Blue Highways: Somewhere on US 93, Nevada

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapWe have our place in the universe, and what a grand and infinite universe it is!  We stop with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) on a lonely stretch of highway in Nevada, look up at the stars, and are amazed what we see and humbled and comforted all at the same time.  Click on the thumbnail of the map at right to fix our place in the cosmos of Blue Highways.

Book Quote

"I've read that a naked eye can see six thousand stars in the hundred billion galaxies, but I couldn't believe it, what with the sky white with starlight.  I saw a million stars with one eye and two million with both.  Galileo proved that the rotation and revolution of the earth give stars their apparent movements.  But on that night his evidence wouldn't hold.  Any sensible man, lying on his back among new leaves of sage, in the warm sand that had already dried, even he could see Arcturus and Vega and Betelgeuse just above, not far at all, wheeling about the earth.  Their paths cut arcs, and there was no doubt about it.

"The immensity of sky and desert, their vast absences, reduced me.  It was as if I were evaporating, and it was calming and cleansing to be absorbed by the vacancy...."

Blue Highways: Part 5, Chapter 5

On US 93 between Pioche and Ely. Photo by Mike McDonald at Panoramio. Click on photo to go to site.

Somewhere on US 93, Nevada

I have been fascinated by the night sky since I can remember.  When I was a kid, before I grew up and became jaded, I would often just look up into the night sky in complete wonder at the stars.  It helped that I grew up in a very small town on the Northern California coast.  Ground light did not really mask the light of the stars there, so I often saw the stars and the distant stream of the Milky Way in all their glory.

When I was around 10 years old, my parents bought me a cheap telescope.  I spent hours looking at the moon.  That year Comet Kohoutek appeared to the naked eye, and I spent hours in the early mornings training my telescope on the comet as it sat low on the eastern sky.  I used to imagine that I actually could see the gasses streaming off of it - it was probably mostly my imagination.

Until I almost ready to graduate, my dream was to become an astronomer.  I thought that there would be nothing better than to sit in an observatory, look through telescopes, and study the mysteries of the cosmos.  I really had a very romantic notion of them, which can still be stimulated when I see a movie full of sexy astronomers who discover the comets that are going to hit the earth, or hear the first signals from an alien civilization.  In reality, I probably would not have been able to handle the physics that I would have needed to know - calculus-based physics did me in when I studied it in college, along with just plain calculus.

As a jaded adult political scientist, I still have a fascination with the sky and the stars.  I don't often take time to look up anymore, which is sad.  But still, things will catch my eye.  A bright planet will get my attention, and I usually will try to find out what planet is sitting on the horizon in the early evening, or close to the moon at midnight.  For a long time, I had a screensaver on my computer called seti@home.  SETI is the acronym for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and the organization had radio telescopes trained on various sections of the sky to see if they could pick up signal patterns that would indicate intelligent communication.  The screensaver I had was part of their parallel networking - while my computer was not being used, it was analyzing SETI data and sending it back to SETI.  With thousands of home computers doing the same thing, SETI could analyze the data without having to purchase or rent prohibitively expensive supercomputer time.

One of my most meaningful astronomical experiences came in the Davis Mountains of Texas at the McDonald Observatory.  My wife and I went to a star party, and there, looking through an amateur astronomer's large telescope, I saw the rings of Saturn and the Great Red Spot on Jupiter for the first time.  It was thrilling to see with my naked eye the things that I'd only seen in books before.

Of course, the naked eye experiences are always the best and most gratifying, such as suddenly seeing a constellation like Orion, or learning how Polaris (the North Star) can be found.  I remember lying on my back on a hillside once with some friends and watching a meteor shower.  Over our heads a large meteor streaked, and then suddenly with a crackling sound, broke up above us.  Perhaps the meteor was as large as a small truck high above our heads, but it was fascinating.  What fireworks display can match that?

