other cars for the past hour or so, there is no cell phone signal, no gas station in sight. Every sign of humanity is a wreck that seem to have come from the other side of that malfunction.

No matter how high your bubble was, no matter how fast and powerful it might have been… when the desert calls and claims his due, you turn into sand.

I experience a curiously deep pleasure in this vulnerability. The Ford is mute and often feels like it’s only propelled by a past momentum that will soon come to an end. What would I do? Accept my fate. Exit the car, and walk aimlessly. Walk not for survival but to enjoy life in this lifeless paradise.

I toy for a moment with the idea of getting high. Tres high. I could pop three 10mg gummies and take off to meet Mojave with its emerald green flesh and purple eyes… I wisely refrain for several reasons. First and most important I have a mission to accomplish. I’m on a job and I intend to do it and be useful. Second, I have flirted with the insane many times in the ocean, a few times in the mountain, sometimes in cities… somehow the desert seems to be the limit. It’s tempting though. It would probably be the most intense and revelatory psychedelic experience of my short career as a spiritual Indiana Jones. Moses paved the way (no pun intended). So I keep drifting.

The sun starts its magnificent dive in slow motion behind the horizon. I lose myself on the pavement, on auto-pilot to Pioneer Town. The night has fallen when I finally arrive at the motel. Again, a set straight out of a John Houston movie. The rooms are simple, clean, crisp… I half expect a waitress in a large dress and lace blouse to knock on the door with a bowl of beans and hot water to fill the tub while I hear the saloon in the distance. The image inspires me so I hop on my ride after quickly refreshing and head out to the Joshua Tree Saloon where no chili beans are on the menu but a terrific rack of baby ribs just hits the spot right on. Back in my room I pull out the laptop and send a full report, complete with coordinates, routing indications and pictures of my selection of shooting spots. I hope it will be useful to the crew and they’ll get some good material. I am nervous. That old feeling again. I have no idea what I’m doing. I only know how to drift, and for now, I drift into what promises to be a blissful sleep after this deeply spiritual encounter with the Mojave and accessorily an 8 hour hop drive…