Jack's Place, Delta County, Colorado, 2013

Jack’s place is about twelve miles from where I live in Western Colorado. I was driving the back roads through the adobe badlands when I first saw the trailer – a glinting carapace hunkered down in a sea of desert.

I have spent most of my life in the American West. I’ve always been drawn to the open desert, where the vast emptiness makes me feel like anything is possible, where there is room for everything except the superfluous, and artifice cannot be cultivated.

Best to keep it minimal here. Noncommittal. Haul a trailer in, so you can be forever untethered – roll on out when you need to. But you never do because once you live out in the lonely wide open, everywhere else feels like jail. And hell, the tires rotted out long ago.

Here you are at the edge of nowhere, but it feels like the center of the Universe.