I'm not the only one fascinated by such things.  Walking along a dry arroyo in the late afternoon in Chaco Canyon, my wife and I looked for pictographs painted by the Anasazi when Chaco was a thriving center.  On an overhang we found them.  One of them looked like a star, and it is speculated by some that the painting symbolizes a large supernova that appeared a thousand years ago and was visible for weeks with the naked eye.  Today it only appears in telescopes as the Crab Nebula.

Here in New Mexico, we are busy building Spaceport America, where companies like Virgin Galactic will rocket space tourists to a suborbital position at the very edge of outer space, and allow them to experience weightlessness for 10 minutes before re-entering the atmosphere and gliding back to Earth.  My wife posted a video where a public relations person for the Spaceport explains the layout of the Spaceport terminal, and another where he explains the activities other than tourism that will happen there.  I'd love to go on that ride, but sadly, I don't think I'll ever have the $250,000 in pocket change to pay for a trip, nor the million or so dollars it will take to hitch a ride on a Soyuz capsule to the International Space Station.  However, I did get a chance to see the Space Shuttle fly over New Orleans, trailed later by the International Space Station.  They were two bright lights in the evening sky, but it touched that fascinated boy in me yet again.

I really need to get out and start looking at the sky again.  I need to lay on my back, like LHM did somewhere along the side of US 93 between Pioche and Ely, Nevada, and just watch and wonder.  It is a comforting reminder, in a strange way, that I live upon a ball that endlessly revolves around a fiery, stable thermonuclear furnace.  That star revolves around the center of a galaxy with an immense, black hole core.  That galaxy speeds endlessly toward some unknown fate untold years in the future of the universe.  That universe continues to expand.  Our lives come and go, but the machinery of the cosmos keeps working.

Here is a favorite poem that I first read in college, and which always brings out the wonder in me when I read it:

Imagine Grass

The planet that we plant upon
rolls through its orbit of the sun,
bending our grass upon the breeze,
While far away the galaxies
in a decelerating pace
reach for the outer edge of space.

Imagine in that final sky
("Give me deceleration; I
will give you mass and curvature.")
at journey's end a far-flung star
of an unnumbered magnitude
Mount Palomar has never viewed.

In that expanded universe
the furthest star will be the first,
poised at the end of everywhere,
on the edge of nothing, like a prayer,
to turn from nothing and retrace,
pulsating through the curve of space.

So many billion light years since
the particle horizon densed,
conceive the universe defined
within the orbit of the mind,
and somewhere in the measured mass
of everything, imagine grass.

Knute Skinner
in A Geography of Poets
(1979, Bantam)

Musical Interlude

What song is better to put to LHM's perusal of the universe than The Beatles' Across the Universe?  Here it is for your listening pleasure.  Will nothing change your world?  Perhaps a night stargazing under a cloudless sky with no light pollution will change it quite a bit.

If you want to know more about US 93

AARoads: US 93
Federal Highway Administration: History of US 93
Wikipedia: US Route 93
Wikipedia: US Route 93 in Nevada

Next up: Ely, Nevada

Blue Highways: Pioche, Nevada

Unfolding the Map

Click on thumbnail for mapOur latest stop with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) is in Pioche, Nevada.  It is the home of a rich mining town history, complete with lives cut short by the gun.  It is a boom and a bust and a boom town.  It is a current ghost town.  It all leads me to speculate on whether I would have made a good pioneer (I wouldn't have, I think).  Click on the thumbnail of the map to the right to see where I most likely would have met my maker.

Book Quote

"Pioche...was pure Nevada.  Its elevation of six thousand feet was ten times its population; but during the peak of the mining boom a century ago, the people and the feet above sea level came to the same number.  The story of Pioche repeats itself over Nevada:  Indian shows prospector a mountain full of metal; prospector strikes bonanza; town booms for a couple of decades with the four "G's": grubstakes, gamblers, girls, gunmen (seventy-five people died in Pioche before anyone died a natural death); town withers.  By 1900, Pioche was on its way to becoming a ghost town like Midas, Wonder, Bullion, Cornucopia.  But, even with the silver and gold gone, technological changes in the forties made deposits of lead and zinc valuable, and cheap power from Boulder Dam (as it was then) kept Pioche alive."

