Tag: Nevada

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Third Beach to Hoh River

We sit on giant driftwood bleachers in the morning sun, peanut butter and rice cakes in hand and the protruding cliff face of Taylor Point rising in the distance a mile in front of us, up from the Pacific Ocean at the south end of Third Beach, space and fog lazily obscuring the sea stacks of Giants Graveyard.  I am on the Pacific Northwest Trail at the western edge of the Olympic National Park at my older sister’s urging, and though she intends a three-day hike from Third Beach to the Hoh River to be bonding for her and her oldest son, it is quiet therapy for me, an opportunity to perhaps accomplish something visceral and palpable after fifteen months of spinning my cubicled professional wheels.

We drove up from Reno the day prior, my sister, oldest niece, and oldest nephew, leaving hours too late but not feeling particularly pressed, as I have embraced my pending retirement.  Or am trying to.  Shifting, on a dime, from twenty years of Army service and a largely feigned laissez faire commitment to schedule to actually living The Attitude of Meh is no simple task.  I’ve started the transition by not shaving, committing (or not. Whatever!) to developing a personal beard style I call “Spanish Moss,” which looks exactly like you think it might.  So we leave a few hours late?  Not to worry.  We turn a ten-hour drive into a twelve-hour one and, still well shy of our start point, are consoled with an extended trip to a Portland-area Wal-Mart to pick up last minute supplies.  We overnight at the Lewis and Clark State Park near Winlock, Washington, hours short of our target but exposed to a view of the indomitable Mount St. Helens to the north.  The volcano looms large both in front of us and in my older sister’s and my memory.  Though it is recently active, it most spectacularly erupted in May of 1980, exactly a month before my sister’s eleventh birthday and a year before our mother’s third divorce and our repatriation to Nevada.  We lived in northwest Washington when the mountain blew, winds carrying volcanic ash the 250 miles north to our small town of Sedro Woolley and depositing it on our family’s cream-colored Ford Galaxy 500.  The car had a big back seat and a wide, gently sloping rear window with an apartment-sized shelf above the seat that served naturally as a bed, fort, or escape pod for any road trip of longer than an hour.

We sit around the campfire, old-growth Douglas Firs towering over us, my sister and my niece and nephew, the latter two now far more adult than child so they can share in the jokes as we talk about our lives as kids.  Wistful and meandering is the conversation chain that flows around family and a campfire; a late morning start and a long drive turning from a discussion on volcanoes and ash to a Galaxy 500 and rear windows and road trips to remember that time a storm blew your bedroom windows out in the middle of the night and there was glass all over your bed and mom and dad couldn’t find you?  Though nature can be powerful, the supernatural is inexplicable and whether through the banality of chance or the magic of fortune, a storm neither sucked me out of second-floor windows nor peppered me with glass shards, as I was snug asleep at the foot of my sister’s bed in the next room, a place I frequently went as a child, driven there by nightmares.

We get up early the next morning and pack like professionals, driving three more hours through the Scrabbler’s-delight towns of Hoquiam and Quinault and Queets; stopping for coffee at one of the Northwest’s ubiquitous drive-thru coffee bars; then north along the 101 and certainly one of the prettiest stretches of road in America.  We just make our pre-arranged pick-up time at the Oil City Road trailhead.  Though most people hike from the Hoh River north, we’re doing it in the reverse, and Seth from Forks has agreed to pick us up here and drop us off an hour north at the Third Beach trailhead.  Seth is a college student in Boise, but lives here in Forks, and though he appears to be about twenty, the interior of his truck, with its coffee mugs and backpacks and work gloves and climbing gear, gives the impression that he’s already living a full life.  He shares his local knowledge, elating my sister with the good news that the coastal black bears are timid (“the inland bears are another story”); titillating her with the insider information that the town of Forks, though the literary locus for Twilight, was simply copied and reproduced en masse in British Columbia for the film because it “was cheaper and Kristen Stewart would have been bored out of her mind if she had to live here for three months” (she would have been); and entertaining all of us by calling Aberdeen, home of Kurt Cobain, may he rest in peace, “Methlaberdeen.”

