“I'm a real loner out here.

“I'm going to always have to be dog-sledding, diving or camping in Africa.”

“I remember, I wore one of your suits. It was really early on, in the seventies.”

While she talks, Hutton paces back and forth across the living room's wide-plank, knotty-pine floor.

It's impossible not to eavesdrop. Hutton's home-or at least this half of it-is a one-room affair, compromising a living area, kitchen and sleeping loft. To have privacy she would have to banish a guest to the cold outdoors or send him next door to her bedroom, which is housed 10 yards away in another one-room structure. But she doesn't.

Ralph Lauren has ostensibly called to give Hutton advice on her new business, Lauren Hutton's Good Stuff, a makeup launched in September. But like most people, he is also eager to know how the famed supermodel and actress is recovering from the motorcycle accident she had in the fall of 2000 when, competing in a celebrity ride, she careered around a curve in Nevada's Valley of Fire, flew 20 feet in the air, and hit the desert floor, skidding 170 feet. Miraculously, her unforgettable face, protected by a visor, was largely unharmed, but the same can't be said for her body. She suffered multiple breaks in her right leg, compound fractures in her right arm, broken ribs, a broken sternum and a punctured lung. As actor Laurence Fishburne, a good friend, says, “By rights, man, she should be dead.”

Hutton's recovery has been slow. For a year and half she relied on wheelchairs, walkers and crutches to get around. Only in the past nine months has she walked without a limp, and recently the doctor removed titanium rod from her right leg.

Among her necessary remedies has been quiet time. Here in the vast, wonder-inducing landscape of the high desert, quiet can be found in large doses. Hutton, whose primary residence is a Manhattan apartment, comes to New Mexico as often as possible to indulge in calm and contemplation. She rarely has housequests. Sometimes she'll spend a month at a stretch with just herself as company. “People are always asking me, 'What do you do out there?'” she says, having wrapped up her phone call and sidled up to the piping-hot cast-iron stove by the front door. (her voice is warm too, and husky, like roasted corn on the cob.) “I watch the dawn. I watch the sunset. I watch tarantulas walk around. I have always loved nature. For me, nature is religion. Who's to say we are more holy than sagebrush?”

Ten years ago, when Hutton purchased this 240-acre property, there was precious else here but the scrubby plant. Today the property boasts an amalgam of sheds and other structures that call to mind a scientific field station in Antarctica. “From afar it looks kind of Mad Max,” says her friend Jaqueline Schhnabel. Up close you see that the buildings are constructed of modeled, galvanized steel. They resemble Airstream trailers. Or military barracks. “I like how bare-bones and plain it is. It's sort of designed not to be a big deal,” says Hutton, walking around the buildings wearing nothing to protect her from the brisk winter air but a cashmere sweater and sweatpants, and shearling moccasins.

Back inside she starts to prepare a small lunch, just a salad. From where she stands in the kitchen, washing the lettuce and grabbing a bottle of balsamic vinegar, most of her living space is visible. There's no clutter. A handful of sheepskin rugs are scattered about the floor. On a table in front her Javanese daybed are piles of books. One's called Giant Squid. Another is a biography of Thomas Jefferson. All around are mementos of her world travels, including a 16-foot boa constrictor skin that trails from the sleeping loft down to the floor.

By comparison, there's hardly any ornamentation in her monastery like bedroom next door, custom-built last year by architect Bill Katz. Its white-stained pine walls gently curve into the floor and ceiling, making the room feel as if it is one unbroken surface. “It's like a blank canvas, where there's nothing really, just enough to allow you to feel at home but also give you lots of space for your thoughts,” says actress Anna Deavere Smith, a friend who visited last Labor Day.

And then there's the dock. Hutton, who grew up on the edge of a Florida swamp, has built a 100-foot-long wooden walkway that runs from her house out to a rectangular deck, which sits in the middle of nothing but dry shrubs. “No lake there,” she says with a wink-but it really is surrounded by a kind of sea. Bu day there are ripples of brown-gray sagebrush, and “at night it's just pitch-black,” says Smith. “You have a feeling like you're in the ocean.” Adds Hutton, sitting down at her kitchen counter to eat, “Sometimes I take sleeping bags out there and sleep.” Leaning in closer, blue eyes widening, she whispers, “I love it.”

Still a bit of loneliness has crept up on her recently. “I was thinking about the fact that I missed arms around me,” she says, finishing up a third bowl of salad. “I've had great lovers, great ones,” she says. One of her earliest was Steve McQueen, whom she met when she was 19. She was a student in New Orleans; he was in town making a movie. “It was hit and run,” she says. But the experience was, shall we say, memorable. “My first lover was a tragedy. I thought that was sex, until I met Steve. I found out that what I had been doing with this guy was not sex. So I have a high mark,” she says. Since then she has been in love four times. There was Bob Williamson, who she learned had squandered much of her savings before he dies three years ago. (“For two years I was homicidally angry,” she says.) Later there was record producer Malcolm McLaren, to whom she remains close. And there were two other men she won't name.

Now, sighs Hutton, 59, all the good guys are taken-at least those who are near her age, “There are lots of young guys out there. They're fun and good-looking, no doubt about it,” she says. “But I feel like I'm not picking on someone my own size.” Still, she isn't sweating it. “I'm a camel. I can go a long time without water,” she says, laughing.

More than anything, she's itching to get back into her life of adventure. Despite her accident, Hutton is still a daredevil at heart. Reluctantly, she has sold both of her motorcycles. (As Liam Neeson, who suffered his own motorcycle crash in the summer of 2000, recently told her, “Lauren, we have pushed our luck.”) But there are other things that thrill her apparently ageless soul. She has plans to go dog-sledding in Greenland, and further down the line she hopes to buy a wooden sailboat and take it around the globe while taping a TV documentary on sharks and other threatened ocean populations. “We're all going to dive our butts off,” she says, explaining that she's particularly eager to see the giant crabs said to reside off the coast of Antarctica. “Curiosity must have killed only dumb cats,” she says. “I'm curious about everything. The biggest, the smallest, the fastest and slowest, the highest and lowest of everything, from stick insects to stars. Most of life is treading water. I need to find out what really gives me joy and go do it again every time I forget.”