Another Round at the Say When: Last Call for Alcohol
A journalist moves to the small town of McDermitt, on the Oregon-Nevada line, to learn about why the high school football team never wins, and about the townsfolk who cheer them on.
One in a series.
After more than two months here, it’s finally time for me to leave McDermitt, this town where I have made both friends and enemies.
I remember driving out in the middle of August, to begin reporting on the community's undermanned high school football team, which eventually could not muster enough players to even have a season.
But I stayed on, and as I took my evening walks down Cordero Road, out toward the old mine site, I saw summer give way to fall, with temperatures in the low 20s on some nights, hinting of another harsh winter to come.
Along the way, I have met some unforgettable characters.
Like Bob, the retired cowboy who lives next door, who will roll up his right sleeve to show you how he can make his bicep muscle dance, and who drives around town in his old brown pickup truck, irritating a lot of townsfolk with his sense of humor and peculiar view of the world.
Bob likes to talk about the weather and point to planes in the sky, boring most people here to a crying jag of tears. He used to track me like a hunter, until I told him I was writing a book, and that he night become part of it.
Now Bob avoids me like I was some out-of-place city stranger, which I am.
I’ve sat in the art studio of a local named Joe White Buffalo as he told me about the continuing nightmare of his days in Vietnam, how those images will still not let him sleep at night, and how he moved here to begin again.
I've spent time with Thierry Veyrie, the resilient French scholar from just outside Paris, who has spent years studying local Native American culture here, and can even speak the Paiute language.
And Richard Egan, the big, kind-hearted football coach of the McDermitt Bulldogs, who came here from nearby Owyhee as a teenager to play football and never left.
I also sat in my living room, listening to Jack Smith, the school’s head basketball and football assistant coach, talk about his late father, Moe, a titan of a character who always chomped on an unlit Cuban cigar.
Moe was a hard-swinging former professional wrestler and boxing manager who guided the careers of many young men with big dreams, including his own son.
Jack fought as an amateur and even had a few pro fights, with Moe there at ringside to root him on and, sometimes harshly critiquing his grit, words that broke the young boy's heart.
And now Moe is gone and the son no longer fights, but as a coach he carries the lessons of his old mentor onto the football field and basketball court. When Jack talks about his Dad, his voice breaks, as powerful emotions burst forth, all signifying a son’s love for a father who is no longer here to guide him.
Yet his father remains with him, always.
Jack keeps Moe’s ashes in a pair of vintage boxing gloves over his bed where, at night, he can still hear the old man’s voice, as he relives those fights both won and lost.
And I sat in the Owyhee home of Nancy Egan, Richard's older sister, as she relived that day in 1999 when the U.S. government returned the remains of her ancestor, the great Chief Egan, a leader of the northern Paiute people, who helped resist the trend of arriving white settlers who encroached on traditional Indian lands.
In 1868, the U.S. Army was involved in the atrocity to cut off Chief Egan’s head, which for 121 years sat shelved at various museums in Washington D.C., before finally being returned home to Burns, Oregon, to a final resting place.
The pain and determination in Nancy’s voice spoke of wrongs that have never been made truly right here on the old battle grounds of the American West.
Alas, there will be some people here in town who will be happy to see me go.
The mothers of some young football players from the Native American reservation here didn’t like how I portrayed their sons in blogs I posted on the Internet, which spread through town like that Chicago fire.
One wanted to know why I had written such terrible things about her town and those kids, dragging them through the mud like that.
“You didn’t write anything that wasn’t true,” Lorraine assures me.
But I am not going to hide behind the comfort of friends.
I feel bad for the anger I have caused. These are just concerned mothers looking after their own, is all.
Considering the history between Native Americans and the non-native culture, I understand that a white guy like me, a journalist, a stranger, who shows up here is by default viewed with suspicion.
To compound that, when he writes something that seems capricious and unfair, it's game-over for that guy.
But there have been moments of forgiveness. When I showed up at the home of one Paiute father whose daughter plays football here, he told me he'd heard about the uproar over what I had written.
"You made a mistake," he said. "And I'm going to give you a chance to redeem yourself."
And he did. And I am forever grateful for that.
Lorraine's husband, Junior, also looks out for me as well, in his own way.
One week, before I took a 275-mile drive that would take me over a stretch of lonely backroads, Junior warned me about ice and driving tired and sudden storms.
“Also don't forget the open range and cows,” he wrote. “I'm starting to sound like a worried parent. LOL. Hey, you have a safe trip.”
Junior and Lorraine are more than just friends, they’re my landlords as well.
I rent the 100-year-old house that Lorraine’s grandfather built, just down a dirt road from where they live with the pack of loyal barking dogs Lorraine rescued from around town and the nearby Native American reservation, including the three-legged Tickie.
The couple’s life here signifies the community spirit people bring to their small towns.
Each morning, Junior phones in the official McDermitt temperature to the National Weather Service. On the coldest mornings, he sends Lorraine out to the backyard to check the thermometer before she heads off to drive the local school bus.
Lorraine also serves on the town board and for years was McDermitt’s postmistress.
On a blustery October afternoon, just as it started to snow, I arrived home to find Lorraine’s ATV parked out in front of my house. She was gathering up the summer watering hoses so they wouldn’t freeze and crack.
I helped her load the hoses in the underground cellar her grandfather had built and she told me about those mornings as a little girl, when her grandmother would send her down into the cellar on some chore.
That’s when he’d see the gutted deer or calf's carcass hanging from the ceiling and shudder.
She laughs now that the memory, this woman whose roots to the town and the land go back so far.
When I first travelled to this town all those weeks ago, the drive seemed endless, the miles ticking off as I headed north on Interstate 95 out of Winnemucca, the last cultural outpost before the vast loneliness of the high desert.
I felt like some modern day Magellan, afraid that if I ventured any further, I might drop off the end of the world.
And yet, just other day, as I returned from a trip, I inwardly rejoiced when I saw that McDermitt sign.
I was home at last, happy to be back.
Now it’s time to go, before winter sets in and the nights get too cold.
A rooster crowed as I packed my car on a late October morning at dawn. I drove south on I-95 toward Winnemucca and the rest of the world and my old life. At first light, crimson clouds hovered over white-capped mountain tops and hawks patrolled the sagebrush.
I’ll come back here, I told myself, and I know the new friends I’ve made will leave the light on for me.