Excerpted from the preface of the new book “Outback Nevada: Real Stories from the Silver State,” published by the University of Nevada Press in March 2022.

Many people — mostly tourists, but also urban Nevadans — seem bewildered by the concept of taking that unheralded drive between Las Vegas and Reno, or exploring any of the state’s hinterlands, like it was some crazy rocket launch into the void of outer space.

“What’s out there?” they ask. “Just a bunch of nothingness?”

The question has always baffled me. “It’s not nothingness,” I say. “But something-ness.” Because out there is where the real Nevada lies. Whenever I grow weary of the noise of my Las Vegas life, when my suburban neighbors begin to grate and I itch for infinite vistas and endless two-lane straightaways, I point my car north, toward Nevada’s untamed outback. Toward Beatty and Goldfield, Tonopah, Pioche and the Big Smoky Valley, Austin, Middlegate Station and Gerlach, Carvers, Jackpot and countless points in between.

I drive when I want to see wild mustangs and burros graze on the leather-colored landscape just off the highway tarmac. I drive when I want to gaze up at night skies so profoundly black I can see the glowing Milky Way and imagine just how far away heaven might be. I drive when I want to follow the swirling dust clouds kicked up by a country boy in a pickup truck, gleefully barreling down some anonymous dirt road, carving out his own freewheeling rite of passage, a young man leaving a trail of smoke and grit to rival any jet engine, one that might be seen from the moon, for all I know.

When doing journalism or just for thrills, I drive when I want to see, hear and feel rural Nevada, the real Nevada, that country-hearted salve for my curious big-city soul.

I first launched my explorations into Nevada in 1994 as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. I worked as a so-called “rover,” a parachutist who dropped into places far outside city limits, on the lookout for hidden subcultures and offbeat tales.

Nevada, I soon discovered, could be a land of scorching debate, with battles over such issues as horse-versus-cattle grazing rights and the preservation of such endangered species as the Mojave desert tortoise, Peregrine falcon and Lahontan cutthroat trout.

In 2012, I returned to Nevada full-time as a national correspondent. Early on, I asked my editor about the right mix of stories between big metropolises such as Vegas, Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Denver and the less-peopled high-desert wilderness. He said I’d figure that out, and I did: I preferred being somewhere out there. I put the city lights squarely in my rearview mirror whenever I could.

In 2015, I left the Los Angeles Times after 26 years, but remained in the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson to launch a freelance career. I wasn’t done with Nevada, not by a long shot. I’d tell friends that while I could take or leave Las Vegas, the desert still beckoned. It kept me here. It rooted me.

I set out to tell real-life stories of hard-edged stubborn characters, both loners and fools, and chronicle small-town goings-on. Out there, I soon learned, the people just seemed more genuine. Their politics are conservative, colored by a bit of leave-me-alone libertarianism and plainspoken country values. Residents tend to favor less government and more freedom to live unfettered — to take their guns to church and their God into the voting booth.

They live in enclaves with far-fetched names derived from the state’s history of mining and railroad development, where pioneers pounded wooden stakes with speculative place-names that somehow stuck. Many withered into ghost towns, with the stories behind those names sometimes now resembling more fiction than fact.

In rural Nevada, I found something I never even knew I was looking for.

You need patience, strong coffee and a couple of tanks of gas to cover the entire length of Nevada — say, from Laughlin in the far south to the border town of Jackpot in the north. It’s not the West’s longest state drive, but definitely one of its most dramatic.

The name Nevada derives from the Spanish word nieve, for “snow-covered,” a reference to the powdery peaks of the eastern Sierra. It’s America’s most mountainous state, its ranges running north to south, like knuckles, or backbones.

Driving the state’s major north-south arteries, U.S. Routes 93 and 95, takes you through vast valleys of sagebrush and creosote bushes, Joshua trees and Mojave poppy wildflowers, all flanked by prodigious mountain peaks on either side. It’s only when you travel along latitudinal U.S. Highways 50 and 6 do these ranges take you on their heady roller coaster ride of elevation rise and fall. Tens of thousands of miles of paved roads (and countless more unpaved ones) cross a state that ranks as the nation’s seventh largest in landmass, yet is among America’s least-populated places. More than 80 percent of its 3 million residents live clustered around Las Vegas or Reno.

Why? Water, or the lack of it.

