Can a noise-addled big-city slicker get in touch with his inner bedouin? Adam Platt sets out for the empty expanses of America's Southwest

It was on the fourth or possibly the fifth day of my Southwest desert wanderings, sometime after attending Marta Beckett's surreal opera performance on the fringe of Death Valley but before experiencing a pleasurable, though surpassingly weird, crystal sound bath at the UFO-inspired Integratron near Joshua Tree National Park, that Mike Dougherty's voice came to me, out of the sky, as it were, like voices in the desert sometimes do.

"Turn off your car's engine," commanded the voice, which emanated faintly from my cellular telephone. Up until then my cell phone, that obsessive crutch of postmillennial man, had been mostly useless in the great American desert, and as I drove from the Nevada border into Joshua Tree National Park, two hundred miles away, its chirping sound gave me a little start. Dougherty had once worked in the old borax mines in Death Valley, and he now ran a business setting up camera shoots in distant desert locations for MTV rappers and assorted unacclimatized L.A. movie people. He had offered to guide me around the Mojave National Preserve for the day, poking in abandoned gold mines, observing forests of Joshua trees, and scaling the famous rogue sand dunes, which are seven hundred feet tall in places and crested at their tops, like waves on the sea.

Dougherty's wife had taken ill, though, and he'd had to take her to the doctor some one hundred miles away. In his absence, I'd become a little disoriented. I'd gotten lost driving down dirt roads looking for some scientists I'd met at my hotel who were tracking the rutting habits of the Mojave desert tortoise, and I'd spent the day tacking aimlessly around the 1.6-million-acre preserve, past places with elemental pioneer names like Devil's Playground and Bathtub Springs. I'd bought a gallon of water and an ice-cream cone from a lady named Irene Asmus at a desolate place called Cima. Like many of the people I'd meet who live out in the desert, she had a brusque, irrepressible manner, and also like many of them, she lived alone. When I said that I thought the desert had become popular and even trendy in recent years, she gave a little frown. "There's not a lot more people in the desert these days," she said. "There's just a lot more people passing through."

Mike Dougherty probably would have agreed with this assessment, although during our brief cell phone chat, he didn't have much time to elaborate. To plumb the true spirit of the desert, he suggested I drive to a dry lake bed, put my car in neutral, open the doors, "and just let the wind blow you along." If this maneuver sounded too complicated, I could stop my car by the side of the road, turn off the engine, and get out.

"Then what?" I asked.

"Then listen for the silence," said Dougherty.

"What silence?" I asked.

"It's that hissing sound in your ears," he said. "It's the sound a high-definition stereo makes when an empty tape is running through it. You don't hear that sound in the city. In the city, where you come from, people live their lives at ten thousand decibels."