CANYCA: California to New York (and back) pg. 14

It was a late start on that cold morning in Ely, Nevada, and its lateness was compounded by a lingering All-American cafe breakfast in the electrified bowels of a seedy casino/cafe, in which were ensconced not only the piteous long-term gambling addicts with their vacuous stares loosely focused somewhere deeper than the surfaces of the machines they paid homage to, but scores of artifacts of America's ex-wildlife: Antlers, heads, entire beasts sometimes; mounted in horrible parodies of life on walls and shelves amidst the gaudy framed bad art and posters advertising worse beer.

Before we actually drove out of Ely, I reflected inwardly upon how strange it was that the streets of the town were unusually devoid of activity for a small American city Saturday morning; like a Star Trek episode where all the inhabitants of a colony are enslaved by a bizarre alien consciousness intent on sucking their brains out ... it was, in fact, not too much of a stretch to see the parallel. But Ely fell behind as the sun paced us in our passing westward under a cloudless sky.



At some point in the earlier part of the day, Tim radioed that we needed to pull over into a rest area and we did ... and I got to hear the words "Gene, bring the bus back down from there so I can talk to you!" in response to the fact that something must have snapped and I was unable to prevent myself from heading up the little jeep trail that angled up the hill from the paved cul-de-sac. Stricken by an unusual bout of weariness, Tim needed a time-out in the bus, and I took my camera gear up to the top of a sage, cactus, and cow-pie strewn hill to get some supremely disappointing shots.

Incomprehensible open spaces, sage, and black crumbly rock edifices protruding from the tumultuous bands of worn mountain ranges that sweep north to south in broad strokes. That is Nevada, and through it, on what is notorious as "The Loneliest Road in America" (Highway 50), our voyage continued. It is best, once again, to resort to a gallery format to expeditiously relate the numerous subtleties that made up the experience of driving through Nevada. Since I was in territory I had navigated before on several occasions, I considered the voyage of discovery technically over, but I was relishing the opportunity to pilot a perfectly-running Volkswagen through the poorly-named "wastelands" with reminders of humankind's formidable effect on the land few and far between, and I was not too surprised at the detection of a tinge of sadness within myself due to the impending terminus of the adventure. There's nothing like a road trip, even in a bright orange baywindow!

Here's the Gallery of the Nevada Crossing (106 pics)



Of note during that day were things like mining operations both past and present, one of several "shoe trees" I know of or about, the Vale of the Dust Devils, Austin, NV with Stokes Castle, and the petroglyphs outside of Fallon. We perused one of the antique stores in Austin, and then headed a short way up a dirt road to eat one of those melons from Green River for lunch at an overlook with a castle (Stokes Castle). That cantaloupe was so sweet and rich the two of us, who had had little else to eat since breakfast, were unable to eat more than half! From our vantage, we looked down into a sweeping valley in which a dust devil disco was in full swing. Some of those twisters must have been a couple thousand feet high at least!

I gathered some sage and another flowering plant, tied it together with a bit of string found in the bus, and placed it on the dash (one thing bays are good for!) next to the wooden fragment with a square nail protruding from it that I picked up near the batcave. This "desert bouquet" made a nice visual accompaniment to my remaining travels, and as it dried, the scent it produced was sublime ...

After the sandmountain, the loneliest gravesite imaginable, and the petroglyphs outside of Fallon, there was offered little inspiration to record and relate the experiences of driving as it became mostly semi-rural highway, busy, with conveniences and housing and field and traffic. All this continued until we met up again with I80, and from that junction hied off through the sage-covered mountains to the bustling burg of Reno, where the first calamitous breakdown scare of the trip occured ...

Next page: (not yet...posted 15-Dec-06)

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