It's midnight in the Mojave, the land on both sides of the highway all mooned up and flat. I'm doing 90 past B Western turn-offs like Roy Rogers Way and Rawhide Road, closing in on Pioneertown, and I'm getting that spirituous feeling that hits my lower chest every time the humidity dips to zero, the horizon depopulates and widens, and I start to catch the dusty-rain scent of chaparral—all pure conjurers of my Arizona childhood.

The American desert has always been for me both mother tongue and foreign language; it's an impenetrable other, but also an inextricable part of my makeup. Being out in it disquiets me, but also focuses me, and brings me back to my senses. I need time with the desert like some people need time with a shrink. I want to stop right now, jump out of my car and run into the acid moonlight, but I've got a date with Gene Autry's ghost at the Pioneertown Motel. I keep driving.

I live in San Francisco now, so I'm always looking for an excuse to go into the desert, to work on my own personal research project: figuring out how and why people project their fantasies and fears onto this inhospitable landscape. That's why Pioneertown, a faux Wild West town dreamed up and constructed in the 1940s by some entrepreneurial cowboy actors and extras from Hollywood, became a blinking red dot on my road map the minute I heard about it from a bemused friend. Pioneertown was meant to be more than a set for B Western TV shows; its utopian founders, who probably believed that these movies would be made forever, imagined a place where bit players, seamstresses, set dressers, wranglers, electricians, and carpenters could live year-round.

And from 1946 through the mid-'50s, this scheme actually worked. Depending on the show being filmed there, Pioneertown became Rattlesnake, Loredo, San Lorenzo, Silver City, Satan's Cradle, Nugget. It even turned into a magnet for folks who weren't necessarily associated with the business, but who wanted to live inside a B Western: During the boom years, for example, two Chinese guys who loved cowboy pictures—a Mr. Jew and a Mr. Gee—moved to Pioneertown from the East Coast to run the Golden Stallion Restaurant and Saloon. It was written into their lease that they had to make themselves scarce when an interior needed to be shot but they didn't mind, since they were also making good money feeding the cast and crew during the long seasons of filming. From its inception, then, Pioneertown was both a real, working town and a desert mirage.

When I finally made it to Pioneertown (population 500, according to the sign at the entrance to town), I had a hard time finding the motel. There are, of course, no street lights there. Nor is there a gas station, a Denny's, or an all-night convenience store where one could ask directions. After driving up and down the only paved road for a while, I turned onto dirt and found myself on Mane (sic) Street, where Gene Autry filmed parts of The Gene Autry Show from 1950-55 and where Annie Oakley raced Target, and Roy Rogers gave Trigger free rein. Mane, on which The Cisco Kid fell in love with the beautiful saloon gal Lil. Mane, where the heroes and villains of Judge Roy Bean, The Cowboy G-Men, and The 26 Men of the Arizona Rangers kicked up dust. The moon and my headlights illuminated the faux frontier buildings, which are low to the ground, wooden, and—apparently—inhabited. There were lights on in some of them.

I located the Pioneertown Motel, finally, at the end of Mane; it was across from Pappy's Bar, and dark as hell. I was a little scared, because it looked like I was the only guest, and it happened to be the opening night of Gus Van Sant's questionable remake of Psycho—the radio had been yammering about lonely motels and psychotics for 10 hours on the drive down from San Francisco. I wished I'd had a gun. Did I tell enough people where I was going, and show them exactly where Pioneertown was on the map? There was a note and a key tacked to the manager's door: Earnie had gone to bed but "Club 9" was made up and waiting. (I'd requested room 9 after reading, in the Pioneertown brochure my friend had given me, that after a hard day of shooting Gene Autry had used it for poker parties.) Using the hitching post that runs the length of the motel to keep my balance, I raced to my room down the noisy wood-plank sidewalk.

Once inside Club 9, I was immediately disturbed by the decor. Instead of the cowboy memorabilia I'd imagined, I got posters of flowers, paintings of flowers, and ceramic plates painted with floral arrangements. The flower theme was continued on the bedspread. The effect was one of being caught in an elevator with an old lady who's wearing too much Avon powder. Would Gene have a doily on his bedside table? I threw the doily on the floor in disgust; later, I had nightmares about a knife-wielding florist who sings to his horse.

By the light of day, I was further sobered and distressed by the appearance of post-boom Pioneertown. For starters, it's almost entirely deserted; it's like a ghost town with active P.O. boxes. I was also unprepared for the displeasing effect of the town's deliberate blurring of fact and fiction, its conflation of present and past. There are Wild West façades with goliath satellite dishes out back; rusting cars parked on Mane; and the "OK Corral" is so run-down it wouldn't even hold a lame horse. Finally, other people: one lone carload of disappointed and overheated German tourists.

