t's now five in the morning, and the scene on the road below the full-moon party is pretty grim as several bands of exhausted ravers struggle to get it together enough to start the long road home. One poor soul on a bad trip has panicked and locked himself in a car. Instead of coaxing him out, the owner is pounding on the glass and issuing threats. A whole carload of partyers failed to factor in the dirt-road-driving time; their car is out of gas, and the hose they have for a siphon won't reach my tank. I do my part in the group effort to get everyone home alive by packing two stranded ravers into the back of my car. The road out of the mountains is treacherous but far less stressful than the highway to Phoenix, which from Apache Junction west is jammed with morning commuter traffic. "Who are all these people?" I wonder as we creep along. I'm in a car full of dirty, spent ravers who can't stop talking — about Brahms and Coltrane, life as a whole. I look again at the workaday drivers all around me — scrubbed, alone, jaws set and flash on a recent conversation with Inirtia, a local DJ, who summed it up so: "More important than the drugs are the ideas — the philosophy, the desire to connect. It's a tribalistic thing, the idea that you're all tuned into the same thing at the same time, whereas most people just want to stay locked in their own small worlds. "People drive around the city all day listening to different stations in their cars; they work in their cubicle all day, then get back in their mobile cubicle and travel to their home cubicle. They do it day after day after day. It's monotony, and it's spiritual death. "Something important is missing in a society where people think they have to live like that, and this is a way to say, 'No, I'm not going to do it.'"