Blue Highways: Fallon, Nevada

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapWilliam Least Heat-Moon (LHM) doesn't stop in Fallon, preferring to drive to Reno.  I will, revisiting my own brief stop there, at a city park, in 2010.  Stay awhile with me, and click on the map thumbnail at right to geographically place Fallon.

Book Quote

"I drank my beer and took my case down the road, through the irrigated plain at Fallon..."

Blue Highways: Part 5, Chapter 10

The Fallon Theater in downtown Fallon, Nevada. Photo by Brian Butko at Lincoln Highway News. Click on photo to go to host site.

Fallon, Nevada

We stopped at Fallon, my wife and I, on our trip out to California.  It had been a long day of driving and we needed a place to have some lunch before we continued our push toward Lake Tahoe.  It was hot, as it was in summer.  We found a little park in the downtown area.  I remembered a train in the park, and a nice shaded part with trees.  We parked and we found a spot underneath a tree.  Our dog, Zia, was happy to get out of the car and stretch a little.

There were quite a few people there.  It was a weekend day, and I remember a young couple lounging underneath a neighboring tree, kissing once in a while, and then talking in muted tones.  Occasionally the girl, who I remember as being blond, looked over at Zia.  Eventually they walked off, hand in hand, toward another part of the park.

That drive, while a great drive and something that I wanted to do, had been a difficult one for me.  I had recently had issues with a woman with whom I'd grown relatively close in a short period of time, and then just as quickly imploded.  It had put a strain on my marriage.  Even though it had been about six months since I had spoken with her, I was still processing what had happened and why and trying to make sense of it all.

It was a shock to me to realize that I didn't have as much control over life as I thought I had.  I had spent a lot of time as an adult, after a traumatic childhood, trying to limit any further emotional shocks.  My one bugaboo was relationships.  Certain types of people seemed to keep coming into my life and bringing out of me a self that was needy, that feared abandonment.  Of course, everything would play out in this way:  I would meet someone interesting and who seemed interested in me as a person, I would get emotionally invested, I'd get myself into a situation where I felt emotionally abused, and then they'd "abandon" me.  Just like in my childhood.

Of course, not all of my relationships were like this.  There were people with whom relationships ended, either through attrition or because they had run their courses.  That was fine.  There was a beginning, a middle and an end and enough communication where there was a mutuality to the finality.  But the other kinds of relationships, where one minute people liked you and the next they hated you and you didn't understand why...they kept popping up in my life, and I kept getting entangled in them.

As I sat with Megan and Zia in this small park in Fallon, I was still emotionally reeling.  Here I was, 46 years old, and still dealing with childhood abandonment issues.  When would it ever end?

Of course, I was missing the obvious.  My dog was stretched out on the grass beside me.  My wife was putting together sandwiches.  She had been with me for 14 years of marriage to that point, and 8 years of a relationship before that.  She had put up with my issues, even that latest one, and was still sticking around.  The answer was right in front of me...and I was dwelling on something that I thought outlined my failures as a person, but which I should not have let go as far as I did.

I wish it were that easy for me.  All that time, and up to now, the answer has always been very simple.  Yet I often get bogged down in my inadequacies, my perceived failures, my shortcomings.  I don't give enough credit where it is due.  My wife hasn't left me, my true friends haven't abandoned me.  They haven't abused me and have stopped me from abusing myself.  That's where my energies should lie, rather than with the inner and outer demons that still bedevil me from time to time.

As I watched that couple walk across the park to find another place to be intimate, I wished them well and that the course of their relationship would run as smoothly as possible throughout whatever course it was meant to take.  Zia stretched, and I scratched her.  Megan offered me a sandwich, and I ate under the cool shade of a tree in Fallon.

Musical Interlude

Back in the day, I was a HUGE Styx fan.  Sure, they tended to do "concept" albums, and they weren't the most original thinkers around.  But I liked them.  They had good musicianship and in the late 70s and early 80s, I was not old enough to have jumped on the Beatles bandwagon and was still wary of harder bands like Zeppelin.  In particular, Fooling Yourself spoke to me because in many ways, I was an angry young man. Though I'm not really that young anymore, occasionally when I hear this song it reminds me that I always had hope I could rise above personal difficulties.  I mostly have.

