We’re the bad people who are ruining the earth.”

I smile. He smiles. He looks like Sam Peckinpah, road-worn and grizzled. His friend is younger, a Brad Pitt look-alike stalled out somewhere east of Hollywood. The Southern California desert always reminds me of Charlie Manson, and I am alone with two unshaven stragglers from the annual orgy of off-road vehicle recreation in the Algodones Dunes, one hundred miles southeast of Palm Springs. Dunes, these dunes, any dunes, have a look of eternity about them. They mark time, moving in the wind, yet their spareness evokes timelessness. Dust to dust, one recalls, seeing the way sand dunes reach for—yet never quite—touch the horizon.

In our time the Algodones Dunes have been notable for this simultaneous evocation of the eternal and the immediate. Perhaps it’s the proximity to Los Angeles that makes the elevated and the profane rub up against each other in such a casual, postmodern way: the campy sci-fi movieStarGate was filmed here, using the dunes as a backdrop for Egypt in 8,000 BC, when a malevolent alien took over the body of a young boy who might easily have been mistaken for Isaac Mizrahi’s assistant during Fashion Week. (“Give my regards to King Tut, asshole!” was one of the film’s more memorable lines.)

Well, this is America. Eternity is a mass-market enterprise. Off-road vehicle enthusiasts flock to the dunes on winter weekends and holidays. One Thanksgiving weekend saw a veritable pupu platter of violent crime among off-roaders: one murder, two stabbings, two fatal accidents, and in the words of a New York Times reporter “innumerable brawls.”

I have driven out here on the advice of an environmental lawyer who told me that this lookout point is a good place to see the damage done by off-road vehicles: this is the line between the protected wilderness and the degraded landscape, pristine and debauched nature. But I’m not concentrating on the view. I’m wondering if I’m going to be raped and killed.

“What do you guys do for a living?” I ask heartily.

“We’re safecrackers,” says Sam Peckinpah.

To read the rest of this article, please visit our online store to purchase a copy of the issue or order a subscription.