An art curator is told about a past visit to Searles Lake, a salt desert near California's Mojave Desert, and the nearby town of Trona, while pulling out a burned pharmaceutical encyclopedia. Trona's borax serves as a raw material for film developer, becoming becomes a link between the memory of the place and the act of filmmaking. Long-held memories of conversations with the filmmaker's mentor James Benning, colleagues, and other mentors about the book found in front of a burned house in this borax-mining village are restored as script.