My Nevada is not Las Vegas. It is not the land of mega-hotels and dueling egos, silicone and stage shows. My Nevada is the land of ranches and mines, open range and barbed wire, the land of rabbitbrush and alkalai.

My Nevada is the place of solace my family fled to when my baby sister was allergic to Bay Area smog, when my father was looking for good pay and a lack of law enforcement, and when my mother was looking for the mountains she had sought out like most people seek out enlightenment. The vast warp and weft of non-Vegas Nevada is a tapestry of sky and mountains. It is a place where you can hear god if you listen and older deities if you listen closer. It defies its statistics. It belies first impressions. It is a place of profound reverence and venereal wonder not available to those who don’t bother to seek.

But it took me until adulthood to appreciate the hallowed desolation of a land whose beauty was defined by texture rather than color. A land more subtle and beautiful than those seeking groomed grass and over-developed stamens. It was a land I grew up in, but blind. A land that would never be sought out on Google, but rather discovered on the open road or the unmarked path.

It takes a discerning eye to see the beauty of this wasteland that stuns me at every turn of a washboard dirt road, that challenges me with the unexpected boulder and the seemingly random placement of a tree that proves the existence of god. This is a place of wonder not available to the casual eye. A place that converts the wanderer with the seduction of roots. A place where nothing comes easy, but what is found comes to define the profound.

Nevada is filled with transient beings made stable, where the ephemeral becomes enduring. This is the place where the misfits and lost find the voice of reason and maybe something more. Where everything makes sense beneath a big enough sky. This is the place where biology meets magic and the random meets the preordained. This is a place easy to travel past but hard to ignore. This is my Nevada.