I hadn’t showered in a while, but there were mitigating circumstances. I was in the desert, camping, and I had spent the night sleeping beside my truck in the Black Rock Desert, where civilization becomes a distant rumor, and personal hygiene begins to seem like a social convention invented by people with plumbing.

I had no immediate plans to return to civilization. I figured I would stay another couple of nights, give or take a night depending on the weather, my food supply, and how long it took before I began to smell like something that ought to be reported to the Bureau of Land Management.

The important thing was that I was having a good time.

There is something wonderfully liberating about being in the desert. Nobody cares what you are wearing because there is nobody around to care.

Nobody notices that you haven’t showered. Nobody asks what you are doing, because the answer is usually, “Not much,” and that is considered perfectly acceptable.

The desert has a way of reducing the requirements of life to their essential components: water, food, shelter, warmth, and an occasional reminder that you are still a member of the human species. And, by midafternoon, I was hungry, so I decided to make tacos.

It seemed like a reasonable undertaking until I remembered that I had decided to make the tortillas myself. I had never been particularly intimidated by cooking, but there is a certain confidence involved in preparing food in the desert that may not be entirely justified.

At home, if something goes wrong, you can throw it away and order a pizza. In the desert, throwing away dinner means admitting defeat to a landscape that has already demonstrated its superiority in several hundred ways.

I pulled out what I had brought and began reconstructing the ancient science of tortilla making from memory: flour, oil, salt, water, baking powder. That seemed about right.

I may have forgotten an ingredient, but there’s no Internet consultation desk in the middle of the Black Rock Desert, so I proceeded with the confidence of a man who had never been formally trained in anything but was unwilling to let that stop him. I put flour into a bowl, added oil and salt, then water and baking powder, and stirred until it began to resemble dough.

I also added garlic because I like garlic. I don’t believe traditional Mexican cooks have spent centuries refining tortilla recipes only to have some guy in the Nevada desert wander into the process and say, “You know what this needs? Garlic.”

But I was cooking for myself, and that is one of the principal benefits of being alone. There were no culinary judges, barely a kitchen, but there was the tailgate of my truck.

I mixed everything and eventually had something that looked sufficiently dough-like to proceed. The next problem was rolling it out.

Tortillas are supposed to be thin, which sounds simple until you are trying to make them thin on the back of a pickup truck in the middle of the desert with camping equipment scattered around you. I did the best I could.

The tortillas were not exactly the sort of thing that would make a professional chef pause in admiration. They were uneven, irregular, and somewhat more substantial than intended.

They looked less like elegant tortillas and more like tortillas that had been through a difficult childhood. Still, they were recognizable, and recognition is an underrated quality in food.

I also had liquid eggs instead of a dozen regular eggs because eggs have somehow become a luxury item. A dozen eggs cost five dollars, while the liquid eggs were two dollars. There are moments in life when a person must stand on principle, and I had decided that the principle was not paying five dollars for twelve eggs when I could pay two dollars for something already liberated from its shells.

At three o’clock in the afternoon, I was drinking beer and making dinner. This is one of the great advantages of camping.

At home, drinking beer at three in the afternoon while preparing dinner might cause one to wonder whether life had taken an unfortunate turn. In the desert, it is simply part of the schedule.

There is no schedule, of course, but if there were one, that would be on it. Eventually, dinner was served.

The tacos were good. The tortillas were not beautiful, but they ate well.

They were very garlicky, which was exactly what I wanted. There is something satisfying about eating a meal you have made yourself, especially when you have made it under conditions that would cause most kitchens to file a complaint with management.

After dinner, I had no idea what to do for the rest of the day, but this was not a problem. In fact, it was the whole point.

The place where I was staying is famous for the annual Burning Man gathering that transforms this enormous, empty expanse into one of the strangest temporary cities on Earth. But it was March, and Burning Man was months away.

No art-cars are cruising the playa, no elaborate installations, no crowds, no music, no neon, and no civilization pretending for a week that it had figured out how to live without civilization. There was only the desert and me, so I decided to go for a hike.

I didn’t have a destination in mind. I just felt I ought to get some exercise, and walking seemed like the simplest form available. I headed out across the landscape without a plan, following a path that exists mostly because somebody else had once walked in approximately the same direction.

The desert makes walking feel different. There is nowhere to hide from the horizon.

At home, you can walk around a neighborhood and convince yourself you are going somewhere. There are streets, buildings, fences, and signs to provide the illusion of progress.

In the desert, you walk for twenty minutes, and the landscape looks almost exactly as it did when you started. It can be humbling and peaceful.

Eventually I reached a viewpoint and stopped for a while. The sun was beginning to drop, and the desert was taking on that particular evening beauty that makes even a person with no photographic talent reach for a camera.

Sunsets in the desert seem almost unfair. There is so much sky that the light has room to become enormous.

The horizon stretches forever, and the mountains sit beneath it like dark punctuation marks. The temperature, meanwhile, was dropping rapidly.

People who have never spent time in a desert sometimes imagine that deserts are simply hot. They picture endless sunshine, sand, and temperatures that fry eggs on the hood of a truck.

But deserts have a nasty little secret: they can become cold with remarkable enthusiasm. So I built a fire.

