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Clack. Clack. Clack. Another tent stake mangled by the uncompromising dessert floor. “Shit!” I grumbled, “It’s too hard. Too dry. There’s no give.” The campground was as full as the moon and my frustration grew with each reserve calorie I burned smashing that dumb hammer into Death Valley’s Almighty Aridity. “Having trouble?” asked an old man, beer in hand, passing along the front of our site. He stood adjacent to the picnic table where Kylie was cooking our dinner -- chicken and rice -- on the camping stove. From my vantage, his lower body was blurred by the flames of the campfire positioned equidistantly between us. “Yes, actually,” I admitted. The old man staggered away and returned shortly with a footlong, heavy duty tent stake that easily pierced Hell’s Fortress. I thanked him. He lingered. It was apparent he was expecting something quid pro quo. “Hungry?” I asked. “No, no,” he said, fingering the flagon I’d left sitting on the edge of the picnic table. He was thirsty. There was something naggingly indigestible about the earlier conversation with the old man and I couldn’t sleep. I’m afraid your generation will pay for the sins of mine. The old man’s words echoed in my head like the caw of a crow in a canyon. “Where are you going?” Kylie asked. “I’m going to sit in the car and listen to the election. Go back to sleep.” I zipped up the tent, opened the car door, and reclined the driver’s seat as if I were in some deluxe theatre. Hours from cell service, I turned on the radio and felt a sort of vicarious nostalgia, with vague reveries of FDR’s Fireside Chats and Welles’ War of the Worlds. “Impossible, they said. Well who’s laughing now?” exulted a man on the radio. My senses piqued and I turned the dial. “I can’t believe what we’re seeing.” I returned my car seat to upright and frantically spun the dial. “Donald Trump is going to be the next President of the United States of America.” It was morning, and sand slid between my toes as Kylie and I climbed and descended dune after dune in still-stunned silence. The same dunes as the day before, but in a different world. The faces of strangers, which we’d eagerly engaged the day before, we now met with suspicion and distrust. Doubt sprouted like sequoias from all things that we had considered certain only yesterday. We strolled through salt-flats like a hopscotch board to an exhibit at the end of a wooden boardwalk. It read: Badwater Basin -- The Lowest Point in the U.S.A.