Parting Shot, Hoh River

Seth drops us at the start of a canopied trail leading a mile and a half from a parking lot down through the Hoh River Rainforest, and after passively-aggressively-unsuccessfully suggesting that my sister, niece, and nephew remove their rain gear (“it’s not raining, and you’ll get hypothermia”), we head for the beach.  Google reviews of this hike promise ankle-deep mud; knee-deep and fast-water river crossings; boulder-scrambling that requires properly timing the tide; and a trail that is “more obstacle course than hike.”  So, after a peanut butter and rice cake fueling, and a second passive-aggressive-unsuccessful rain gear removal suggestion, we begin.  I have nominally prepped for the hike, my only concern with negotiating boulders around a blind corner, so I naturally assume that the first stop – Taylor Point – is where we must cross boulders only during the outgoing tide.  It is not.  It is, rather, the impetus for the first of our two “group discussions.”

Not having children is both boon and bane.  I am free to come and go as I please, and am not burdened with the demands of responsibility for a living, breathing, DNA-sharing thing.  I need not exert the inefficiencies of, to be blunt, caring.  This, of course, is theory; in practice I would be perpetually panic-stricken if I were a parent.  A scraped-knee would likely induce in me barely concealable tears and a minor case of hyperventilation.  My niece and nephew are now 17 and 19, but it is hard to look at them in any manner other than as objects to be hurled wide-eyed and giggling into the air or as face-painted children ready for an “Uncle Jay Day”, something I surely looked forward to more than they did.  So as I venture fifty yards or so onto the boulders around Taylor Point, and realize that I cannot see anything but cliffs and more rocks and an incoming tide and that this might cause some problems for my traveling companions, I, as my older sister might say, lose my shit.  I look back at my sister gingerly negotiating the boulders and my niece absorbed in her vain search for tide pool creatures, and say “turn around.” My sister freezes, pauses, looks at me, then asks, “turn around?”

I do not like feeling anything but fully in control, and though I am confident that no wave foreseeable could possibly shake me from my perch, even the potential danger of some harm coming to those I see – even erroneously – as ones in need of protection is uncomfortable.  So when my sister asks, “turn around?”, it triggers in me something instinctual.

“TURN THE FUCK AROUND.”  This is a gross, and, in hindsight, hilarious overreaction, but the self-imposed burdens of leadership are significant and spontaneous, and turnthefuckaround seemed like a pretty good thing to say.  My sister moves, quickly.  My niece is cooly unconcerned, and my nephew chooses this moment to remove his raingear.  But we scramble back across the boulders, our final few steps retracing the original, which were then on dry sand and are now in shin-deep water.  The debrief is fairly quick.  We agree that in return for moving quickly when there is a hint of urgency in my voice, I won’t swear anymore, which is a fairly reasonable concession on their part.  The raingear, however, stays on.

The most dangerous stretches of the Third Beach to Hoh River trail are conspicuously marked by large, black and red circular discs affixed prominently on trees and next to an entry/exit point diverting you away from the beach, and danger, and into the rain forests of the Olympic National Park.  They should not be ignored, at any cost, and heeding their warning, after climbing up or down wooden rung-missing ladders and rope assisted inclines, rewards you with silent marches on trails peppered with Pacific banana slugs, looking unmistakably like giant turds; through permanently damp, waist-high skunk cabbage, deer fern, and pick-your-berry (Salmon? Huckle? Black twin?); under soaring Sitka spruce and Western Hemlock.  There are obstacles to be negotiated at every turn, cooperation required, and like a corporate sponsored team-building event, we are positively lifted by the time we make it to Toleak Point.  Everything seems to converge here.  Sea otters, permanently content on their backs, float with the current; Bald eagles projectile-shit from tree branches like expectorant, a county fair participant readying to launch a watermelon seed in reverse; sea lions cruise the channels between rock outcroppings, hunting fish and barking commands to each other like bloodhounds on a chase.  It is easy to imagine life here hundreds of years ago, single plumes of campfire smoke rising from the tree line, soft-lit Thomas Kinkade landscapes unobstructed by the noise and tools and trappings of electricity and progress.  We find a camping spot, luxuriant, just above the beach and the driftwood piles marking high tide.  We hang rope to dry our gear and quickly make the camp ours, pitching our tents and taking forty-five minutes of collective effort and patience to start a fire.  My niece and nephew are, literally, without complaint, and I am a bit ashamed that I find it moving.  If we can’t start a fire, no biggie, but we did, and that’s pretty cool too.

