Dan Flores

It was a cloudless morning in June.

Big Ben is as far south in North America as you can get and still be in the United States.

And at that latitude, June means searing heat that's felt in the nostrils with every inhalation.

It's heat that is also a smell.

It can even leave a coppery taste in the mouth.

This particular morning began at 78 degrees, but my thermometer read 92 by 9 a.m., 98 by 11, and 108 shortly after noon.

By that point, my body felt like a bag of mostly water the blast-furnished Big Ben's Painted Desert desperately wanted to reduce to raisin form.

Wandering half lost in that astonishing badlands, it struck me while in the midst of it like being on a planet made up of herds of recumbent gray and lavender elephants whose bodies had partly melted into the ground.

I had to remind myself at 1.30 p.m.

that five hours in a sauna is more than enough.

The heat bug screeching of cicadas in the tamarisk thicket where I'd parked my Jeep guided me back to shade and safety.

But even on a 112-degree day, I lingered longer in that world of elephantine forms than I should have, reluctant to give up those visions and such a sense of being fully alive.

My ultimate Badlands experience so far went down a decade ago, almost by accident.

At least it seemed accidental to have Anthony Bourdain's producer call and inquire if I was interested in helping out with a Parts Unknown episode they wanted to film in and around Santa Fe, and who then asked whether I could appear in a few scenes with Tony without looking like a deer in headlights.

The answer was a foregone conclusion, although I wasn't entirely sure about the headlines part.

The accident?

I discovered eventually that Steven Rinella, who at that time used the same production company Bourdain did, was behind the scenes of that phone call.

The Parts Unknown shooting schedule was crazy.

They had five days to film seven scenes, and since Bourdain arrived with a vague Old West caricature of New Mexico, some of those scenes got brainstormed on the fly.

I joined them on the second day of shooting, a day when we were miked up for eight hours and that ended with a campfire cookout under a full moon and soaring canyon spires with Bourdain preparing a meal for himself and me and three generations of a local Spanish family.