If you want to know more about Fallon

City of Fallon
Fallon Convention and Visitors Bureau
Lahontan Valley News (newspaper)
Nevadaweb: Fallon
TravelNevada.com: Fallon
Wikipedia: Fallon

Next up: Reno, Nevada

Blue Highways: Salt Wells, Nevada

Unfolding the Map

William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) stops into a strange red building to find it's a brothel.  We go in with him, speculate about prostitution and sex scandals and such, have a beer and leave.  It's an industry in Nevada - so what can we say?  Click on the thumbnail at right for the map.

Book Quote

"I stopped for a beer in Salt Wells at a place called Maxi's.  If there was more to Salt Wells than that entirely Chinese-red building, I didn't see it.  An ornamental wrought-iron fence covered the front; the gate was locked.  Turning to leave, I noticed an arrow pointing to a button.  Push me.  I felt like Alice in Wonderland. I pushed, a dark face peered from a circle scraped on a window (painted red too), the gate clicked open, and I went inside where walls, ceiling, curtains, and lightbulbs were bright red.  A sign:

DANCE WITH THE LADIES
50¢
THREE FOR A DOLLAR.

"Below was a sticker, GO NAVY.  A saloon as peculiar as the desert.  That's when I realized it wasn't a desert saloon.  It was a desert cathouse.  Bold and plain, directly on U.S. 50, and flagrantly red from top to bottom."

Blue Highways: Part 5, Chapter 10

Closed Salt Wells brothel. Photo by Del at DelsJourney.com. Click on photo to go to site.

Salt Wells, Nevada

LHM is not very observant in this passage.  That this passage, dealing with prostitution and brothels, is the focus of this chapter shows to me that there is some kind of synchronicity in life.  The issue of prostitution has been buzzing around my ears for the past couple of weeks or so.

No, it's not any personal experience.  I've never had, nor sought out, any relations with prostitutes.  I have a tendency to believe that prostitution is taken up by few women who do it because they like it or consider it a career goal.  Rather, I believe prostitution is the refuge of women who, for one reason or another, have ended up in what truly is a dead end job, selling the last item on their life's shelf that can be sold.  I may be wrong, but it seems to be a career born out of desperate life circumstances or desperate emotional turmoil.  Because it is a product of desperation, people engaging in it can be exploited just as any other people in desperate situations.  They often are.  But that's just my personal opinion.  I respect the amazing capacity that we as people have to survive, but I wish for a day when bodies are not treated as commodities but as vessels containing something precious.

The synchronicity comes first from cooking.  Recently I agreed to make a spaghetti sauce that I've been preparing since the early 90s for my co-workers so that we could share it at an office lunch.  The sauce is called puttanesca, and if the history that I read about it is true, it's conception was just as interesting as the sauce is tasty.  I read that puttanesca was created during a time in Italy when any kind of promotion or advertising of prostitution was declared illegal.  Before, a red light or lantern was put in windows to alert prospective johns where to find the brothels.  Without advertising, what were the madames and prostitutes to do to lure in business?  The answer was to create a aromatic, pungent, full-bodied sauce for pasta that would feed johns, for a fee of course, but also give them a guidepost to the brothel.  Now, all johns had to do was follow their nose to get to a place of ill-repute.  The pasta is named after putta, the Italian word for whore.  Of course, if you read Wikipedia, you'll get a different story where it was invented in the mid-20th century at a restaurant.  Regardless, I love making the sauce, partly because it tastes so good, and partly because it may have such an interesting story to it.  Without the story, it would just be another kind of sauce.  With the story, it has something extra!  Even if the story isn't true - I prefer to think it is.

I also see synchronicity with this quote in one of the lead stories in Albuquerque's news.  The story originally started with the discovery of a prostitution ring centered in Albuquerque and encompassing Arizona and Colorado.  The organizer was a physics professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University who has a summer home in Santa Fe, and who was arrested while online at a Starbucks in Albuquerque.  He apparently bought a website and turned it into a prostitution clearinghouse for an exclusive group of men.  Potential members were recruited by word of mouth.  New male members were put on probation until they had relations with a prostitute, and on the site the prostitute reported what happened and how much she was paid.  Members then moved up to "verified" and "trusted" status.  Prostitutes were recruited by a "Hunter's Club" made up senior members.  It was a complex ring, full of security members to foil police.  But eventually, the police were able to work a few of their detectives into "trusted" positions.

