I come into Death Valley through Nevada, stopping first at the abandoned town of Rhyolite.

Technically this is not yet National Park Service property, but a ghost town on the edge of such a dramatically named valley is not to be missed, so I drive down the remains of a street , past the remains of a town. If it’s like a movie set, Rhyolite is more bombed-out-20^th-century town than Wild West. You might expect to find zombies lurking in the shell of the Cook Bank building, rather than the wandering spirits of cowboys and school marms.

The mining town boomed in the early 1900s, threw up some solid edifices like the bank and the train depot, and then died within the next decade. The most visually arresting thing about it, beyond the stark white stone cut against the intense blue sky, is looking at the historic photos posted around the site. They show how things used to look, so you can see what time and neglect has done.

If I come away thinking “is that all there is?” I can’t decide if I mean the smallness of the town and the lack of things to look at, or a more general sense of futility.

Maybe it’s just that nearby name, “Death Valley.” Past Rhyolite, the road stretches a long, straight way before it climbs into the park proper. I crest the ridge that defines the eastern edge of the great depression and my anticipation is high; I see shimmering white sands in the distance, and on the side of the road, not sun-bleached cattle bones – but flowers.

Purple, white and yellow flowers line the route about as far as I can see. It’s like I’ve passed through some portal and found not only the Great Sandy Desert, but a backcountry trail on the road to Oz.

“Weird.”

I think I say it aloud, though there is no one in the car – or within miles – to hear me. Still, it’s a delightful surprise, and I cruise along with a smile on my face because I’ve discovered yet again that there is a lot I never know about the world until I’ve seen it.

Now, I don’t want to mislead you into thinking there are acres of colorful blooms. The flowers grow only along the pavement, as if someone spilled packets of seeds on the road and they rolled to the edges to take root. Just beyond the flowers is the Death Valley I’d imagined. But, of course, hadn’t quite imagined rightly.

Looking past the flowers, out across the naked land, I get a feel for the anatomy of the earth that I’ve never known before. The alluvial fans spreading across the valley, spilling over each other from the mountains above, look as thick and regular as the serratus muscles on some bodybuilder. There are planes of muscle beneath them – maybe it is the color of the earth, so like my own flesh, that makes me think this – while the mountains are hard and sharp as bones.

 And the vegetation that I mostly do not see? Is that the skin of the earth? Or is topsoil the skin and the vegetation then the fur? I can’t quite make the analogies work, but they feel close enough, and Death Valley becomes a penetrating image of the planet, as if some first layer or two has been stripped away.

I drive on to Scotty’s Castle, a rich man’s folly built on the edge of the desert. It looks and feels like it could be on the California coast; probably there you can find hundreds like it – vaguely Spanish, stucco and tile. But out here it’s as unexpected as those flowers along the road, and saved from the desolation and decay of Rhyolite only because it is maintained by the National Park Service.

My mind thinks there’s some connection, this sense of tentativeness and fragility, under which the muscular land heaves and rolls, oceanic, titanic, slowly slowly turning and alive.