Nevada is America’s most arid state, and that absence of water — and the fact that 80 percent of the land is managed by the federal government — has kept the rural population low, allowing the land- scape to remain primeval and wild. Most of its outlanders — farmers, ranchers and townspeople — have settled near water, leaving the rest to four-legged inhabitants, including wolves, coyotes, foxes and mountain lions.

Still, for some reason, Nevada gets overshadowed by its yellow-haired sister to the west. California, the so-called “Golden State,” gets all the historical buzz for its 1848 gold rush, while Nevada, with its Comstock Lode, a massive deposit that gave the 36th state its identity as the “Silver State,” has, to my mind, often been relegated to a less-precious metal, as though awarded the second-place prize.

But those mines also gave Nevada its quirky, colorful history. The discovery of an active vein meant an influx of fortune seekers, men who labored below ground and spent their earnings freely. Towns sprang up from nothing, with names such as Rhyolite, Berlin and Gold Point, many replete with opera houses, bars, hotels, newspapers, courthouses to try lawbreakers and jails to house them, and, of course, brothels. Then when the mineral veins died, so did the towns, in many cases receding back to dirt and dust from which they came.

Mining remains a large part of rural economy. Today, Nevada produces more gold than any other U.S. state, including California. And Nevada’s frontier culture also holds up against California or any other Western state as a place that teemed with pioneers-turned-national celebrities. A young Jack Dempsey worked as a bartender and bouncer at the Mizpah Hotel in Tonopah, a gritty mining town where lawman Wyatt Earp once wore a badge. Samuel Clemens took the pen name “Mark Twain” while working for Virginia City’s Territorial Enterprise. Reno tailor Jacob W. Davis created the first denim jeans, the durable apparel that later outfitted miners, cowboys, lawmen and desperados across the American West.

U.S. Highway 50 still follows the trail of the old Pony Express. In the early 1900s, the ornate Goldfield Hotel featured the only elevator west of the Mississippi River, its 154 rooms each containing a telephone, electric lights and heating — luxury that matched the main boulevards of Manhattan.

But rural Nevada is more than just long-shuttered grand hotels, ghost towns and museums to the past. People continue to scratch out a living here, with grit and humor. Ralph Keyes, an alfalfa farmer and county commissioner, says living in rural Nevada takes common sense.

 “You have to have a hardy pioneering spirit,” Keyes told me in 2017. “If you want streetlights and curbs, stay in the city.” He relishes every day spent in this blissful middle-of-nowhere and described his life with plainspoken images, like a rural poet.

“This morning, I was up at 4 a.m. I rode an open tractor and watched the sun rise. I smelled the hay and watched the coyotes trot out of the fields, with the cool air and sun on my face.” He paused. “Just being part of that keeps me here. The smells, the sights, the taste of dirt in your mouth.”

That’s one reason I drive into Nevada’s outback; out there, I can taste dirt in my mouth and get sand between my teeth.

Driving north from Las Vegas along U.S. Route 95, I don’t feel I’ve really entered the outback until I’m well north of Indian Springs, when four lanes narrow to two, at the turnoff toward mysterious Mercury and its tall tales of green men and secret government programs.

During my countless trips out there, I’ve sat at the tiny bar in the Happy Burro in Beatty, clutching a $2 bottle of beer and a bowl of the spicy house chili, and later stood outside with two native residents as they pointed at a sandstone mountain that towers over town, admiring it like it was one of the French Alps, saying, “This is why we live here.”

I’ve stepped into the general store in Dyer to revel in town gossip and attended Native American scholar Boyd Graham’s class on spoken Shoshone at White Pine High School in Ely. I’ve traveled with a retired Michigan cop to chronicle the long-ago graves of Nevada’s early pioneers on the internet, to make sure history endures.

Still, there are always new stories to tell out there. They’re not death knells for the rural life, but stories of ongoing life and enduring culture — from battles over water rights to celebrations of cowboy poets, fiddle-playing ranchers and the spoken word.

Whenever I hit the road, I leave behind big-city traffic and crime like a good hunting dog shakes water from its coat. And as soon as I return, I’m already anxiously anticipating my next adventure into that peerless panorama of somethingness.

In the meantime, I think of that teenager behind the wheel of his pickup, kicking up some backroad dust, as if to remind the world that he’s out there, and that farmer-poet perched atop his open-air tractor at dawn, the wind and the sun on his face. They’re celebrating the dirt in their mouths, both feeling very much alive.