When the hammer fell, one of the people caught in the ring was a political science professor emeritus and former president of the University of New Mexico.  It was revealed that he was one of the ring's moderators and was a member of the "Hunting Club."  His office at the university was searched, and was found to contain pornography and sex toys.  His case is currently starting to work its way through the legal system.

Of course, now everyone is on edge because at some point, the names of the johns who utilized this service will become public.  Given that prices for a prostitute ranged between $250 and $10,0000, I'm sure that some pretty big names in town will be revealed to have been involved in this ring.

This episode tells me a few things.  One is that as long as there's a market for prostitution, it will continue to happen regardless of the penalties.  Men who use the service might be sexually addicted, emotionally hurting, or morally bereft, but they provide the demand.  On the other hand, prostitutes, for their own reasons, provide the supply.  It's a market exchange - no, excuse me, it's a black market exchange.  As a society, we attempt to reduce the supply by busting the prostitutes.  However, as long as the demand persists, fueled by social problems, the practice will continue.

Second, I'm a political scientist, and I never realized that we could be that interesting.  This political science professor, whom I've probably run into once or twice in the political science offices at the University of New Mexico, was living a double life unknown to his colleagues, his friends, and his wife.  True, it was kind of a sad double life, but still.  It makes you wonder what goes on with the people you know.  I realize that we only are allowed a chance to truly know a few people, and most of the time, we see the facade or the act masking the reality.

Back to Salt Wells.  I went through the place on my trip across US 50 in 2010, and never even noticed a red building.  I wonder if it's still there, 30 some odd years after LHM passed through?  I could see myself, at one time, being naive enough to blunder in, just like LHM, thinking it was just a strange bar.  Now, after years and lots of experiences and stories like the one above, I'm a bit jaded.  I realize that people are capable of anything that will hurt others and hurt ourselves.  Fortunately, I also believe that we are capable of doing great kindnesses to each other and that even in the midst of prostitution rings, there are those with the proverbial "hearts of gold" helping others in the best way they know how.

Musical Interlude

This song doesn't have to with prostitution, but it does have to do with sex.  It's My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult's Sex on Wheelz.  The video is one they did for Ralph Bakshi's Cool World movie.

If you want to know more about Salt Wells

It's a small place, and I couldn't find any mention of the brothel where William Least Heat-Moon stopped.  But, if you're interested in such things, here's a list of brothels in Nevada.

Travels in American Southwest: Bordellos and Brothels
Wikipedia: List of brothels in Nevada

Next up: Fallon, Nevada

Blue Highways: Sand Mountain, Nevada

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapThe cosmic symphony comes alive in today's post, as William Least Heast-Moon passes by Sand Mountain, an enormous dune in the alkali flat desert of Nevada off Highway 50.  Did you know a sand mountain can sing?  Read on, and read about other types of sounds in our natural environment.  To see where Sand Mountain is located, click on the map thumbnail, to your right, while you groove to the sounds of Earth, Wind and Fire (below).

Book Quote

"The argument whether or not Sand Mountain had crossed the highway made more sense when I saw the thing - a single massive mound of tawny sand, a wavy hump between two larger ridges of sage and rock.  It was of such size that, while it wasn't perhaps big enough to be a mountain by everybody's definition, it was surely more than a dune.  Nevadans once called it "Singing Sand Mountain" because of the pleasant hum in the blowing sands, but no one has heard the mountain since off-road vehicles from California took it over."

Blue Highways: Part 5, Chapter 10

Sand Mountain, Nevada. Photo by basis104 on Panoramio. Click on photo to go to site.

Sand Mountain, Nevada

The existence of a "singing sand mountain" makes me feel strangely happy.  I couldn't really put my finger on it at first, but I think I understand why.  The sense that the earth "sings" is comforting for a number of reasons.

