Outback Nevada: A new nonfiction book about unvarnished places and unadorned people
My new nonfiction book, “Outback Nevada: Real Stories from the Silver State,” marked its official publication date today. Outback reflects newspaper pieces I wrote for several publications during a decade-long romp into parts of the 36th state few people see, and the colorful, often crazy, and sometimes curmudgeonly folks who live there. It’s available on Amazon, the University of Nevada Press and at many booksellers. Here’s an excerpt from the prologue, with a shout-out to my fellow Nevadans.
YOU CAN BUY THE BOOK HERE. AND THANKS!
University of Nevada Press: https://www.unpress.nevada.edu/books/?isbn=9781647790448
Many people — mostly tourists but also urban Nevadans — seem bewildered by the concept of taking that unsung drive between Las Vegas and Reno, or exploring any of the state’s hinterlands, like it was some crazy rocket launch into the void of outer space.
“What’s out there?” they ask. “Just a bunch of nothingness?"
The question has always baffled me.
"It’s not nothingness,” I say. “but something-ness.”
Because out there is where the real Nevada lies.
Whenever I grow weary of the noise of my Las Vegas life, when my suburban neighbors begin to grate and I itch for infinite vistas and endless two-lane straightaways, I point my car northward, toward Nevada’s untamed Outback.
Toward Beatty and Goldfield, Tonopah, Pioche and the Big Smoky Valley, Austin, Middlegate Station and Gerlach, Carver, Jackpot, and countless points in between.
I drive when I want to see wild mustangs and burros graze on the leather-colored landscape just off the highway tarmac. I drive when I want to gaze up at night skies so profoundly black I can see the glowing Milky Way and imagine just how far away heaven might be.
I drive when I want to follow the swirling dust clouds kicked up by a country boy inside a pickup truck, gleefully barreling down some anonymous dirt road, carving out his own freewheeling rite-of-passage, a young man leaving a trail of smoke and grit to rival any jet engine, one that might be seen from the moon, for all I know.
When doing journalism or just for thrills, I drive when I want to see, hear and feel rural Nevada, the real Nevada, that country-hearted salve for my curious big-city soul.
You need patience, strong coffee and a couple of tanks of gas to cover the entire length of Nevada, say, from far-southern Laughlin to the border town of Jackpot, at its northernmost reach.
It’s not the West’s longest state drive, but definitely one of its most dramatic.
The name Nevada derives from the Spanish word nieve, for “snow-covered,” a reference to the powdery peaks of the eastern Sierra. It’s America’s most mountainous state, its ranges running north to south, like knuckles, or backbones.
Driving the state’s major north-south arteries, U.S. Routes 93 and 95, takes you through vast valleys of sagebrush and creosote bushes, Joshua trees and Mojave poppy wildflowers, all flanked by prodigious mountain peaks on either side.
It’s only when you travel along latitudinal U.S. Highways 50 and 6, do these ranges take you on their heady rollercoaster ride of elevation rise and fall.
Some 50,000 miles of paved roads (and countless more unpaved ones) cross a state that ranks as the nation’s seventh-largest in land mass, yet is among America’s least-populated places. More than 80 percent of its 3 million residents live clustered around Las Vegas or Reno.
Why?
Water, or the lack of it.
Nevada is America’s most-arid state, and that absence of water — and the fact that 80% of the land is managed by the federal government — has kept the rural population low, allowing the landscape to remain primeval and wild.
Most of its outlanders — farmers, ranchers and townspeople — have settled near water, leaving the rest to four-legged inhabitants, including wolves, coyotes, foxes and mountain lions.
And those Nevada vistas can be breathtaking. One sunny winter morning in 2012, I drove west over the Spring Mountains and began the descent into the sprawling Pahrump Valley.
I had just returned from four years in Asia and was dumbstruck at the raw beauty and sheer scope of the high-desert terrain looming outside my windshield.
I called my father, another aficionado of all things western, including the novels of Louis L’Amour, and waxed about about the spectacle that lay before my eyes.
We hail from Upstate New York and just aren’t used to vistas like this.
“Dad,” I said. “The land, it just goes on forever!”
Still, for some reason, Nevada gets overshadowed by its yellow-haired sister to the west. California, the so-called “Golden State,” gets all the historical buzz for its 1848 gold rush, while Nevada, with its Comstock Lode, a massive deposit that gave the 36th state its identity as the “Silver State,” has, to my mind, often been relegated to a less-precious metal, as though awarded the second-place prize.
But those mines also gave Nevada its quirky, colorful history. The discovery of an active vein meant an influx of fortune-seekers, men who labored below ground and spent their earnings freely.
Towns sprang up from nothing, with names like Rhyolite, Berlin and Gold Point, many replete with opera houses, bars, hotels, newspapers, courthouses to try lawbreakers and jails to house them, and, of course, brothels.
Then when the mineral veins died, so did the towns, in many cases receding back to dirt and dust from which they came.
