The ecosystem does its thing. Oh, some buildings burn, a handful, on the dry flora fringes of this concrete scab we call civilization. The nation freaks out, as if this is New Orleans. Do we gym-toned, suntanned "victims" look like we're bloated, floating on our backs in a flood of sewage? You can go back to your regularly scheduled programming. Leave us alone. We'll handle it. We have day laborers out here to push windblown eucalyptus leaves from the sidewalks and gutters and more quasi-documented slaves to detail the ashes off our cars. We're good. Half a million people evacuated doesn't mean they'll scatter far. It just means some temporary camp-outs in the living rooms of friends or family a couple miles down the road. Well-stocked schools and stadiums cover the rest, and no burning embers rain down upon them, just good will, particulate matter and smoke-filtered sunshine. In case you hadn't noticed, and you wouldn't, the real disasters are elsewhere: Darfur and Iraq, the Congo and the Yangzte, not to mention Washington. Yep. No real crisis would get so much attention.

The sky is orange, an apt color for this County of Orange, a place which long ago gave up the historical meaning of its name to suburban development and freeways, tollways, oh, and parkways, on which, coincidentally, you can drive 55. Not so on the 405, ever, and particularly when fire plays tag in the hills, and all the side roads north have closed down to keep lookey-loos (and naughty boys with matches) away from the windswept, combustible pre-developed landscape, staked out; its future high-end, luxury estates still in the planning stages. Not to worry, say the disembodied TV commentators, voices backed by the thrum of helicopters, their faces replaced by God's-eye images of His apocalypse: the fire in Irvine (an enormous swath of land, master-planned) lingers in an area only slated for growth; the flames skim over the top of concrete foundations, but nothing is built there--yet. For now, the natural disaster upstages the human disaster that has ravaged this poor land. None of us will ever live to see the recovery of that. For this landscape and its native ecosystem, this section of California, there is no recovery to come. We have zero containment on sprawl.

I park, after some hesitation, twenty miles west of that artificial megalopolis, a street hyper-urbanized for its appeal to sin-seeking tourists (and not, as defenders claim, to clean, green living).

It takes me nearly an hour of suburban navigation, red-light, green-light, to get this far, and now a family of Spanish-speaking neocolonialists falls out of a Chevy beside me, with--of all clichés--an unleashed chihuahua and five children similarly free. The parents unload peekneek baskets, and a grandfather, viejo hombre renuente, takes his place in the back of the line, his thick fingers engaged in a tug-o-war with something lodged behind his molars.

So I don't know... I don't know if I want to hang around here, at the end of a week of work away from home. I suffer a particular consternation when faced with large families and the crescendo of their jubilance, their indifference to the public space they occupy. But what choice do I have? This is the option afforded stubborn 21st-century American single men with day jobs. We can't get very far before we have to return, and we are too tired, too cynical, to take this kind of amateur exploration seriously anymore. Small wonder.

The mountains rise high toward the same blue sky that ceilings the Venetian and the new-and-absurd Caesars Palace, Mandalay Bay and Bellagio. These mountains, not supervised by engineers or even built by cheap labor--merely deposited, composited and then revealed, over time, by all the processes that continue on despite everything--will last longer, almost certainly, than that trash heap of metal and sewage down the hill.

I succeed in hightailing it away from our neighbors among us, and I follow a steep embankment equidistant from two rock climbers. They stop to unpack their clanking equipment, and I descend what appears to be the "designated trail" indicated by a small sign placed obscurely on a post beside a stunted Joshua tree. Boot prints seem concurrent, and the scarce vegetation not trampled elsewhere assures me, somewhat, that I won't defy the limited direction implied by fine print: "Area of Ecological Concern."

The east wing of Red Rock Canyon "National Conservation Area" has a name, too, "Calico Hills," and numerous other assignations historically significant to no one in particular--the Paiute and Patayan, the inestimable numbers of wanderers before that--people long dead. Lucky for them, they had the place to themselves and could whoop it up, they could chase around on the rocks and score pictures of fauna and flora into the desert varnish without the consequences of a misdemeanor charge or my irrelevant frown. But the prehistoric marks of man yield less fascination than the geological casualties I find: fallen pieces of uplift collected at the bottom of the cliff like soldiers thrown off a battlement, their contusions caused by eroded iron ore collected within the sandstone.