I have not stepped foot on Sand Mountain.  Like LHM, I passed by it on Highway 50 at a distance.  My wife and I noted that it was there, and I think that she read while we zipped by that it was a singing sand mountain.  As a sand dune, it is subject to the elements and therefore, not only does it sing, it has probably moved to various places during its existence.  This is alluded to when LHM stops in Frenchman and a person sitting near him at the counter mentions that Sand Mountain has moved across the highway.  Knowing these facts about a natural feature almost begs us to give it some kind of anthropomorphic attributes.  For a moment, I can get in touch with those primordial feelings that made our human ancestors worship geographical phenomena, like mountains and rivers, as actual gods, or manifestations of divinity on earth.

But there is more to it than that.  I buy into the fact that humans affect the planet with our activities.  I have no problem that we contribute to climate change through our release of chemical compounds into the atmosphere.  I know that we affect the environment.  Our endeavors have leveled mountains, and have created lakes where there once were rivers.  The Three Gorges Dam in China, for example, concentrated so much water in one place that it had perceptible effects on the very rotation of the earth.  We have remade landscapes to suit us.  We have and continue to mow down forests.  We create giant landfills to store our discarded items that will take thousands of years to decompose.  Even now, pools of melted radioactive materials are sitting at the bottom of reactors in Japan after a tsunami hit them, and who knows how long it will be before humans can safely inhabit those areas again.  We have left our calling cards in the world's highest and lowest places, and even on the moon.

And yet, a sand dune sings!

We know that people sing, and we hear songlike attributes in many animals.  My dog sometimes trills in her excitment, and my other dog, gone now for about five years or so, used to howl when we hit notes, with our voices or with instruments, that resonated with him.  Much has been made of the communicative songs of whales and other mammals in the ocean depths.  Birds sing in communication, and insects use their legs and other parts of their bodies to create marvelous little rhythmic tunes.  Once a seal, watching me curiously from the water with only it's head exposed, seemed to sing a little short tune at me before diving into the waves.

When I was much younger, I used to have an album by Stewart Copeland called The Rhythmatist, which was the music from his documentary of the same name.  He had traveled through Africa, and was introduced to rocks called rock gongs.  When struck, these rocks make sounds, some audible, others so low on the frequency scale that they can not be heard by human ears.  One can always hit or strike things in nature to make a sound.  A band from the Basque Country in Spain, Oreka Tx, has a documentary called Nömadak Tx that chronicles their music making adventures with other cultures around the world.  In one part they make their native instrument, txalaparta, out of stone, in another part they makeone out of ice.  As beautiful as the sounds of these instruments are, they need human help to make the sound.  Natural sounds, made by nature through nature, are different.

Inanimate objects we don't often associate with singing, yet well placed crevices or cracks and a rush of wind or water can cause natural sounds that change with the rhythm of air or waves.  As I grew up on the Northern California coast, I knew a number of spots where seawater, rushing into cracks along the rocky coastline, either pushed water or air through holes and created moaning or whistling sounds.  These sounds were often crashing and mournful, as if some being had been locked up in the tides and was mourning the loss of her freedom.

Apparently atoms can make sounds.  A couple of articles I found seems to indicate that atoms moving make a simple click sound as they move.  Scientists observing atoms, if they do certain procedures, can create a sound which seems "heartbreaking."

In fact the entire earth, according to scientists, actually emits notes and tunes of power and complexity.  the scientists don't know what causes these tunes, which are imperceptible to the human ear but which I have to believe have some impact upon us on a subconscious level.  What might the earth be singing about?  Is it singing in eternal joy?  Is it communicating with its brothers and sisters in the solar system?  Is it singing its loneliness in the cosmos?

But why stop there?  Radio telescopes pick up the sounds of stars being born, stars dying, distant objects moving toward or away from us, and even sounds from the instant after the Big Bang.  We are surrounded by the singing of the universe around us.  Every moment, every happening, is accompanied by a movement of energy that can be converted into a sound if we choose to do so.

Is this the physical manifestion of what Dante called "the sweet symphony of Paradise?"  Is this the seven perfect tones that Cicero believed held the universe together?  These questions are beyond my ability to understand.  I've always been drawn to music, and regardless of whether that music comes from the intellect of human musical genius, an animal communicating something to another, an earthly non-human source, or the cosmos, I am glad that a universal song is constantly playing.  When I sing or make a note on an instrument, I too join that cosmic symphony and am connected with the universe.

