From a distance, the place called Wendover looks as if it had been dropped into the stark vastness of this landscape from above, rather than built up out of it. It is an improbable place, bursting with contradictions. The marks of deep geologic time visible to every horizon, the infinite desert sky, and the no-time, no-sky that exists inside the windowless casinos. The neon enticements and the trailer parks. The lives that pass through here, and the lives that pass here.

Our human lives are, of course, always built and lived in relationship to the natural world, but rarely is the contrast so stark. Here, a manicured golf course is a peninsula of lush green in an ocean of sand and dust. All of it once a lakebed, not too many thousands of years ago.

I see unsettled beauty in this place, along with the strangeness and the suffering. All of it wrapped in windblown dust and an endless sweep of horizon.