"Start up the quirky dream machine in your head,” is how the horoscope read. I scanned it one cold March morning at a Denny’s in Gallup, N.M., the one off Interstate 40, where the highway elbows above Route 66. As I looked out toward a red anvil mesa, patched white with snow from an overnight storm, it struck me that the quirky dream machine had not kicked over for some time.

Wasn’t that why I’d come here? For as long as I can remember I’ve headed to the desert southwest whenever my head felt unlevel. And after a winter of sudden and permanent departures and grief that hung around like a stubborn fog, I’d booked a flight to Albuquerque and a big S.U.V. that sat high and rode so silently you barely knew you were doing 90 until you checked the speedometer.

For much of my adult life I’ve made pilgrimages to Navajo land, an area encompassing more than 25,000 square miles, a landscape formed as if from a John McPhee reader: slot canyons, cap-rock plateaus, sandstone escarpments, cartoonish buttes and peach colored sand deposited in the Paleozoic era in a vast desert of Pangaea, the supercontinent."

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Guy Trebay: Dream Weaver (The New York Times Magazine 5/14)