And I'm comforted to know that after I am long gone, after humans have played out their journey in this universe, most likely somewhere, sand dunes will still be singing.

Musical Interlude

This song seems very appropriate for the musical interlude, given that it's a joyful song, advocates singing as healing, and was conceived by a band that takes its name from the elements.  I must say that I really love Earth, Wind and Fire.  Enjoy Sing a Song.

If you want to know more about Sand Mountain

Nevada Destination Guide: Sand Mountain
Roadside America: Sand Mountain
Wikipedia: Sand Mountain

Next up:  Salt Wells, Nevada

Blue Highways: Frenchman, Nevada

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapI once saw a "Demotivators" poster that had a picture of an isolated tree on an icy landscape.  The caption read "Just when you think you are not alone, you are alone.  So very alone."  In the middle of the vast desolation of the Nevada desert, one can be forgiven for feeling that way if they have to stop.  It just depends on our relationship with solitude and loneliness.  William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) stops in Frenchman, Nevada and we consider what being alone in such a place might mean.  Click on the thumbnail of the map at right to virtually share this space with us.

Book Quote

"Frenchman, Nevada, population four, sat on the edge of a U.S. Navy bombing range.  A if that weren't enough, it was also on a fault zone that still wobbled the seismographic instruments around.

"Frenchman appeared on my map as a town, and, in the desert, it probably was a town, consisting as it did of a cafe-bar-filling station, four-unit motel, trailer, and water tower all huddled on an expanse of dry lakebed mudflats cracked into a crazed jigsaw puzzle of alkali hardpan.  In a state abounding with uninhabitable places, Frenchman excelled.  Without vegetation, suffering from unrelenting wind and extremes of temperature, no source of food or supplies closer than thirty-six miles, no medical care other than Band-Aids and Mercurochrome, frequently rattled by bombs and earthquakes, Frenchman somehow survived on a single source of income: highway travelers."

Blue Highways: Part 5, Chapter 9

The desert and bombing range near Frenchman, Nevada. Photo by Devon Blunden on Panoramio. Click on photo to go to site.Frenchman, Nevada

I can't imagine living in the middle of the Nevada desert, in a town the population of four.  I'm a small-town boy, from a town of around 5,000 when I was growing up there, and over my lifetime I've had to come to grips with living in cities.  Even now, there are things that I will never get accustomed to living in populated areas.  Like ground light blocking out the stars.  When I grew up, the stars were prominent and brilliant when there was no cloud cover.  I should have paid more attention when I was a kid, but I didn't know that one day, I would live in a places where, because of ground light, the number of visible stars would be severely reduced.

I'll also never become quite accustomed to the ever-present sounds of human activity in a city.  At night, things get more quiet but never silent.  There is always traffic on the main arterial street a couple of blocks away.  There is always the distant hum of the freeway.  In the early morning, the airport wakes up and military and civilian plane, helicopter and jet engines rev up.  Of course, during the day, the activity ratchets up to a background hum that is constantly present.

In cities, people also contribute to the lack of quiet.  During the day, there are people everywhere moving and doing.  Noise accompanies their activities, whether it's building or refurbishing houses, firing up the old truck to work on the engine, driving by, talking to a neighbor, talking on a cell phone, talking to a dog, talking talking talking...  At night, though the hubbub dies down some, there is still noise.  The low murmur punctuated by laughter at a neighbor's party.  A dog that barks at a cat which then causes the other dogs of the neighborhood to rise up in a canine racket.  Late at night, gunshots that ring out in rapid succession a couple of miles away.

In other words, the city concentrates the human drama in one metropolitan setting.  Sub-dramas take place neighborhood by neighborhood, house by house, each chronicling happiness, joy, ecstasy, fear, pain, sorrow, tragedy.  In other word, the human condition on a grand scale.

Now, imagine that you are in a community of four people out in the middle of nowhere.  Of course, you will be able to see stars because there is no ground light to interfere with your enjoyment of the celestial tapestry.  The sounds of human activity will be limited to the people who are there.  In that case, it's only four people, so the sounds will be less common, and on that day or evening you want to get away, you can just walk a while and you'll be surrounded with silence that is perhaps broken only by yourself, or the breeze or perhaps a small animal.