For at least a mile I wade through this carnage until the "trail" joins up with a dry wash, again designated only by the evidence of other hikers; the brand insignia of their heels in the sand, discarded wrappers, water-bottle caps. Then a stout, sturdy American Pit Bull Terrier, glistening brown, rises up and freezes on the jut of a white boulder ten yards ahead of me. That puts me at a standstill, too, until its owner calls out the beast's name and appears--a young man in camouflage shorts and a tan shirt, dog tags, with a lithe girl who says something; I can't remember the words. They grab hold of their pet's collar and hold it tight to their bare knees, but the animal still growls and barks something unintelligible that echoes like mortar fire; it flings pebbles from the pads of its strong feet and lurches, strains, a muscular mass of fury, made-to-order to mangle passersby.

I ask, "The trail continues on this way?" Internal alarms swirl and sound; external mechanisms remain somehow unresponsive. "Yeah, but you need to know the mountains." I take unexpressed offense at the boy's response, for this isn't his wilderness. To whom does it belong but everyone? Families out for lunch, enthusiasts who cling to the smooth cliff and gingerly hand each other ropes and metal pitons as they raise themselves higher toward the sun, soldiers on leave with their girlfriends, interrupted.

This place doesn't belong to me, anyway, not in the least. I continue on, and the trail, I think, disappears into a disarray of stones, none of which match, like a drawer full of buttons. I scrabble at my own pace and make it into a ravine of sorts, where I'm sure once or twice a year a good flash flood wells up and pours through like a jungle river. I see evidence of horrific torrents in the twisted cactus roots exposed, the way everything seems upside down and forced against will into an aggregate dump.

For now, all remains still, holds tight and crisp in the autumn heat and waits to see what I will do. The whole Earth waits.

The high-rise shadow of megastructures protects me from the sun in the morning. I think of this as the only advantage to their incredible height and breadth and excess. Every year, four late Septembers in a row, I walk to work on this gaudy, tawdry strip. I dodge tourists with cameras pointed upwards. I wait for the dust behind a bulldozer to settle so I can cross with a crowd at the light. Each time I return, a new stack of several thousand more flights hangs within steel frames, erected by the same handful of developers, paid for by the wide game room at their base and the nickels of seniors, the desperate last bids of the poor, the blank checks of foreign high rollers, the fleeced wallets of the willing, dwindling middle class. And meanwhile, the imploded former icons of garish entertainment augur future projects that make Liberace's coat look like a mud flap.

Yet the people around me disagree in their numbers and in their smiles. They find this place wondrous and exciting, delighted by the giddy thrill of kids at a carnival for adults.

As usual the appeal escapes me. I don't know from popular. I imagine the spectacle of a desert basin left alone, of the green remnant that was "the marshes," "the fertile valley": las vegas, an oasis centered in a wide stretch of baked sand. I live in the wrong time, as the saying goes, but at any other time I would probably be dead. The thing is I live now, not in self-imposed exile but incredulous and pretty much on my own. The billions spent here to erect ever more elaborate houses of cards, expressions of ego and one-upsmanship, could eradicate urban blight, could clothe and house and educate millions, could rebuild Detroit and New Orleans and criss-cross the country with passenger trains, could discover cures or new sources of power, could re-ice the Arctic or figure out a way to replay time so we could witness Rome's ignominy and see in slow-motion the same process of its extremes in full flower here.

As I wander a little on Thursday night on the dark street under the monorail, a skinny fortyish woman in blue jeans and a long-sleeved striped shirt, either a size too large or no longer fitting, stands on the median of Paradise and Sahara. She sees me, her shock of grimy hair caught in the glare of headlights from an SUV, her body backlit by the sheen of the Hilton a couple blocks away. As I pass she raises her cupped hand to her mouth and forms a circle with her fingers, then jerks them quickly back and forth.

"No thanks," would be the answer to the question if she had asked it. I feel the same way about the whole sad, sick, pathological town that stretches out away from us, that hemorrhages, blinking, glittering toward the horizon, far and wide from this wayward and desperate moment.