Ry Cooder recently took New York Times writer Lawrence Downes on a tour of El Mirage Dry Lake in California's Mojave Desert, to explore the inspiration and setting for I, Flathead, the third and final album in Ry's California trilogy (which also includes Chávez Ravine and My Name Is Buddy), and its companion novella.

Downes describes their destination as "a land of spy planes, space aliens, off-road vehicles, sturdy reptiles and people with freaky desert habits, like racing vintage hot rods on dry lakebeds ... in other words, a critical stop on Ry’s California trail."

It's a place and state of mind featured throughout I, Flathead, which tells the fictional tale of Kash Buk, a hard-living, car-racing, guitar-playing man out of the 1950s California salt-flat racing world.

"From the ’20s to the ’50s," writes Downes of El Mirage, "it was a magnet for white, working-class hot rodders, the kind of people who form the core of his California trilogy, along with steel-guitar players, Okies, Arkies, Mexican-American dance-band leaders, zoot-suited Pachuco hipsters and the occasional space alien."

The characters in the novella and album, says Downes, are the sort "who liked Merle Travis, the finger-picking country-western guitarist, and found California to be just the place to realize homely dreams of peace and quiet. They worked in factories, danced in honkytonks and built hot rods out of surplus parts to race at El Mirage."

The day's adventure in the desert with Ry, he says, "was as though I’d been roaming the Delta with Robert Johnson, or gypsy France with Django Reinhardt."

To read the article, visit travel.nytimes.com. For a companion multimedia slideshow, "Touring Ry Cooder's California," with photos by Eric Grigorian set to the song "Flathead One More Time" off I, Flathead, visit nytimes.com.