By then, the sun had disappeared, the temperature had fallen, and the desert had become quiet. I sat beside the fire and watched the flames while the darkness gathered around the truck.

There was nothing to accomplish, and nowhere I needed to be. After an hour or so, and two or three pulls on the whiskey bottle, I decided it was bedtime.

I climbed into my sleeping arrangement, settled in as comfortably as possible, and prepared to spend another night in the desert. I had no reason to think the morning would be particularly eventful.

The desert, as it turned out, had other plans.

I woke the next day with the unpleasant realization that I had forgotten to set my alarm properly. I had intended to get up around 6:30 to photograph the sunrise. I thought sunrise was around 7 a.m., so I had set the alarm for six, which seemed early enough to provide a comfortable margin.

It was not. Sunrise was closer to 6:35.

There is a peculiar state of consciousness that occurs when you wake up because you are supposed to be doing something. You are technically awake, but your brain has not yet received the memo.

Your body gets out of bed while your mind remains somewhere several miles behind, possibly still asleep. That was me.

I moved around camp in a kind of half-conscious panic, trying to remember what I had intended to do and why I had thought it was necessary to do it before I had coffee. Eventually I made coffee, which restored some portion of my civilization.

I also made oatmeal, because few problems cannot be improved by coffee and oatmeal, and the ones that remain probably aren’t worth worrying about before eight in the morning.

I had brought a camera with me, and I was determined to use it. That might sound like an odd admission, but I had once been very interested in photography.

I used to take pictures everywhere I went. I photographed landscapes, buildings, people, sunsets, and all the small things that caught my attention along the way.

Somewhere along the line, though, I had become a little jaded, or lazy. Probably both.

A camera can become surprisingly easy to ignore. You can carry one for hundreds of miles and take nothing but photographs with your cell phone, or you can spend an entire trip thinking, “I’ll get that picture later,” until later becomes tomorrow, tomorrow becomes next week, and eventually the moment is gone.

So I’m trying to get back into it.

I drove toward the viewpoint I had walked to the previous day. I wanted to see it again, this time through the camera rather than simply through my eyes.

The desert looks different in the morning. The light is softer, the shadows longer, and the air cleaner than it had the day before.

I took pictures. Not great pictures, perhaps, but pictures nonetheless, and there is something satisfying about that.

You do not have to be brilliant at something to enjoy doing it. Sometimes the pleasure comes from simply paying attention.

The camera gave me a reason to stop and look closely at things I might otherwise have walked past. But by midmorning, I was thinking about the weather.

The desert had been calm when I arrived, but the wind was beginning to pick up. There is nothing quite like heavy wind in an unprotected desert area.

It does not merely blow. It attacks.

Wind in a place like this has nothing to slow it down. There are no rows of houses, no dense trees, no walls, no buildings standing between you and the weather.

It comes across the open country with the confidence of something that knows it owns the place. And, frankly, it does.

A strong desert wind will beat you down, beat you up, fill your eyes with dust, and make you question every decision that led you to sleeping beside your truck in the first place. So I decided I would leave before it really got going.

That is another thing the desert teaches you: pay attention.

At home, weather is often background noise. You look at the forecast, perhaps glance outside, and carry on with your day.

In the desert, the weather is part of the experience. Wind, temperature, and sunlight are not minor inconveniences.

They determine what you can do, how long you can stay, and how comfortable you will be while doing it. And temperature can be especially deceptive.

It seems like it should be warm because you are in the desert. That is the assumption people make.

Desert equals hot. But the desert does not care about assumptions.

The same place that can bake you in the afternoon can make you reach for a jacket after sunset. The sky is so open that there is little to hold the day’s heat once the sun goes down.

You can sit beside a fire in a coat, watching your breath drift into the darkness, and think about how strange it is that the word “desert” makes people think only of heat.

I stood there that morning with my coffee, looking out across the Black Rock Desert, and realized that I was perfectly content. I had no shower, no itinerary, and no particular destination.

My tortillas had been too thick, my eggs had come from a carton, I had nearly slept through sunrise, and the wind was preparing to rearrange the landscape. Yet none of that mattered.

For a couple of days, I had managed to step outside the machinery of ordinary life. I had cooked dinner on the back of my truck, walked without needing to arrive anywhere, watched the sunset beside a fire, slept under an enormous sky, made coffee in the morning, and picked up the camera I had neglected for too long.

There are times when getting away means going somewhere spectacular and filling every hour with activities so you can later prove you had been there. This was different, as I wasn’t trying to accomplish anything. I was just there, and maybe that was the best part.

The desert does not ask anyone to be productive. It does not care whether you showered, or the tortillas were thin enough, whether your photographs were any good, or whether you had a carefully constructed plan for the day.

It offers a place to sit, a place to walk, a place to cook and, when the sun went down, a place to build a fire. That is enough.

I finished my coffee, looked once more across the open desert, and began packing up before the wind made my decision for me.

I would leave eventually, of course. Everybody does.

But for a little while longer, I was exactly where I wanted to be: somewhere with no shower, no schedule, no obligations, and enough desert between me and the rest of the world to make all of those things seem remarkably unimportant.