I'd expected, in an artificial town inhabited by real people, a certain lack of distinction between real and unreal; but the banality of it all made me, if anything, nostalgic for the purely imaginary world of the B Western. So I raided Earnie's video library of TV serials made in Pioneertown during its heyday, and retreated to my room. Over and over again, in 30-minute cycles, good guys in white hats prevailed over bad guys in black hats, law triumphed over lawlessness, freedom resisted the forces of repression (except in the case of Indians, of course), and industriousness turned out to be more powerful than avarice. Safe inside Club 9, I knew a world where no one good ever grows old or dies, and where seldom is seen a retired extra collecting his social security check from the P.O.

Post-World War II America yearned for a world like Pioneertown, where everything is orderly and pristine, in a dusty sort of way, and where, when things do get messy, a hero like Gene Autry—whose ongoing appeal, needless to say, lies precisely in his unworldliness (he sings to his horse for God's sake, and orders milk at the bar)—can always be counted on to clean it up again. I sympathize with that yearning, but isn't there something wrong with Pioneertown, with reducing the complexity of frontier history to such an extent?

"Every simplification of the world becomes a vital lie," writes German philosopher Odo Marquard. I think he's right, but how can one knowingly live inside a lie and not go crazy? Pioneertown, built as something-true-within-an-illusion, has become a corpse with a pulse, a talking cowboy puppet. Even as kitsch, it is neither quaint nor forgettable. That's why, after just one day of watching this real fake town come to fake real life on TV, I succumbed to a nauseating, disorienting seizure. I was paralyzed on my floral bedspread: I could neither scream a nihilistic scream nor manage an ironic wink. Only my eyes moved, darting frantically from the Pioneertown on the TV screen to the Pioneertown just outside my motel room window. I couldn't feel my body—everything was weightless, timeless, directionless, senseless, worthless.

The next morning I burst into Earnie's room—he was piling hundreds of stuffed animals onto his double bed, something he seems to have to do every day—and told him I wasn't going to be staying, after all. I gave him back his videos, he tore up my credit card slip, and I drove off, back into the desert. A few miles out of town I stopped, put on my backpack, and started walking: no trail, no map. But I knew where I was going.

In Paroxysm, a new collection of interviews with Jean Baudrillard, he spouts off about the American desert. "The desert is a trap, the trap of space, the trap of appearances," he says. "All the values and categories of the mind get caught in this trap and cancel themselves automatically." I picture M. Baudrillard safely inside his air-conditioned rental car, scared of snakes, pressing his nose against the tightly shut window, seeing nothing. To him, the desert is just a blank screen upon which to project his cosmopolitan thoughts. It seems that Baudrillard likes this parched, unsentimental land precisely because it allows him to suspend all sense (both common and unique) in time and space—to be disconnected; alienated from himself and the dust and heat on his skin; to be without sense, senseless.

To be fair, I suppose Baudrillard is right as far as it goes: In the desert, socially inflicted values are trapped, sapped of meaning, annulled. But what exists beyond this cancellation, this vacancy that is not a sign? Et alors? This is the point at which Baudrillard bids us adieu. Not that his escapism is uninteresting, mind you: I understand and on occasion even share his impulse to march us all right up to the edge of the abyss and shout: LOOK! This flirtation with oblivion is in many ways preferable to the sort of see-no-evil obliviousness championed in the post-World War II era by so many Americans. (Europe gets Foucault and Baudrillard; we get Autry, Disney, Pioneertown.) But, in the end, I sense that both paths lead to sleep, forgetting, simplifications turned to vital lies. And so I turn instead toward what makes sense for me: the inhuman, yet humanizing desert.

The truth is that the desert is a place—ask any desert-dwelling monk or hermit who's ever lived—where one becomes aware of a reality that transcends, or lies hidden beneath, signs and symbols, "the values and categories of the mind." Reality here is not an illusion, though it may be unstable, unprovable. When I venture into the desert on the desert's own terms—that is to say, when I step into a landscape I know to be radically indifferent to my presence—my very ego dries, desiccates, dissipates, and is lost. In this cancellation, though, there is a kind of liberation, an awakening, of sense: that singular, revivifying aspect of human experience that situates each soul in the universe, on Earth, on a particular patch of soil in a particular moment. In the desert I travel the path from absence to presence and, in the process, discover what I can only call my undeconstructable self—a self not necessarily experienced as a discrete thing but something essential: the beginning perhaps, the wellspring, from which values and meaning flow.

More, in the desert I not only sense my presence, my own singularity, but my presence-within-a-greater-presence: an immanence. The desert is a place of convergences, where the particular and the ineffable—presence and immanence—come into alignment, intertwine, and, in the end, confirm in discrete relationship the existence of the other. I am the land's opposite and I do not exist without the land. From a terrifying solitude endured comes: connection. Out of the blazing quiet arises: forms, a body, words.

Out in the desert, safely away from Pioneertown—with its conflations, where opposites melt, congeal, and end up annihilating each other—I fell into these presences and my experience was one of deep connection and meaning. In defiance of the wasteland of contemporary culture, where true and untrue, past and present, real and unreal, beauty and trash are conflated and crushed to death, I rejected both the childish utopia of Pioneertown and Baudrillard's senseless dystopia. Terrified by the desert's exquisite emptiness, nevertheless I opened myself up to it and came, radically, to my senses.