1.
It's midnight, late August, the Black Rock Desert, a 500-square-mile dry lake bed in Northern Nevada where I am camped out for a week with 30,000 of my closest friends, which is to say it's the annual Burning Man Festival. None of us is asleep, techno throbs in the distance and I'm walking with my friend Laurel Roth across the empty, mile-wide central plaza of the temporary city, which for several days is the fifth-largest urban population in the state. Midnight, and a full moon that keeps shining despite the alkali storm that stops us in our tracks, forcing us to pull kerchiefs over our faces. The moonlight disperses perfectly and evenly in the particles, which are smaller in diameter than the wavelength of light. The whiteout is total and to move even as much a single step is nauseating. It's midnight, 100 degrees out, but so dry there's no sweat to mix with the alkali. When the storm passes I shake like a dog and the dust falls away, a cleansing ritual as one day passes into the next.
2.
Midnight again, four months later, New Year's Eve, McMurdo Station, Antarctica. I write about deserts but don't particularly like heat, so I have come to the largest desert on the planet, the Antarctic, which happens to be relatively cool. Despite the fact that the ice here can be 8 million years old and three miles thick, the amount of precipitation that falls on this continent the size of the United States and Mexico combined is about five inches a year. Equivalent to the Mojave. Last week I was at the South Pole, where it was -50 Farenheit. Chilly. Tonight I'm sitting on a deck attached to the north side of a building in the southernmost port in the world. It's 50 degrees, a record temperature for McMurdo, courtesy of global warming. We take off our parkas and boots. Our socks. Our sweaters. There's no wind. Off come the thermal underwear and socks. It's warmer here than in Malibu today, despite the fact that the sea at my feet is frozen solid for as far as the eye can see. This is a heat wave I can live with.
3.
Six months and some weeks later, noon, July, driving from LA to Las Vegas through the Mojave with no air-conditioning. I've been writing about the Antarctic and have forgotten to get the AC fixed and am on deadline for an article. My daytime transit through the Mojave, the hottest desert in North America, is not by choice. Before I was born, my parents, whose car didn't have as much as a fan inside, would make this drive in summer only at night and with waterbags strapped in front of the radiator. The rubberized canvas sacks helped the engine run cool and provided emergency supplies should the car break down. Me, I'm running with a bottle of frozen water between my legs and wet towels over my head. I'm not sure I've made much technological progress since my parents eloped along this same route in the late 1930s. Writing about deserts is a growing field—the planet is getting hotter and more of it turns to desert every year. But, damn, I wish my work were all in the Antarctic.
William L. Fox is the author of Terra Antarctica, Living In the Desert of Desire, The Void, the Grid and the Sign, Driving By Memory and other books dealing with deserts.