We’re set up early enough to scour the beach, walking over a thick blanket of dried, shredded paper-like seaweed and finding, among other things, Styrofoam coolers, rope, nets, buoys, bags, and all things plastic.  The ocean is an artist, a driftwood sculptor and a gem polisher, but she occasionally does her best Andres Serrano impression, vomiting on her shores the effluence of man far and near.  My nephew finds a bleached skull, sans the jawbone but a radiator-like screen in the nasal cavity intact, and we spend twenty minutes debating what this belonged to.  Is it a coyote or a wolf? An adolescent saber-toothed cat?  A dog?  Sea Lion seems badass – it’s a lion of the sea, after all – but I realize that Google will settle this debate and then, as quickly as we gained it, the knowledge will be gone.  No need to retain it, the answer is always just a search engine away.  I wonder what Google, for all its power, has done to the imagination of a boy.

Last WalkWe spend the night at Toleak Point and head out early the next morning, traversing beach, then rain forest, then beach again.  We startle a raccoon and trace the solo steps of a deer, joined briefly by a larger, second set, then solo again as one set of tracks disappears in the woods to the left and another in the ocean to the right.  Other than a slight mist the night prior, the weather holds out for three days.  Freshwater creeks are shallow but adequate, and with our water filter we could have safely left all water bottles and Camelbacks at home and survived just fine.  The warnings of mud and a fast river crossing are false, as the drought has reached the coast as well.

At Jackson Beach we climb down the vertical face using fifty feet of rope ladder, eat the remainder of our dehydrated food (Jamaican Jerk Chicken and Pad Thai) and have our second group discussion.  This one concerns whether we stay our last night here, risking setting up camp at what may or may not be the high-water mark, or wait for the tide to go out and skirt the point, crossing what turns out to be the much-anticipated boulder field.  The latter wins, and my sister and I kill time talking about life after the Army.  I watch my niece and nephew walking in the sun and think about how one experiences life and risk and adversity and beauty relevant to our age.  This trip as a twenty-year-old, in possession of a healthy ego and an unearned sense of optimism, would have been a significantly different experience than that of a forty-four-year-old in transition.  Articulating the risk of hypothermia from wearing raingear when it’s not raining, for example, is such a pedantic thing to say, but life is easier when someone is there to protect you, no?

The tide starts to go out, so we pack up and start our trip around the last corner, hesitant, not knowing what is on the other side or how far we have to go.  But it opens up after a few hundred yards, the beach covered in giant driftwood logs like dropped matchsticks and the flats reflecting the setting sun and the most extraordinary view.

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Life on the Lincoln Highway/The Fourth Street Project

Carl Graham Fisher, the astigmatic speed-freak credited with envisioning the first trans-continental road – the Lincoln Highway – may not have ever stepped foot in Nevada, but his life mirrors the boom-or-bust history of the Silver State. Born in Indiana, Fisher’s father left him when he was young, causing Fisher to quit school early to help support his family. He proved adept at the task, and revealed himself to be a remarkable inventor, investor, and showman. By the age of 50 he was worth over $100 million and famous for his promotional stunts, which involved, among other things, dropping a car from a hot air balloon and then racing it back to town (the dropped car was engine-less; he drove a prepositioned, perfectly good car back); riding a bicycle off the roof of a building; and enlisting a baby elephant, frocked in a Fisher-project sandwich board, to caddy for a vacationing President-elect Warren G. Harding. Like the history of Nevada, Fisher’s fortunes rose and fell, and he was destitute near the end of his life, surely the result of the Great Depression, but probably the result of his whims as well. His then ex-wife, whom he met and married when he was engaged to another, said he was all speed and that his millions were simply incidental – “he just liked to see the dirt fly.”

