Another Round at the Say When: Out in the Middle of Somewhere
As the days melt into weeks, I find myself feeling more at home in the tiny high-desert house I inhabit on the Oregon-Nevada border.
The place is officially located in Oregon, just across a small field from Interstate 95. I awaken each morning to the squeal of southbound cars as they slow to the 25-mph speed limit here in town, or the engine roar of those speedy types who hit the gas leaving town, hurtling into the wide-open spaces, north toward Boise and beyond.
The worst offenders are the big 18-wheelers that pump their muscular air brakes as they lumber into town, sometimes in the middle of the night, the high-compression blast rousing me from the deepest sleep.
During the day, I can look out my window from the table on which I have set up my computer, where I sit each day trying to figure out this western town and the people who live here, and watch the tourists.
The dual state-welcome signs sit right across the road from one another, near the post office and the old two-celled jailhouse made of rocks that’s now houses little but dust and cobwebs, a place where stray cats give birth to their kittens.
Passers-through pull their vehicles onto the road shoulder to take selfies in front of the Nevada or Oregon sign, depending in which direction they’re traveling. I hear the laughter of children, couples holding hands, both young and old making clownish poses in front of an inanimate road placard.
When his old pickup truck is running, my neighbor Bob, a peculiar man in his early 80s who once worked as a ranch buckeroo, scrambles over from his well-manicured dirt yard and offer to take pictures for the tourists.
The encounters don’t last long, because I’m pretty sure Bob gives most people a start, and they hop back into their cars and Bob goes back to his post, no doubt on the lookout for the net possibility of human interaction, fleeting as it might be.
Other than that, it’s pretty quiet here, in this town of a few hundred souls.
My rental house was built in 1917 and my landlords, Junior and Lorraine, who live just down the dirt backroad, across from the long-shuttered White Horse saloon, display pictures of the place before it was refurbished.
Lorraine and her family grew up in what is now the garage that sits a few feet away from my wraparound front porch, the place where Junior now houses his light plane.
Much of the house’s interior is original, from the kitchen cabinets to the wainscoting and sturdy door frames.
There used to be a hardwood floor, but a previous renter turned off the heat in the winter and the pipes burst, flooding the entire house, ruining the floor.
Junior wasn’t too happy about that.
I came here to write about a small town’s relationship to its eight-man high school football team.
On sweltering afternoons throughout August and into September, I walked over to the football field to watch the boys practice, taking notes as the two coaches talk about this year’s chances of the undermanned team that rarely wins.
Now the weather has turned and the chill of fall has descended upon this little town. Temperatures drop into the 30s on some nights, prompting me to switch on my heater.
Still, even with the coming of a new season, I don’t believe I’ve come any closer to understanding this place and its inhabitants than I did when I first arrived here nearly two months ago.
I still have long lists of people to contact and have pored over the notes of interviews with those I have reached, yet no clear picture has emerged.
I’m not yet sure what my story even is, or how I fit into it, if I do at all.
And here’s the thing about small towns, those rural locales you blow through en route to someplace else.
You wonder: What do people do out here?
They’re probably all sitting in their parlors just waiting for some outsider to knock on their door.
But no.
People are busy here. They lead active, complex lives. Their days are far, far from one-dimensional.
With most, I have to make appointments days and sometimes weeks down the road, and then not be surprised when those meetings are pushed back yet again.
The longer I stay in McDermitt, the more I realize how much I don’t know about the place.
The community, of course, is comprised of more than just a single town. The school here serves students not just from McDermitt, but the nearby Paiute-Shoshone reservation, a burg called Orovada, about 30 miles south of here, as well as the farms and ranches of the more-distant Kings River Valley, and places in between.
Slowly, I am adapting to the pace of life here.
Each evening, I walk due-west toward the setting sun, on the ribbon of asphalt called Cordova Road, named after the long-closed mine outside town.
It’s here that I find peace. Passing cars are rare and it’s so quiet I can hear the cicadas and smell the sagebrush, along with the occasional whiff of a mother skunk. Crows and ravens eye from the tops of fence posts, and even the cows turn from their grazing as I pass.
But I keep my distance, because some ranchers don’t like strangers messing with their cattle, whether you're a dog or a human, and a few have been know to take a few pot shots to make their point.
Once, as I walked on a hot Saturday afternoon, a bearded local slowed his truck, leaned over the shotgun on his front seat, and handed me a can of cold beer before rumbling off. Another time, a pickup driver stopped to ask why the heck anyone would be walking that road when a car or pickup worked just fine.
We talked for a half-hour, exchanged telephone numbers and went our merry ways, me slower than him.
In my brief time here, I’ve broken some ground, made some friends.
Junior, my landlord, rides around town on his ATV and stops whenever we cross paths. Or I’ll go over to their house and pet their four rescue dogs as Lorraine heats up a pot of coffee. Not long ago, Junior dropped off a basket of fruit that came from the farm of Lorraine’s relatives.
On any given day, I can drop in on the two football coaches, Richard and Jack, or Todd, the gray-haired grandfather who once broke noses here with his brand of smash-mouth high school football, more than a half century ago.
They all live just a few steps away from my house, and so I rarely use my car, unless it’s to make the 74-mile trip down to Winnemucca to shop for food.
Jack lives just down the dirt road that runs past my place. He’s about my age, has a harem ten cats, and dotes over a little lapdog named Hazel.
I would have befriended Jack anywhere I met him, but it just happens to be here.
The other night, I accompanied Jack on his evening walk with Hazel and we headed over to the secondary dirt landing-strip that’s adjacent to the municipal airport.
Junior usually keeps the weeds at bay, in case he needs to land here, but now they’re overgrown. Hazel sniffs and snorts as we walk, one eye damaged long ago by a boxer's swipe of one of Jack's cats.
The last rays of sunlight fire up the desert landscape with the aura of a Renaissance painting, with muted colors of brown and gold and orange.
I love McDermitt at this moment.
Just the other day, my new friend Theirry, a French scholar who has spent years here studying the Paiute culture and language, who used to rent my house from Junior and Lorraine, texted me about having dinner at the Say When casino, the town’s meeting spot.
I invited Jack and Thierry brought along a Native elder, an Bannock Indian artist named Harley with whom he spent the day, driving off road in his pickup, looking for hunks of desert mahogany for his next art project.
We drank beer and talked about life in and out of McDermitt.
When we left, we all said goodnight to Chloe, the no-nonsense casino owner, and I walked home, to my little 1917-era house, along the dirt road on a moonless night, the darkness so pitch-black I held my hand out in front of my face for guidance.
Happy that I am making connections far outside my comfort zone, out here in the middle of somewhere.
