In Nevada, I've been everywhere, man (well, almost)

The two-lane road runs straight and true as it barrels through the Big Smoky Valley, a place so deep within rural Nevada's innards that few outsiders ever make it here. 

The skies are western-big and dotted with clouds, the landscape brown and dry and intimidating. I have the road to myself so I let my gaze scan the sagebrush, salt grass and rabbit brush in search of a wild horse, coyote or elk.

On impulse, I reach for my oversized DeLorme map book of Nevada, my trusty trucker’s atlas to this mammoth state, where the ragged mountain ranges run north to south, where the most interesting roads are dirt, and where the neon bar signs gesture through the darkness, attracting thirsty locals like cowboys to a corral.

The book is wet. My water cooler has leaked and I spread out the pages to dry in the sun, cursing myself at this rookie mistake. 

For months, through Covid and quarantine, I have pretty much stayed close to home. Only now am I pointing my 1998 Mercedes Benz northward, to once again venture out into the place known as Nevada’s Outback.

Whenever people ask what’s between Vegas and Reno, I tell them there’s not anything out there, but everything. 

This is where the real Nevada lies, with its stubborn red politics and rich mining history; a place where a contrary old rascal runs a guest house in a ghost town, always preferring a little coffee with his morning whisky; a place where every year they throw a Cowboy Poetry Festival for ranch hands who like to string a few words together.

Now I’ve left hibernation for a 1,500-mile journey across parts of rural Nevada still as tough well-used as old leather. My eyes, rusty from quarantine close-ups, ache at the endless western expanses that for months I could only imagine. 

Little details take on meaning, like the lines of telephone poles that run off at odd angles from the tarmac, like on some urgent mission, with a mind of their own.

Or the three burros, four-legged legacies to the state’s prospecting past, munching grass just down the road from the Happy Burro bar in downtown Beatty. 

Or the humble dirt track that juts off State Highway 376 near the Round Mountain Mine that some dreamer has misnamed Wine Glass Road.

My first stop is Winnemucca, whose name derives for the Paiute-Shoshone phrase for “One Moccasin.” The place found its way into a song sung by such country legends as Hank Snow and Johnny Cash, that strung together a list of 100 lyrical place names with the lyrical rapidity of a country-and-western rap song. 

I’ve been everywhere, man. Crossed the desert’s bare, man. I’ve breathed the mountain air, man. Of travel I’ve had my share, man. I’ve been everywhere.

That’s how I feel. But rather I need to go everywhere. 

I have places to go, people to see. 

I’ll meet with a cowboy preacher who brings the Good Word to forgotten ranches and cow camps. Inside a diner on the town’s main drag, I’ll watch him reach out a worn wrangler’s hand to lead the table in prayer, this self-made holy man whose phrase of choice is often “Can I get an Amen?”

I’ll meet a Native American football coach in a fly-speck town on the Nevada/Oregon border, whose team never wins. I’ll sit on a picnic table outside the town gas station and watch the traffic speed past, in a hurry to get somewhere else, listening to the coach talk about his gutsy players just finished a shortened four-game spring season in which they were outscored by a whopping 242 to 2.

A large, muscular man wearing a red baseball cap, he’ll tell how a high school with just 23 students is so hungry for eight-man football players that this fall they’ll try a willing and ranch-toughened Rez girl on the front line.

Then it’ll be on to Duckwater, an isolated reservation that’s home to a Pauite artist named Jack whose quiet demeanor belies a career of outspoken work that exposes the damage white culture has done to his tribe’s sacred lands. 

He titles his designs with language that riffs off the insults whites have hurled at Native Americans in Nevada, such as Sagebrush Heathen, Indian Uprising, Colonized Mind Designs, Pesky Redskins and Wretched Savages.

Before leaving home, I consulted my atlas to plot my way to Jack, running my finger along a thin line of a road that started out tarmac before quickly diminishing to dirt.

“Is that route even passable?” I asked.

“It’s good road,” Jack said.

We shall see.

When I get there, I plan to entice Jack to take a dip with me at a natural hot springs on the reservation that few outsiders know about let alone set foot in.

Then it will be on to the Nevada/Utah border to meet activists refurbishing a World War Two-era airfield that bears an ominous footnote as the training base for the men and machine that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Their work has forced them to reconcile the ill-fated connection between the people who detonated the bomb and the innocents below on which the doomsday device landed.

Along the way, on the road between these places and people, I’ll pass the home of a woman who built a little house on the prairie out of hay bales and watched in horror as wandering cattle chewed up her foundation.

I’ll walk into a hotel-casino and gag on heavy cigarette smoke and feel like I’ve stepped back into another era. I’ll look out my hotel room at a landscape of drab auto parts stores, fast-food joints and tire shops and realize this was a vision of the American West I hardly missed during shutdown.

But when I’m in my groove, I’ll be tooling down U.S. Highway 50, tagged as the Loneliest Road in America, and State Highway 6, which is even lonelier. 

I’ll drive many hundreds of miles to pass through just a handful of counties, forsaking four-lane thoroughfares for their more contemplative two-lane cousins. 

I’ll pass Battle Mountain, which bills itself as the Base Camp to Nevada’s Outback. I don’t know about that, but it certainly feels like a faraway place by any measure. 

Yeah, before I’m through, I’ll pass through Austin and Eureka, Ely and Tonopah, Goldfield and Alamo, Cherry Creek and Indian Springs.

And while I may not have been everywhere, man, I’m working on it.

Out into rural Nevada, the real Nevada.