Early the next morning I'm crusing through Paiute country, past the serrated back of a mountain, a prehistoric reptile half-buried in a landslide? Just ahead, The Judds' bus has been pulled over by a cop. (Were they singing off key?)

At Beatty, I turn in the opposite direction to Death Valley, crossed decades ago. At Hawthorne, there's a Naval Underwater Warfare Detachment that, in the middle of a desert, must be a stealth operation. Even here, you know it's America, rising over 5,000 ft., then dropping into valleys, there is a delay in the left hemisphere's development near the Sylvian fissure, the area of the brain that is most involved with language. The neurons' complexity of interconnections with other neurons also develops later in the left hemisphere than in the right. But what is interesting is that these growth asymmetries may provide the basis for a sintering zeroscape that leads past a large lake and finally into Sparks, where last week it was snowing, but today it's 90 degrees.