I'm sitting in a long black tour bus gliding over California Route 10 to Joshua Tree National Park, the biggest wilderness in the lower 48. The mountains that ring this valley are hidden today behind a gray curtain. Is it smog from LA? Smoke from the forest fires?

The bus exits 10 and heads up a winding road. The terrain looks flat but my ears are popping. We stop at the Ranger Station entrance to the Park. I study line drawings of coyotes, packrats, and jackrabbits, scorpions, tarantulas and six species of rattlesnakes. I buy a guidebook and a green petroglyph tee shirt.

We set off again. The bus weaves back and forth on switchbacks. We're traveling up an old stagecoach path. I feel carsick. I concentrate on the view out the window. Ocotillos, which look like fan-shaped bunches of sticks, palm tree-like Yuccas, low creosote bushes. They all look dead to me, but they're not. Even in this drought year, everything we see is alive.

I'm feeling sicker. I'm relieved when we get out for our second stop, a fifteen-minute pause in the Sonoran Desert. I follow a man with a camera off the bus. We hike up a stone-lined path, around weird-looking rock formations. Rocks are heaped on top of each other like mounds of clay. The man with the camera stops to take pictures and I pass him.

I'm facing the desert alone. It stretches out around me, vast, simple, unearthly quiet. I'm not used to silence like this. I've been in beautiful natural settings but they usually involve forest and water. There are no wave sounds or wind in the trees here. The place has a sharp purity about it, a cleanliness. I stand and take it all in.

We get back on the bus and climb our way through the switchbacks to the Mojave Desert. We pass old mining shafts, farms and outlaw hideouts. The driver tells us stories about the people who lived here as we cruise through Lost Horse Canyon. We're close to the 5000 year-old petroglyphs of Indian Cove but we don't stop.

The driver tells us a story about Gram Parsons, the singer songwriter - and another outlaw who took refuge in the desert - who died in 1973.

Gram died in the Joshua Tree Inn. He was heir to a fortune. When he died, his stepfather wanted his body sent to Louisiana so he could establish Gram as an LA resident and thus lay claim to his money. But Gram loved the desert and told his manager that when he died, he wanted to be burned up out here.

His manager hijacked his casket from LAX and took out to Joshua Tree and set it on fire. So the legend goes.

As I listen to the story, my head fills with songs I used to love, songs sung by Gram and Emmylou Harris, Gram and the Byrds, Gram and the Flying Burrito Brothers.

We pull over on a red dirt parking lot for our third and longest stop. We're in the Mojave Desert now, home to the strange, elegant Joshua Trees that grow nowhere else in the world. The driver tells us the trees were so named by the Mormons, when they crossed this desert in the 1800s. They thought the tree, which resembles an upright fork poked in the ground, looked like the biblical prophet Joshua, raising his arms to heaven. It does.

We are handed refreshments, a bottle of water and a granola bar. I ask the driver if I can walk back to the place where the fire was and he nods and points around a big rockpile.

I set off, leaving the sight and the sound of the other people behind. My carsickness is gone. I walk cautiously, looking down. I'm thinking about scorpions and tarantulas and rattlesnakes.

There is no shade. The heat is a clear distilled heat, as if you took all other substances - smog, wind, water, smoke from the fires burning miles away - out of the air and just left the heat. The heat has consumed even smell. I take a deep breath and the air sears my lungs.

There is a kind of clarity here. As if the sun is burning through all my unimportant thoughts. I feel like I could think better here, if only I could stop my heart from pounding. I clutch my water bottle and granola bar and blink away visions of dying out here, fried to a crisp by the sun. The silence fills my ears.

I come to another rock formation and, suddenly, there it is. The shrine to Gram Parsons.

Lyrics to his songs are painted on the rocks, along with messages, names, and crosses. An altar lies on the sand in front, ringed with rocks and filled with offerings. I sit on a small flat rock. The silence seems louder here.

I see another creature in the shadows of the rock, a few feet in front of me. Motionless, except for quivering ears, a jackrabbit stares back at me.

We stare at each other for a long time. It feels long to me anyway. Much longer than any wild animal has ever spent in my company. I wonder if he's a heat-induced hallucination, or a statue. Maybe I imagined the quivering ears. I get up and take a few steps towards him.

He hops around me. I'm thinking he's run off now, behaving like a wild animal should.

I walk closer and inspect the writing and take a few pictures. I run my hand over the words of the songs.

I take a few steps back to my flat rock, sit down, and glance to my left. The jackrabbit is sitting a few feet away. He's been watching me the whole time.

Now that I'm back on my rock, he hops back to his spot. He's right in front of me again. He fixes his eye on me just like before. We sit there together in the silence until it's time to get back to the tour bus.

I snatch a pebble from the ground and get up to place it on the altar, my offering to Gram. The jackrabbit hops to the side again.

I turn around to go. I don't look back. I know he's there, watching me leave.