What surprised me most about the hundreds of acres of mirrors of the Solar Electric Generating Stations is how well they fit into the Mojave Desert. I expected the 250 acres of parabolic troughs to seem huge; they would be in the middle of San Francisco. But desert distance is different and the size of the plants at Kramer’s Junction, which produce about 150 megawatts, isn’t really all that impressive. I expected something grander and crazier from the satellite photo.

And in most of the coverage I’ve read about solar fields, writers emphasize the HUGENESS of plants that Luz built in the 1980s. “The rays captured on the huge, rain-gutter-shaped mirrors fire sleek tubes of synthetic oil, which in turn generate enough turbine-driving steam to power more than 100,000 homes,” went Paul Pringle’s SEGS account for the Dallas Morning News in 1989. I’m not going to say they were disappointing in person, but there was little dissonance between the plants and their surroundings.

Maybe it’s because just down the road, one of the world’s largest boron mines has made a hole in the Earth that’s bigger than the mirror field and 500 feet deep.

Maybe it’s because on the way to Kramer Junction you drive past the giant logistics companies near Victorville with their million-square-foot warehouses connected to the entire world by plane and train, the road-facing flanks of the buildings perforated with hundreds of semi bays for trucking plastic toys and lawn furniture the last mile.

Maybe it’s because on the drive back to the coast, you pass through the haze-filled San Joaquin Valley, in which a few mechanically enhanced hired hands create food on a truly impressive scale, miles and miles and miles of fields just to feed a tiny slice of our hunger for almonds. The whole enterprise is tawdry and sublime at the same time.

Out there, where lots of things are happening at the scale of the global economy, it’s just not that weird to have a 250 acres of mirrors making steam to turn a turbine. Or at least not much weirder than the Zappo’s warehouse run by quasi-autonomous robots near Vegas. Kramer Junction feels like a lot of random truck stops. You can get a Subway turkey sandwich or a burger and visit an antique shop with a fine collection of vintage coffee grinders. You can watch a train thunder by and get stuck waiting on a red light. Then, you can drive half a mile to the most successful solar project of the 20th century. If this is the future, it sure seems like everything else. And perhaps that’s solar thermal’s greatest advantage.

The mirror fields, in comparison to a solar panel on a home, are big. But that’s not the world in which energy production exists. Going out to places like Crockett, California, where rail meets interstate meets ocean or Victorville, where rail meets highway meets air field, I’ve started to see the separate country that undergirds San Francisco and Gainesville and Boston.

That country is big, mechanical, and fast. It cannot be located in a dense place: Land needs to be cheap and land regulations loose. But density requires these other desolate places to exist. If you live in a major city, you are excluded from this world. In fact, it’s been designed so that you don’t see it, won’t see it, except perhaps fleetingly from the highway or as you fly past and snap a photo. And there’s nothing wrong with all that, necessarily.

The problem is that people who rarely spend time out near the correctional facilities of the desert, still bring their ideas from Main Street about “a lot” or “too much” into this other world. SEGS might be huge in the burbs, but in the geography of infrastructure, where everything is huge, it makes sense. In the Mojave, a million square meters of mirrors may be defined as small and beautiful.

I wish there was a way to visualize the infrastructure world, where its nodes are and how it connects to China and Europe and the Gulf Coast. Perhaps you could calculate the dollar value of goods moving through a place per capita. Then, suddenly, you’d see the lifestyle-support systems of the country fluoresce. The outskirts of Mobile, Alabama. Kansas City. Riverside, California. Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Orangeburg, South Carolina. A whole different set of cities would glow.