An American Mecca : ENVIRONMENT : THE MOJAVE: A Portrait of the Definitive American Desert,<i> By David Darlington (Henry Holt: $25; 337 pp.)</i>

We all have our desert stories, don’t we? One of the things that drew me--a native Virginian--to live for a time in Southern California was my grandfather’s spellbinding account of his four years in the Mojave at the turn of the century. “Tales of the Waterless Sea,” he called his unpublished manuscript--stories of his delivering the mail on horseback, of encounters with Native Americans, grizzled prospectors, human skulls. For me, my grandfather’s Mojave was the Old West.

In “The Mojave: A Portrait of the Definitive American Desert,” David Darlington, who grew up “within the humid purview of the Atlantic Ocean,” has his own desert story, a story nearly the size of the Mojave itself, which stretches from southeastern California into southern Nevada and southwestern Utah and spans cultural icons as disparate as Death Valley and Las Vegas.

“I still recall how bleak Interstate 10 seemed east of Palm Springs,” Darlington writes of his first encounter with the Mojave, “how alienating the dehydrated landscape, how unnatural the absence of noise. The monumental emptiness of the place seemed a frightening weight to bear. The desert struck me as an enormous vacuum--a void, like outer space.”

Darlington’s repulsion is characteristic of what he calls the “Old View” of American deserts: the desert as wasteland, a fit dump site for civilization. In the chapter “A Convenient Place for the Unwanted,” he demonstrates how the “Old View” led to the creation of the Nevada Test Site (formerly the Nevada Proving Ground) and to the idea--championed, among others, by the state of California--of burying hazardous waste in the Mojave.

In contrast, Darlington examines the “New View”--the desert as mecca, a place to care for your soul, a fragile but complex ecosystem serving up nuggets of stark beauty to the urban prospector. Driving to the Mojave from Los Angeles, he writes, “you feel cut loose from the urban milieu as surely as astronauts are released from gravity’s restraint. . . . Owing to its freedom from confinement, the desert kindles a kind of epiphany as a matter of course--an almost physical sense of liberation, sudden, sensual delight of being that is like nothing else.”

Despite his proclivities, however, “The Mojave” is no Sierra Club paean to the lords of nature. Drawing from extensive interviews and research, as well as years of wandering the Mojave in a pickup truck with a camper shell, Darlington has pieced together a first-person portrait of the region both remarkably broad and fair-minded, encompassing huge swaths of natural and cultural history.

For people who know this desert--who live there, who have studied it--the truth of the Mojave usually lies somewhere between the radically opposed views. As Darlington observes, it also lies beyond the lingering images from popular culture, from westerns and TV shows like “Route 66.”

Typical of Darlington’s profiles is that of Gary Overson, a rancher and spur-wearing cowboy who announces to Darlington when they meet, “It don’t mean nothing to me to be in a book”--then spits snuff juice into a bowl. Overson runs 2,000 head of cattle on more than a million acres of desert near Goff, Calif., and Darlington makes it clear that grazing on that scale has damaged the desert ecosystem.

But--riding the range with Overson, sympathetically detailing his grueling work--he also gives Overson the chance to defend himself. “When I was a kid,” Overson tells him, “people thought we were crazy to even live out here. Now they want to take it away from us. Why do people want the ranchers off? The cattle business has stayed here since the first cow. . . . Grazing is a renewable resource. Grass grows back; nothing else does. If there ever was an environmentalist, it’s the rancher, because your living depends on it.”

Given the embattled status of Mojave National Park and other publicly owned land, “The Mojave” is a timely read, never more so than in its last chapter, “The Tortoise and the Hare-in-Hounds,” which focuses on the endangered desert tortoise--an “indicator species”--and off-road motorcycle racers as symbols of the continuing and bitter conflict over land usage. Darlington, whose previous books are “In Condor Country: A Portrait of a Landscape, Its Denizens, and Its Defenders,” and “Angels’ Visits: An Inquiry into the Mystery of Zinfandel,” is not only a judicious reporter; his prose is downright riveting as he contemplates the fate of land under siege from the human animal.

But what a reader will remember longest are Darlington’s vivid portraits, often laced with irony and dark humor: of an erudite ex-Marine named Dennis Casebier, with whom he travels by four-wheel-drive vehicle over the rugged Mojave Road, and who, like Overson, loves the desert but hates the Feds; of Stephanie, a forlorn waitress who works in a cafe in Newberry Springs, Calif., where the movie “Baghdad Cafe” was filmed; of a profane George S. Patton impersonator in Indio on the eve of the Persian Gulf War, standing tall in his Jeep and screaming: “The Iraqis are the enemy; we’re going to spill their blood!”

For those too tame for off-road exploration, for sand in their boots and scorpions in their sleeping bags, traveling deep into the Mojave with David Darlington will prove as satisfying as a cool drink of water in the desert sun.

* DAVID DARLINGTON will speak on a panel on travel books, “Around the World in 80 Ways,” at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on Sunday, April 21, at 3 p.m.