In 1913 the thirty-nine year old Fisher conceived of the Lincoln Highway, eventually labeled Highway 40 and now known as Interstate 80, and though through much of the country her asphalt is laid within a few miles of Fisher’s original trace, for 8.6 miles in Reno the Lincoln Highway still resides, incognito, as Fourth Street. All of American History moves east to west, and so it does here as well: the oldest stretch of the original Lincoln Highway begins somewhere around the very modern Rail City Carwash; her terminus a parking lot in Verdi on the other side of railroad tracks with an elevated view of an abandoned, vandalized trailer and a short walk through a sandy field to the Truckee River. Here I find two fly fishermen, retired, going home to Santa Cruz with nothing more than a nibble or two. The older man tells me that he remembers driving Highway 40 as a kid, staring out the window from the backseat of his father’s car at the desert, then the motels and bars, then more desert. I tell him the buildings probably haven’t changed much but keep to myself my suspicions that the road seems to be about as lucky as he is. Fourth Street, I think, could use a nibble. Or two.

Three hours earlier I am the first breakfast customer of the day at Los Compadres; on the way out I watch as an industrial sized garbage dumpster births an old woman. We lock eyes and she, sheepishly and after a pause, says “I was talking to the bird.” I ask if it answered; she smiles and continues her day. I momentarily consider following her rather than Carl Fisher’s aspirations, but instead walk across the street to inspect the artwork on the Desert Sunset bar. The owner, huge and tank-topped and holding back a pit bull with a giant metal chain the size used to tow cars, emerges from the motel next door. He’s gregarious and proud of his business, and we talk about the other hotels on Highway 40.

A sign on the door at Shorty’s tells me that ROADHOUSE TOM’S COATRUN Has Moved to the Wonder Bar; I contemplate their frivolous use of capital letters but quickly resolve it in Shorty’s favor, as I have a weakness for the semi-colon and who am I to judge. An Indian – the sub-continent type, not the native – at the desk of the Hi Way 40 Motel lets me park for free while I take pictures; the woman at the In-Town Motel does as well, reluctantly and only after scolding me for texting while I was turning into her parking lot (guilty). I am sized up by a prostitute near the bus station; I discuss the tragic beauty of the mosaic entryway of the N.C.O. Railroad Depot, soiled by urine and spray paint, with a man sporting a neck tattoo and who I think is going to ask me for money but instead just stands and stares with me; I pause from picture taking at Abby’s Hwy 40 to let a man, severely overweight, pass by in his wheelchair. He moves not by pushing the wheels with his hands, but by shuffling his feet slowly forward, one never fully extending beyond the other. For three blocks I am enchanted by a middle-aged Hispanic man’s custom bicycle. It has thick wheels and extended handle bars and a beautiful silver eagle mounted on the head stem. The bike is painted the colors of the Mexican flag, and I tell the rider – booted, cuffed denim jeans, snapped-to-the-top black satin jacket with matching slicked back hair and dark sunglasses – that his bike is badass. He says thank you.

The west end of Fourth Street is no more optimistic, but the fornlorn seems to have dispersed a bit. There is an artist’s motel, seemingly in business but without a car or person in the parking lot; a brief stretch of industrial, the kind built big and cheap and windowless and populated with gymnastic centers and beer distributors; then a huge, abandoned wooden riverfront resort complex, fence locked and without any indication of what it once was. Then, nothing. A stretch of road with high desert and retaining wall on the right and a rolling river with trees in foliage the colors of fading sunshine and leaking chlorophyll on the left. This, I think, is what must have driven Carl Fisher’s dream, and the dream of Highway 40 and is maybe even what drives someone’s dream on the other end of Fourth Street. Maybe the dreams of a woman who talks to birds.

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The Renaissance Project: (1 of 4)

I’ve made the long trip from my high desert town in Mason Valley to the rugged, feral Jarbidge Mountains in the northeast corner of Nevada just twice in my life, both times in the passenger seat of my grandfather’s 1962 Ford truck, homemade plywood and metal horse trailer following behind.  The Jarbidge Mountains north of Elko were, and are, prime mule deer hunting grounds, and for a week each fall my grandfather, his off-spring, and the many others in the Venn diagram that was his life would gather for a primordial return to drinking, hunting, and cooking that was, I would only later realize, my only significant Y chromosome exposure in my otherwise XX-filled adolescent world.

