As I headed north to Monument Valley on the Arizona-Utah border, pickup trucks raced by me with cargo beds full of children. They were wrapped in red blankets and waved ecstatically as they passed, hair flapping in the wind, skin the color of wheat. I drove past road signs for places called Many Farms, Sweetwater, and Two Grey Hills; past young girls setting up roadside jewelry stands and men on horseback guiding herds of sheep; past purple valleys, smoldering red mesas, and an eighty-mile stretch of desert, notable only for occupying what Edward Abbey, the agrarian anarchist, called “a beautiful blank spot on my map.”

Another trailer experience was out of the question. I had enough poverty pictures, so I decided to choose a family rather than have one chosen for me, to drive around until coming upon a photogenic homestead, then ask to stay. That homestead appeared a dozen miles southwest of Monument Valley, after a series of random turns along unmarked dirty roads; a lovely mud hogan that sat between a large, circular sheep pen and what looked like a chicken coop. There was a trailer on the lot, but it was small and well kept. I knocked on the hogan’s wooden door. No answer.

When I turned to leave, a blue pickup truck pulled behind my Jeep. Two men stared from the cab. I waved. When they emerged, they headed towards the sheep pen, prepared to ignore me. The older of the two was tall and bulky, with black hair that hung straight and silky from a center part. “Excuse me. Sorry to intrude.” They slowed enough for me to catch up, for me to blurt out my request. They started through black sunglasses. I was the person nobody wanted on their property. The desperate-looking man asking if there are any gutters he can clean. The smiling, snow-white pair clutching the Book of Mormon. Worse, I had come to live with them.

There was whispering in Dine, their native language. More staring. “You can stay on the couch in the trailer,” the tall one said, “if that’s okay with my other son. He’ll be back later.” They walked off. I sat in my car, waiting. The sandstone turned orange, rouge, dark. There were crickets and so many stars. I read by flashlight, made a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich on the hood of my car, listened to the radio. A pair of headlights jiggled up the road, paused at the sight of a strange car, a strange person. A man hopped out of the passenger seat, and when he entered the hogan there was a brief leak of warm light, soft and flickering, like that of a campfire. The car drove off. I was reclined in the passenger seat when the tall man with the long black hair knocked on the door and told me I could stay.

His name was Clayton Wallace, he was in his early fifties, and he worked as a councilman for the Oljeto, Utah, Chapter House. He also herded sheep, a task that didn’t prove photographically rewarding, as the sheep spread themselves too thin for the camera. Clayton’s wife, Vanessa, did a fair share of shepherding as well. She was weathered and diminutive, the red velveteen blouse she wore most days draping off her shoulders, as if from a hanger. She didn’t speak English, though she smiled and nodded a lot. And she was kind enough to let me picture her brushing Clayton’s hair, which she did twice a week, outside, on those mornings he washed it. They were uninhibited before the camera; no deer-in-the-headlights stares or embarrassed guffaws.

For the first few days my inability to take full advantage of their unaffected behavior, of this pristine environment, to record something more than a mundane act in a beautiful setting, resurrected familiar pangs of self-loathing. We are neurotic children, photographers, our emotions never straying far from the illusions of total defeat. Of a career lost, a life in ruins. Particularly during those projects we have yet to get our arms around. Perhaps it is a perverse stimulus, this cloud of dissatisfaction that hovers above our heads; an incentive to keep looking, trying, creating. There are better pictures out there, always. We know this because we see them in our minds, an omnipresent, cerebral slide show of impossible images and unachieved scenarios. Though six weeks into this project I no longer felt inspired. I felt drained. Impotent. Unable to produce.

The clouds lifted by chance on a Sunday morning, just moments before I was to drive to Monument Valley. Through my windshield I noticed Clayton’s sons carrying arm-fulls of wood behind their hogan. They were heating a pile of smooth river rocks, draping a thick blanket over the entrance to a sweat lodge. Some of Clayton’s fellow council members were there, chatting, poking at the fire, undressing. They do a sweat here every week, one told me, and I rushed back to the Jeep for my gear. It was not purposeful, Clayton’s neglecting to tell me of this practice, despite my many requests to photograph something, anything, halfway visual. Like my other host families, the Wallaces didn’t seem to recognize those parts of their lives that an outside observer might find interesting.

