We’ve just eaten some mushrooms. It’s bearable out here, to do this, west of the Ubehebe Crater at the far north end of Death Valley. There’s no one around, we haven’t seen another human since last night’s fill-up somewhere in Nevada. The air is still, completely desiccated, with a uniform steel-gray cloud-cover, not too cold. Anthony’s old Ford Torino — the Toe-ree-no we call it — rattled, rattles, will rattle for the whole mid-winter trip from Colorado. It is still rattling as we start up the bad dirt track, southwest towards Teakettle Junction, Anthony is driving. His window is part-way down. I hear some other sound coming from the back of the car, damn, breakdown. I turn to look back as something starts to screech. It grows to an full-on eye-watering scream, and looking across out Anthony’s window, I watch as an F-16 roars past, by us, straight out the window, not 15 feet off the ground. We are both yelling, at each other, at the terrible roar, at the plane which disappears instantly, at the terrible incongruity. Stop the fucking car! No immediate place to pull off, the track is cut into the land, below grade, so to pull off is to high-center the car, guaranteed: no tow-trucks out here. We are crawling along, finally come to a pull-out where we stop and exit the vehicle as fast as possible, clamber down into the dry wash nearby, where we sit on some wide and water-smoothed limestone to settle our hyper-stimulated selves down. It is not for a time until we discover the entire surface of the rock we are lounging on is covered with petroglyph star charts, oh my god, we are here! then the sun sets and it gets single-digit cold immediately in the single-digit humidity. We retreat back to the car and drive on in the transparent dark to the Racetrack Playa to cry with the intense night-cold, night-wind, watch the unbearably clear skies, before crashing on the hard-frozen ground.