And that's the other side of the coin.  For all of those things, you give up human community.  You give up knowing what other people think about this or that, or how they spent their day, or what they want or desire out of life.  Myself, while I like to be alone, I would think that such an existence would not only entail being alone but also leave one lonely.  Being alone is something everyone wants once in a while.  It is the physical reality of being by oneself.  Loneliness is much more of an emotional state.  It is feeling disconnected from others, even if one is near or among people.  The two states are linked.  If one is alone, one can always find others if one wants.  If one is alone for too long, however, it can lead to loneliness.

Think about it for just a minute.  Think about being under the vast sky, in the midst of the vast earth.  You feel like the only person for miles.  For a while, that might be desired.  You are not surrounded by the busy-ness of everyday human life.  But after some time, you might want to find a person, someone to talk with.  The sky and the wind and meager plants and the occasional animals are fine companions, but they cannot offer advice or opinion or just friendly voice.  People are social.  We need other people, even if it is for short bursts of time.

I don't know how the people of Frenchman, Nevada battle loneliness, unless they snatch what they need from the occasional passing cars on Highway 50.  It still seems like a pretty lonely existence to me.  Or maybe, the sounds of military aircraft utilizing the bombing range remind them that they are still a part of a human community, even if they are just a remote outpost on the edge of the human existence.  When I passed through that area in 2010, the immensity of the landscape and the realization that I was just a blot on something much bigger and larger than me was humbling.  I was, at the time, in a lonely place in my heart, even with my wife by my side.  Spending too much time in the Nevada desert would probably not have helped me, and may have exacerbated my loneliness.  I breathed a little easier when we hit larger towns and other signs of human habitation.

Perhaps I should idolize the people of Frenchman that LHM describes and interviews in Blue Highways, and others who live like them.  Much of my latest work to better myself has been to learn how to live without the clutter and the detritus that separates me from those parts of my psyche that make me uncomfortable, that are scary, and that are hard to face. If the people of Frenchman have learned to live alone, and still be comfortable in their solitude and not succumb to loneliness, perhaps they can be a model for me.  Perhaps they are like the ascetic desert monks, or those hermits of all cultures who separate themselves from people yet hold keys of wisdom for all.  Perhaps they can point me toward a place where I can be engaged with the world around me without running from the person within me.

Musical Interlude

I am not a person who knows a lot about John Lennon's music, partly because I came into my musical own during the late 70s and hadn't had the exposure to The Beatles because I had to figure out my own musical tastes.  Now that I'm older and can go back to what I've missed, I have become more appreciative of the music of Lennon.  Isolation fits the mood of this post, especially its counterpoint of being alone in a world that is "a little town."

If you want to know more about Frenchman

There's really nothing about Frenchman.  I've seen a website that says that Frenchman is not a town anymore, but has been designated a site.

Here's a kitchsy thing that was, until December of 2010, near Frenchman that I missed and dearly wished I'd seen, the Tree of Shoes.  But now, it's gone too.

The Tree of Shoes

Next up:  Sand Mountain, Nevada

Blue Highways: New Pass Station, Nevada

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapA few miles west of Austin, Nevada we stop at the ruins of a Pony Express station.  Besides having to ride hard and fast, the young riders had to be the model of efficiency, carrying very little.  How I could learn from their example when traveling!  How William Least Heat-Moon travels in style in Ghost Dancing!  Tp see where New Pass Station is located, click on the map thumbnail at right.

Book Quote

"New Pass Station, under cliffs of the Desatoya Mountains and half an hour west of Austin, used to be a stagecoach stop...

"Regardless of the utter fierceness of desert winters and summers, the Pony Express riders, they say, always rode in shirt-sleeves; considering the real hazards of the job, that may be true.  The Central Overland California and Pike's Peak Express (the actual name of the Pony Express) used to run notices that are models for truth in advertising.  An 1860 San Francisco newspaper printed this one:

WANTED
Young, skinny, wiry fellows not
over eighteen.  Must be expert
riders willing to risk death
daily.  Orphans preferred.

