High Desert, Open Road

Reno to Buckeye Creek

The ragged wagon train traveled east from Silver Mountain city, two or three families at the limits of patience and purse, turned away from Jacob Marklee’s toll bridge for lack of funds. Instead, they followed a double-rutted track winding down the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevadas, a decade’s worth of wooden wheels tamping down and doubling an older single-track trail cleaved by iron-shoed horses and leather-booted trappers and over-weighted prospectors. And it, in turn, surely followed paths worn by thousands of years’ worth of Washoe and Numu peoples and, for millennia before that, mule deer and elk and moose and whatever other giant mammals descended the big mountains in the winter, leaving the sugar pines and junipers to find warmth and water amongst the aspens and cottonwoods and sagebrush of the high desert below.

Or at least this is how I imagine it, as I pump my brakes on the steep descent of Highway 89 from modern-day Markleeville – population 201, an increase of 13 humans (presumably) from a decade earlier – for Highway 395 southbound, paralleling the shallow West Walker River and leading to my next stop in Bridgeport, California. Highways of man and beast have always led to water, and surely always will, no more so than in the arid, mountain deserts of the Great Basin. And as much as I romanticize hearing the imaginary grind of wagon wheels on sedimentary desert rock, of feeling the pull and stress and sweat of oxen through leather reins in my hands, I also know no pioneer ever experienced the liberation of the open road, windows rolled down, left forearm burned, hand surfing the airstream like a backseated-child while the poetry of John Prine serenades through crackling speakers. I drive the switchbacks, the smell of overheated brakes intermixing with residual brushfire smoke and the inimitable aroma of wet sagebrush: There is nothing more nostalgic than the smell of the Nevada desert after a rain. No mind that I’m technically in California; the pull of my youth does not recognize mere political borders.

The last 180-degree bend in the road parallels a miniature altiplano, a broad, flat plain of scrub brush lazily funneling between two sheer, barren ranges, a glacial ghost. I can see for miles, a cloudless blue sky interrupted to the south only by the ever-soaring turkey vulture, an animal with a sense of smell so keen that gas companies unintentionally stumbled upon them as collaborators: Have a leak in your pipeline in the middle of the desert? No worries, look for the congregating buzzards – the chemical additive included in natural gas smells like decomposing flesh to a scavenger. A good reminder, I think, that hidden utility lies in us all. I pull over at the bottom of the hill to ease my brakes and to write a note – the image of “glacial ghosts”, I think, is a good one, and I don’t want to forget it – and see a jackrabbit duck under a sagebrush as an overhead vulture floats by, its shadow diving and climbing on the varied surfaces, a black flag unfurling.

I follow Highway 395 to Bridgeport, a small town of alfalfa farmers and cattle ranchers and upper-middle class Bay Area alums who have recognized the value of clean streets and starred skies. And, also, the value in relocating to a new community but still in your own state, where the locals are less apt to complain about the “goddam Californians” moving to town and jacking up property values. I take Twin Lakes Road from 395 to Buckeye Creek where I will camp for the night, asphalt splitting in two the Hunewill dude ranch, both sides of the road containing cattle and horses, and tourists sentimental for less contentious times. I slow my truck as two men on horseback, wearing the weathered felt hats of working cowboys, no doubt rakishly handsome and impossibly polite, casually herd a cow and calf towards an open corral, the Sawtooth Range of Yosemite lurking like a Hollywood backdrop. Somewhere – everywhere, perhaps – near the tops of those mountains is my Tree of Life, spring snowmelt that finds its way east down the Sierra Nevadas, through creeks and valleys to the East Walker River, then joining the West, then through my childhood village of Yerington, Nevada, eventually dumping into Walker Lake. If it makes it there. Water in the Nevada desert is more precious than the state’s prolific haul of silver and gold, and the takings of men upriver, for hay and garlic and onions and cattle, has left Walker Lake 180 feet lower than before we non-indigenous decided the looming, people-eating Sierra Nevadas were simply too big to cross, and that this valley right here would do just fine.

I arrive at Buckeye Creek campground and am alone. The post-Fourth of July crowd is gone by Tuesday morning, though the detritus remains, waste overflowing bear-proof bins. I park my truck far from the sight and smell of the trash and restrooms – I’d make a poor gas-leak inspecting buzzard – and sit down on a rock. Then I listen: the ticking of my cooling-down truck engine. A slight breeze from an indecisive direction. White noise from the creek below me. A chirp. No, a peep. Condensed. Or abbreviated, like a short exhale from a squeaky toy. From my periphery I see the source, an athletic flash of movement from a camouflaged chipmunk, an animal so invariably small and cute that I am sure they must all die in adolescence. At first there is one. It is curious, and brave, though that is perhaps boosted by the startling quickness of this animal; I try to take pictures with my cell phone but it moves so fast the image is blurred beyond recognition.

I unwisely throw an almond in its direction, and before the chipmunk can claim it two more appear from the edges of my campsite. They barrel into the first chipmunk, the three of them rolling around like a cartoon dustup, a victor emerging to take the nut into its hands, as big as a football to a child. And now there are more. Perhaps ten of them; they dart into and out of my vision one at a time, distracting me, sniffing at my backpack, the wheels of my truck, the picnic bench. I feel one brush against my bare left foot as I watch another in the opposite direction; they are probing me, testing my defenses like Zulu warriors at the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, and I hope I am Lt. Bromhead in this reenactment and not Private Williams.