Mining remains a large part of rural economy. Today, Nevada produces more gold than any other U.S. state, including California, ranking second only to South Africa.
And Nevada’s frontier culture also holds up against California or any other western state as a place that teemed with pioneers-turned-national celebrities.
A young Jack Dempsey worked as a bartender and bouncer at the Mizpah Hotel in Tonopah, a gritty mining town where lawman Wyatt Earp once wore a badge. Samuel Clemens took the pen name “Mark Twain” while working for Virginia City’s Territorial Enterprise.
Reno tailor Jacob W. Davis created the first denim jeans, the durable apparel that later outfitted miners, cowboys, lawmen and desperados across the American West. U.S. Highway 50 still follows the trail of the old Pony Express.
In the early 1900s, the ornate Goldfield Hotel featured the only elevator west of the Mississippi River, its 154 rooms each containing a telephone, electric lights and heating — luxury that matched the main boulevards of Manhattan.
But rural Nevada is more than just long-shuttered grand hotels, ghost towns and museums to the past. People continue to scratch out a living here, with grit and humor, in places like Dyer, in the agricultural Fish Lake Valley.
One bar is The Boonies. A T-shirt sold there reads “Where the hell is Dyer?” Another features a telling mileage sign: “End of the World: 9 mi. Dyer, Nev.: 12 mi.”
Ralph Keyes, an alfalfa farmer and county commissioner, says living in rural Nevada takes common sense. “You have to have a hardy pioneering spirit,” Keyes told me in 2017. “If you want street lights and curbs, stay in the city.”
He relishes every day spent in this blissful middle-of-nowhere and described his life with plainspoken images, like a rural poet.
“This morning, I was up at 4 a.m. I rode an open tractor and watched the sun rise. I smelled the hay and watched the coyotes trot out of the fields, with the cool air and sun on my face.” He paused. “Just being part of that keeps me here. The smells, the sights, the taste of dirt in your mouth.”
That’s one reason I drive into Nevada’s Outback; out there, I can taste dirt in my mouth and get sand between my teeth.
Driving north from Las Vegas along State Route 95, I don’t feel I’ve really entered the Outback until I’m well north of of Indian Springs, when four-lanes narrow to two, at the turnoff toward mysterious Mercury and its tall tales of green men and secret government programs.
Only then does my mind get right, do I stretch my emotional legs and begin to unwind. I see dirt roads that jettison from the tarmac, exploding like laser beams toward the far horizon, and fight the urge to drive every one of them.
During my countless trips out there, I’ve hiked atop Big Dune, the rippling waves of sand crossing the Amargosa Valley, and crawled deep into old mining shafts with a pair of modern prosectors, in search of — not gold or silver — but the abandoned denim bibs and trousers now worth a fortune.
I’ve sat at the tiny bar inside the Happy Burro in Beatty, clutching a $2 bottle of beer and a bowl of spicy house chili, and later stood outside with two native residents as they pointed at a sandstone mountain that towers over town, admiring it like it was one of the French Alps, saying “This is why we live here.”
In Tonopah, a town situated atop Nevada’s Mason-Dixon Line, that separates north from south, I’ve drank morning coffee with a circuit judge inside the Mizpah Hotel, after a night of quaffing craft beers with a horse activist at the brewery across the street.
Rural Nevada, it seems, always seems to throw you a surprise: One of the state’s best used book stores is located on the Tonopah’s main drag and you can spot a lot of cowboy hats perusing the aisles.
I’ve stepped inside the general store in Dyer to revel in town gossip and attended Native American scholar Boyd Graham’s class on spoken Shoshone at White Pine High School in Ely.
I’ve traveled with a retired Michigan cop to chronicle the long-ago graves of Nevada’s early pioneers on the Internet, to make sure history endures.
I’ve escorted two college-aged filmmakers on a tour of Nye County brothels, so they could talk to real working girls. I bought one of them his first bottle of beer at Miss Kathy’s Short Branch Saloon in Crystal.
I’ve written about dreamers like Kim Bozarth who built a modern home in the Big Smoky Valley out of bales of straw and walked the ruins of artist Frank Van Zant’s rough-hewn 1960s paean to the Native American spirit, a Burning Man-like revelation envisioned long before that festival found a home in Nevada’s high-desert.
Still, there are always new stories to tell out there.
They’re not death knells for the rural life, but stories of ongoing life and enduring culture — from battles over water rights to celebrations of cowboy poets, fiddle-playing ranchers and the spoken word.
Whenever I hit the road, I leave behind big-city traffic and crime like a good hunting dog shakes water from its coat. And as soon as I return, I’m already anxiously anticipating my next adventure into that peerless panorama of somethingness.
In the meantime, I think of that teenager behind the wheel of his pickup, kicking up some backroad dust, as if to remind the world that he’s out there, and that farmer-poet perched atop his open-air tractor at dawn, the wind and the sun on his face.
They’re celebrating the dirt in their mouths, both feeling very much alive.