"The only baggage the boys carried - in addition to the mail mochila - was a kit of four, cornmeal, and bacon, and a medical pack of turpentine, borax and cream of tartar.  Not much in either one to keep a rider alive."

Blue Highways: Part 5, Chapter 8

Ruins of stage/Pony Express stop at New Pass Station, Nevada. Photo at Nevada-Landmarks.com. Click on photo to go to host site.

New Pass Station, Nevada

When driving across Nevada on Highway 50 last year, my wife and I passed a number of ruins that were the only remnants of stage and Pony Express stations.  Because Nevada is so unpopulated, outside of its major population centers, there weren't very many people on the road or visiting these stops.  We were on a schedule and didn't really stop either.  But the vast empty distances of Nevada evoked a special kind of awe in me for people who rode alone across it.  Knowing that they were all the same age as high school kids - kids who are going to soccer practice, playing video games on their game systems, listening to music on their music players, using their IPads and other types of modern activities - is almost mind boggling.  I'm not arguing that we should send our kids out to jobs where they must be "willing to risk death," but just drawing a comparison.  The definitions of "active kids" are quite different now.

What most impresses me about the quote above, however, is the packing.  Perhaps it's because I just got back from a foreign trip where I once again overpacked that this topic is on my mind.  I have never internalized the idea of packing light for any kind of endeavor.  Granted, the Pony Express riders didn't really have any room to pack extraneous stuff, but they also made do with what they had.  I'm sure that those riders who survived their tenure with the Pony Express packed light for travel the rest of their lives.  If one learns how to pack light, and how to use what one has, then that habit stays with one for life.

Case in point.  In Turkey, for a three week trip, I packed three pairs of jeans.  Why?  I only used one pair over and over.  It's all I needed.  I packed a beard trimmer, and never used it.  I packed five t-shirts, and only really used two.  I could have saved myself a lot of weight and possibly one bag and had a lot less hassle.  Sarah, one of my trip companions and a journalist with our public radio station, impressed us all as she managed to pack light enough to have one bag of clothes and all of her radio equipment in carry-ons!

I once carried a full backpack all over Europe, filled with things that I could have easily gotten when I arrived but, because it was my first time, I packed with me because I was filled with dread that I wouldn't be able to find even the most basic supplies.  I'm not that ignorant anymore, and won't pack easily obtainable things unless I go to a developing country where I know it will be difficult to find some items that I would need.  But I still need to learn how to pack light.

The Pony Express riders had to be ready for anything.  They had race across the wastelands as fast as they could to meet a schedule.  They had to be light and quick so that they could travel fast, and elude pursuers such as unfriendly Native American tribes.  The necessity to be unencumbered could mean the difference between life and death.

For me, in my travels, the choice is not that stark.  For me it's the choice between being relatively free of hassles as compared to being weighed down by luggage.  Not exactly a horrible thing, and a product of my lifestyle, which is much more well-off than that of the 19th century.  However, even in the 1800s things changed pretty rapidly.  The Pony Express lasted less than two years, then the railroad connected the west and east coasts and more mail could be carried farther and faster by locomotives.  For travelers, the choice between bone-crunching and rattling stage rides and a comfortable seat in a fast-moving train was a no-brainer.  Suddenly one could pack more to take with them, and many packed their whole lives in a few trunks and moved west.

As for me, I will try to keep the practice of the riders of the Pony Express in mind when I travel in the future.  Light and quick.  It'll make my travel more enjoyable, and just in case, I'll be light enough to elude any unfriendly pursuers.  Okay, maybe I won't need to elude pursuers - but a guy can dream he's important enough to have pursuers, can't he?

Musical Interlude

When I was young, this song was all over the radio.  I heard it so many times that even today, I can sing along to all the words.  I think it might have been the only huge hit that Christopher Cross had.  Though it's not about the Pony Express, the theme of riding fast to escape is appropriate.  Enjoy Ride Like the Wind!

If you want to know more about New Pass Station

Flickr: New Pass Station
Forgtten Nevada: New Pass Station
HMSOA.org - New Pass Station
Nevada Landmarks: New Pass Station
State Historic Preservation Office

Next up:  Frenchman, Nevada