Blue Highways: Part 5, Chapter 5

Downtown Pioche, Nevada. Photo by Don Barrett at Flickr. Click on photo to go to site.

Pioche, Nevada

I am frustrated as I wrote a very nice post, but I somehow lost it.  Sometimes, writing a blog is maddening.  When something is saved, and then isn't, it can be very disheartening.  However, I will soldier along and try to reconstruct something of what I had.

I have never been to Pioche, Nevada.  In fact, I got my first experience of what is probably true Nevada, which is very different than Las Vegas, when I persuaded my wife that we should load up our car and drive with our dog to visit my family in California.  Our route took us over US 50, which stretches from Ocean City, Maryland to Sacramento, California.  Nevada touts its stretch of US 50 as "the loneliest road in America."  They're probably right - the road rolls through very few towns along the length of Nevada.  But what struck me was that the towns maintained the feel of old West towns.  It was as if I were traveling through Old West towns where the only improvements made were pavement and streetlights.

Most of the towns through Nevada appeared to get their start due to the industries that extracted ores from the ground, mostly gold and silver.  These were rough places, as LHM indicates in his passage above.  Thanks to westerns I was like a lot of other people who romanticize the Old West.  I used to think it would have been exciting had I lived on the edge of the frontier, helping to build a community and establishing a business or settling "virgin" land (we tend to conveniently forget about the original native inhabitants).  But something always sat wrong with me.  In my present life, I have high blood pressure, I suffer from allergies, I have poor eyesight.  In my childhood I had two bouts with pneumonia, chronic bronchitis, and all the other childhood diseases.  I once asked, rhetorically in the presence of a friend who was planning to go to medical school, how it was that people with such maladies made it on the frontier.  She looked at me like I was a little crazy, and then said flatly, "they didn't."

It is easy to forget that towns like Pioche, and other settlements throughout the Old West, were difficult places to live.  LHM relates an astounding fact, if it is true, that 72 people died by violence before the first person in Pioche died a natural death.  Certainly such towns were lawless.  They were settled by men who worked hard in the day and played hard at night - usually fueled by liquor.  Women were few and far between.  The first women to settle in such towns were usually prostitutes, followed by entertainers, followed by a few female entrepreneurs.  Not all the business was legal, and crimes resulted in feuds, gunplay, and death.

When I now think about that Old West romance, I remember that given what I know right now, I might not have survived.  The attack of gallstones that I had a few years ago that occasioned the removal of my gall bladder would have probably killed me back then.  If there were even any attempts to surgically repair me, I would have been under the knife of a person quite possibly never trained in a medical school, and perhaps even just a barber.  The kidney stone I suffered would have gone untreated, or the treatment would have been worse than just suffering through them.  If I were a miner or other working class person, I wouldn't have been able to afford glasses for my eyes, which probably wouldn't have worked that well for me anyway given the science of the times.  I wouldn't have had the antihistamines to relieve my allergies, or the steroid inhaler to relieve any asthma from those allergens.  My high blood pressure would really have been a silent killer - but only if I managed to avoid getting shot, or cut badly on the job and then developing infection.  I probably would have been lonely, without much in the way of female companionship unless I paid for it.  Of course, that would have led to possible STD like syphilis or gonorrhea.  I might have ended up crazy as a loon from untreated syphilis.  Nope, the frontier can seem romantic, but it often wasn't.

I still enjoy, however, listening to the stories of those who were pioneers.  My grandmother used to tell me her stories about growing up in Northern California, where her grandfather and father ran a sawmill.  It was the edge of the frontier in the late 1800s and early 1900s.  My mother grew up in the forests as well because her father was a logger and she lived in logging camps until she went to high school.  When I heard those stories, I heard about a life of hard work, but also a life that was filled with wonder and possibility.