The 8-hour by car/12-hour by trailer-dragging truck odyssey started early in the morning for me, even earlier if you consider the amount of time my grandfather surreptitiously put in teaching me how to saddle a horse, how to shoot a rifle, how to crack preposterously silly jokes (including one that ended in returning, while standing in an elevator, a strange woman’s skirt to her ass-crack) – all skills needed to survive a week at deer camp.

My grandfather was efficient with his words, and my memories of those long drives are monopolized by the nostalgia-inducing rattles of hand-cranked door windows, a heater that worked remarkably well on my left leg but not so much on my right, a compass glued to the dashboard, seemingly bobbing in time to the Marty Robbins and Charley Pride 8-tracks grandpa alternated in the bolted-on stereo.  We would stop for a quick breakfast at the Wig-Wam in Fernley, then drive onto a pristine I-80 pockmarked by the lonely alfalfa- and gold and copper mine-fueled economies of northern Nevada: Lovelock, Winnemucca, Battle Mountain, Carlin; even today, blips on an interstate causing only fleeting, sad astonishment to all those traveling between, precious home to those who know nothing else.

In Elko we would stop on Idaho Street downtown, both coming and going, but always at the base of the giant Styrofoam polar bear looming from the facade of the hundred year-old Commercial Casino, metal arrows shot from compound bows of alcohol and adrenaline-infused teens protruding from her exposed abdomen.  I remember, once, waking from the narrow bench seat of my grandfather’s truck to see that white bear directly over me, spectral, back and bottom-lit by the soft red and yellow neon lights of the casino and contrasting starkly with the cold dark of a Nevada night and the foggy haze of my sleepy fourteen year-old eyes.

Deer camp itself was, in spite of night, snow, mountains and cold, the temporally organized chaos of men who, though arriving at different times on different days, possessed that institutional knowledge inherent to habit, the end result a harmony of horses, saddles, guns, and military surplus tents and equipment of an era congruent to the man who occupied or handled it: World War II for my grandfather, Vietnam for his sons, the Korean War for those falling in-between.  Everything was durable and thick, huge cast iron stoves spewing wood smoke from heavy gauge, wax-coated canvas tents; bottomless Dutch ovens hanging over fires or warming on gas stoves; cheap beer and rot-gut whiskey flowing, oh the whiskey.  The stuff was a marvel to me.  It seemed to have no effect on my grandfather (I only later found out he had stopped drinking years prior), made one uncle talk even louder (a Marine Corps cannoneer in Vietnam, he was occupationally hard of hearing in one ear and genetically in both) and jollier, and made a great uncle frighteningly mean. I stayed away from him at night, but during the day and when sober he could be disarmingly nice.  I shot a rabbit once and he taught me to skin and clean it, showing neither impatience nor condescension with my timidity and apprehension.

Of all the characters in the annual, week long rite of passage, the Ford looms largest.  My grandfather had an aluminum Caravan Camper bolted to the bed of the truck, muted water-color western scene curtains (homemade) over the windows and door, a plywood table (homemade) bolted to one bed rail, a modified metal-spring cot bolted to the other.  Sometimes my grandfather would sit in the camper, reading old newspapers by the light of a Coleman kerosene lantern, emerging occasionally with some treasure from years gone by.  I rarely went inside any further than my arm would reach, partially out of some instinctual respect to not invade a place so obviously his, partially out of awe of the overwhelming number and variety of objects the camper would produce.

Now the truck is mine.  I asked for it, ostensibly as a joke in one of the many moments of twistedness as my family negotiated the transition of my grandfather’s possessions from him to us as the last years of his life unhurriedly but unmistakably crept towards him.  But I meant it, I wanted the truck, and though perhaps I wasn’t the most deserving, I think my grandfather knew I would take the obligations of owning such a thing seriously.  I drove it, on my fortieth birthday, the ninety miles from Yerington to Reno, stopping three times to bang dirt out of the choking fuel filter as the engine sputtered prior to dying, me cruising to a stop on the shoulder of a snow dusted US Route 95A.  The trip was different than all the other hundreds of times I’d driven that exact route, perhaps because I was now 40, but more likely, I suppose, because I was driving my dead grandfather’s truck and the rattling-windows brought back more than just memories of quarter-century old deer hunting trips.  Right there I used to work for a man who, upon reflection, might very well have been some sort of pedophile; here is the dirt road entrance if you want to take the back way to one-hundred-fifty-year-old Fort Churchill; after this curve in the road you’ll see the little valley where, as a kid, my grandfather would invariably point out a herd of wild horses walking amongst the sagebrush and creosote.