“Don’t take a picture of my asshole,” Clayton joked as he stripped, which I guessed meant that the rest would be okay. He cinched his hair into a ponytail, tied his foreskin closed around the head of his penis with a strand of yarn, then crawled on hands and knees into the sweat lodge. The others joined him for the first of three rounds. From their earthen sanctum there came songs, deep and guttural, like those of Tibetan monks, and after fifteen minutes the men reemerged damp and dazed. They rolled themselves in the sand, which stuck to their bodies like flour, then laid face-up in the noon sun. One of the men asked me to join them, and though I was eager to photograph, saying no seemed an unwise option. I stripped naked and tried with much resolve, and little success, to tie the ceremonial yarn around my foreskin. This ritual was written for the uncircumcised and that little boyhood snip had left me short-skinned.

“Muslim?” one of the Indians asked.

“Me? No. Why?”

“Cause you look it. And you’re circumcised.”

“They do this to everybody.” I made a snipping motion with my fingers.

“What for?”

“Well … they used to think it prevented disease. And stopped kids from beating off.”

“Does it work?”

“Nope.” There was laughter, the first I’d heard in two months. I pushed hard in with my thumbs, got the lasso of my yarn in position and yanked it shut.

The inside of the sweat lodge was tight, black, suffocating. The air seared my nostrils and dried my lungs. There was no light. Wet skin pressed against mine, twitching with the inflections of songs and emitting a sour odor. Sweat dribbled into my eyes. Voices raised and lowered. Bodies shifted positions, struggled to find space, as if the slick, naked lot of us were balled in a womb. I covered my face. Eventually the carpet lifted and there was brightness, a nuclear blast of white light, and we emerged in a world with air so cool, abundant, perfumed with cedar and piñon. We rolled like kids in the dirt, and the desert clung like a garment.

While the others continued their ritual, I thought it time to begin mine, and though my history in photojournalism was be then still short, I was quite sure I had never, nor would ever, look so certifiable while holding a camera. Sugarcoated in orange sand, wearing only knee-high cowboy boots, I felt like a deranged stripper—one with a string of yarn holding back the goods.

But the pictures! There the men were, sprawled on the ground before me, a quarry immodest enough to excuse my own appearance. As landscapes go, it had great personal value, this desert of naked Indians, waking me from my malaise like a defibrillator to the chest. This is what photographers desire. Always this moment, when time and money and labor are suddenly rewarded. When that dark and demoralizing gap between bumbling intruder and privileged witness is finally bridged. When the images lie before you, right there, and for five, maybe ten seconds, while hurriedly setting the correct exposure, while assessing the angel and lifting the camera and preparing to fire that first burst of frames, you hear a song of success in your mind: Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes. There is no more indelible experience for the photojournalist, this brief and elusive rapture, this conquest before the long-sought lay, this open-field dash just as the end zone emerges, all pretty and green—yours for the taking.

The project fell into place from there, as these things have a way of doing. Long-sought situations arose as if on cue—a wedding, a song and dance (or Navajo pow-wow), a Christian revival, a tribal police ride-along, even a group of men building a hogan in Monument Valley. Then one morning I awoke with the most liberating realization: I had enough goddamn pictures. Within moments I was on the road, then calling Deirdre from a payphone outside a Burger King, telling her I was finished, was coming to see her, would make it there by Easter Sunday.

I rambled east the rest of the day, following four-wheel drive trails over the Chuska Mountains, then descending into the San Juan Basin. This was the far northeast corner of the Rez, the land so flat I could see Shiprock, the eroded remains of a giant volcano, some twenty miles out. The Navajo believe Shiprock is the petrified remains of a flying monster, rising phoenix-like from the New Mexican desert. They call it Tse Bit Ai, “rock with rings.” I drove to its foundation, stared straight up and watched clouds sail in fast motion past its pinnacle. It looked gothic and hideous, as if warning the curious not to continue. That gave me satisfaction, that I was returning from the opposite direction. I climbed a small buttress and ate dinner—red beans and fry bread—while Shiprock threw its shadow east like an arrow.

Excerpt is taken from the chapter “Arizona” of Jim Lo Scalzo’s new memoir Evidence of My Existence, out now from Ohio University Press and available for purchase at Amazon.