Sometimes I think I'm too jaded now, except in rare situations where I can let my mind be free of all the clutter it has collected through the years, to experience that kind of feeling.  I don't quite understand what it is like to walk out of one's door and see nothing but wilderness and realize that it can be a playground, like my mother and grandmother saw when they were young.  Nor do I understand what it is like to build something from the ground up.  The basics have already been built for me - I just add my little embellishments to the structure already in place.  To me, that's what a pioneer does.  He or she builds something where there was nothing before.  If it wouldn't kill me, I think I'd like being a pioneer, and building a Pioche, or some other place, out of nothing.

Musical Interlude

Today's musical interlude has nothing to do with Pioche, Nevada or any western state except perhaps in its name.  U2's Silver and Gold is about apartheid in historical South Africa.  However, here's my stretch to make it relevant.  As seen above, pursuit of riches, represented by silver or gold, has led to lots of violence of suffering.  It doesn't matter if it is by gunplay and terror in Pioche, or through enslavement for foreign occupiers in South Africa.  Silver and gold may be pretty, but the behaviors it can incite in some are not.

If you want to know more about Pioche

Ghosttowns.com: Pioche
Lincoln County: Pioche
Lincoln County Record (newspaper)
Overland Hotel
Pioche History
TravelNevada.com: Pioche
Wikipedia: Pioche

Next up:  Somewhere on US 93, Nevada

On the Road: Reno, Nevada

Click on Thumbnail for MapNote: First published on Blogger on September 5, 2006

Unfolding the Map

Sal doesn't stop, and Jack doesn't mention much, and I've never been there so we're taking a gamble with Reno. But in the spirit of Jack, we should gamble as much as possible. As always, click on the image to see the map.

Book Quote

"...then out to Nevada in the hot sun, Reno by nightfall, its twinkling Chinese streets..."

On the Road, Chapter 11

Littourari Intersection

Blue Highways: Reno, Nevada

Reno, Nevada

Okay, I've never been to Reno and the only real thing I know about it comes from reruns of Reno 911, which I'm supposing doesn't give a very accurate picture of the place. Sal doesn't stop there but passes through on the bus and uses a very strange phrase to describe Reno. I'm not sure what the heck he means by "its twinkling Chinese streets." But an interesting thing occurs when you type "twinkling Chinese Streets" as a quotation into Google -- underneath the young kid from Reno on MySpace who uses it in his profile (and proclaims "I'm not afraid of you and I will beat your ass" in capital letters), and underneath the woman who seems to have posted On The Road in its entirety on her site, you come across a whole bunch of sites that also appear to be postings of various parts of On the Road, until you click them and are taken right to a porn site. Then, if you look closely, you will see intersposed in Jack's words on the Google page various X-rated words. Somehow, I don't think Jack would have minded that too much.

I have one story about Reno, however, that has come through my family. My mother and father got married there. Not only did they get married in Reno, but they eloped there, with the the California state police alerted to pick them up.

Here is the way that I heard the story. My mom wanted a church wedding (Catholic) but my father didn't. They agreed to elope. My mom was supposed to take care of her sister's children while she and her husband went out on a date. She called her brother's wife to come over and take care of the kids on some pretext. My father drove up, she got in, and off they went to Reno. All hell broke loose when my mother's family found that she was gone. After all, even though she was out of high school and legal, it was the 50s. Police were called, and an alert was sent out over radio. Somehow, my parents eluded the trap and made it to Reno, where they were married in one of those quickie wedding chapels. They then called back to my mom's family. Allegedly, my mom's brothers threatened to kill my father when he showed his face at home, but that all seems more bluster and custom than for real, because they were all friends otherwise. So as far as I know, my father never got a beating at the hands of my uncles. And I'm sure the honeymoon was spent taking in shows, throwing money away at the casinos, and doing what couples do on honeymoons.

That's all the connection I have to Reno. And Jack's was just as slight, it seems. A bus ride past the Chinese streets, and on to California.

If you want to know more about Reno

City of Reno
Reno.com
Reno-Sparks Convention and Visitors Authority
Reno Gazette-Journal
Reno Wedding Chapels
University of Nevada-Reno
Wikipedia: Reno

Next up: Truckee, California