I left the truck in Reno at my mother’s house, directions to a long-hauler as to where to pick it up and where to drop it off.  I failed to prepare him for the verbosity that is my mom, and certainly failed to extrapolate for the fact that she would be seeing off a truck that was first her father’s and now her son’s.  And now the truck sits here, in front of my house in Tennessee, where I can sit and look at it out of my window even as I type, visualizing what it will be and hoping I don’t forget what it was.

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The Church Invisible (4 of 4)

A spring day in Tucson: the sun beats down, already, the heat magnified or diminished by the absence of humidity, I can never figure out which. On a mid-morning  run with a friend and the air hangs heavy, with heat, with smells of a morning-after detoxification, with my own history.  Biennial trips to this town are conducive to foolish sentimentalism, particularly if one already tends that direction, and much of me is here in Tucson.  Almost all of me is of the desert.[1]  Here for, some would say, an overdue wedding (though nothing good in the desert happens quickly), we run on a Mesquite and Willow Acacia-lined path along the Rillito, a sanded wash that lately, due to groundwater pumping and population and a depleted Tucson Basin aquifer, only very occasionally answers to River; scattering in front of us Harris’s Antelope squirrels and Lesser Earless lizards, brave until we are right on top them and then sprinting away, blindingly quick and beautiful in a devilish sort of way.  The desert, it seems to me, despite its desolation and acerbity and extortive leanings, is accommodative and prone to potential.

Example: the wash.  Heavily vegetated and waiting for liquid fulfillment, patiently, it bides its time as a temporary reprieve for anything with legs, or wings, non-discriminatory; and there, on the banks, the presently vacant City of Fun, Inc. carnival, octopus arms and mallet-ended fulcrums and tea-cupped turntables dormant but for one man hosing down a tractor-trailer; fleeting, precarious joy in abeyance only until the sun goes down when it will then come to life, iridescent with light, and the momentary absence of worry; with the sparkled pubescent longing to steal a moment alone, if for only a flash, at the top of the Ferris wheel or in the darkened back corner of the House of Horrors; here, continuing on the path, the Cactus Wrens and Vireos and Abert’s Towhees calling safely from the spiked confines of the ocotillo and acacia.  They can leave – they do have wings – but they do not.  Something keeps them here, something in this non-judgmental desert that lets you, if you can stand it, be who you are and stay as long as you want; it is addictive, it becomes home in a way that is either incapable of or beyond description – that somethingness Edward Abbey reduced to, well, “something”: there is something there which the mountains, no matter how grand and how beautiful, lack; which the sea, no matter how shining and vast and old, does not have.[2]

The desert, though it can be a trap, an inert ambush lying passively in wait, where it will, if you let it, consume you, leaving you parched and cracked-lipped if you are lucky, starched-white boned if you are not; is also a preservative, sanguinity and resilience rewarded by people or things (a fifty-year old truck) from the past, the discovery striking in you a flint of something, nostalgia or love or a rumination on destiny, if such a thing exists.  Surely this truck doesn’t have one, it has neither destiny nor free will, it has no choice in its fate but there is something, a sum of parts or energy or personality or history.  The arid, high desert has preserved the truck, and memory may preserve emotions, but there is always something more, something frequently both frustratingly and gloriously invisible and unexplainable in its potential.

