One night, in January of 2016, in the midst of a torrential downpour, I slept in the parking lot of Desert Hot Springs just outside of Palm Springs, California. I had just picked up a rental van named Franky Boy from Inglewood and was on the way to Slab City to work on my dissertation project. Roads everywhere had become impassable with the rainfall and I figured what better place to sleep than the parking lot of a hot spring? After what had been such a dark and foreboding day, I awakened to the above view out the window. As I begin to move towards the end of this long process of dissertation research and writing, I think of the little moments like these that somehow get lost in the process but nevertheless are vivid reminders of being with this work.