Death Valley is really wide-open - it's bigger than Rhode Island - and it's less a part of California than an ungoverned territory so there's lots of weird cops-and-robbers stuff going on.
Marriage is a lot of things - a source of love security the joy of children but it's also an interpersonal battlefield and it's not hard to see why: Take two disparate people toss them together in often-confined quarters add the stresses of money and kids - now lather rinse repeat for the rest of your natural life. What could go wrong?