This church invisible has converted me, and I have self-imposed a deadline of the first week of July to finish the truck.  I work relentlessly.  I have done all I can do with it in my own garage, and for the last several weeks it has occupied a spot in Anthony’s workshop, where I can use both his tools and his expertise.  I go there on weekends, a coffee in one hand and an offering in the other, a twelve-pack of lemonade or a bottle of Fast Orange hand cleaner, something to karmically defray both the kindness Anthony has shown me and the experience I am taking.  Today we remove the bed, crisscrossing nylon webbing from alternate corners of the truck and then raising it using Anthony’s homemade hydraulic lift, setting it back down on a wheeled-cart where Anthony will tend to it later. We set to work, Anthony surgeon to my lumberjack, he cuts, removes, copies, welds, grinds and paints the multiple rusted-out spots on the truck, leaving not a trace of his graft and simultaneously allowing me to keep my grandfather’s truck almost entirely in the original.[3]

I, alternatively, am the antithesis, methodically breaking rusty bolts, crudely spray painting smaller parts, oafishly grinding away at the frame with a steel wire wheel.  It is here, I decide, my grandfather’s truck becomes mine, decades of Nevada dirt and rust and mouse turds and Cottonwood leaves falling from places that haven’t seen the light of day in almost fifty years, my grandfather no doubt wondering what in the world it is I am doing expending so much time and energy scrubbing half-century old leaf springs.  He was a man who spent a life time making something, using his hands, concluding each day with a visual confirmation that his toil had amounted to something identifiable, even if it were grading a stretch of road or irrigating an alfalfa field or shoeing a horse or front-end loading buckets of dirt from one place to another, and I wonder if perhaps he, over his lifetime, had become desensitized to the emphatic corporeal nature of what I feel only after working on my truck; this thing I encounter after seeing my reflection in a hand-shined stainless steel grill, or in grinding away the rust from the frame to reveal a stamped FORD emblem, unchanged over the lifetime of the company; or in hearing the basso, diaphragmatic WHUMP of the laden door closing soundly against the metal cab.

There is a shameless self-satisfaction I find at the end of these days, a mute self-aggrandizing I proudly display in the grease and paint on my one pair of Carhartts; the dirt in my fingernails an unmistakable sign that I worked, the progress on the truck visible to anyone who looked at it in the morning and then again in the late afternoon.  I become obsessive, my need for organization and aggregation and order manifesting in the urge to remove one more bolt, or clean one more part, or paint one more piece, and I find myself unable to distinguish between a need to finish the truck or to extend my time restoring it.  The truck, the desert, the end of my time in Tennessee, the preparation for yet another move, this reconnection, albeit temporary, have all made me pensive and introspective.

But now the truck is finished, and it is beautiful.  The oxidized powder-blue has been replaced by the original, Baffin Blue, contrasted by a two-tone of Corinthian white on the hood, a band along the top of the bed, and in the interior.  All the rubber is new, the clouded stainless steel burnished, the bench seat reupholstered, gearshifts and heater box painted.  Anthony has patched the floor pans and corrected all the imperfections accumulated over a lifetime of camping, deer hunting, and pulling horse trailers through creosoted, dusty roads at the whims of a transplanted New Jersey Irishman and his brood.

Anthony assures me there is no other truck in existence like this one, and my instinct is to respond of course there isn’t, but then I realize he is speaking about its appearance, the fact it is four-wheel drive and has the original tailgate and an aftermarket diamond plate rear bumper and brush guard attached to the frame through a customized grill.  Because this thinly veiled posit that a 1962 Ford F100 is somehow metaphorical, well.  That’s just silly.

 

[1]Sand gets everywhere, even in veins.  Another blood line: Nicola Hage, a blue-eyed five foot ten inch Syrian, left modern-day Lebanon sometime in the early 1900’s with fifty dollars in his pocket, in search of a brother and the idea of America on his brain.  He made his way first to Turkey and then to Le Havre, France, where on November 12th 1910 the twenty-one year old paid second-class stowage on the S.S. Chicago to New York City, watched his name entered into the Ellis Island registry ten days later, and then headed west, eventually finding himself in el Triunfo, Baja California Sur, a silver mining boomtown 3,500 miles from New York and 9,000 from his home. What drives a man to go to such trouble, such great lengths, passing by so much opportunity and wonder and novelty existing between there and here? What continued to push him west? Was it a condemnation; a serial reminder of repeated failures, of loves lost or stabbing epithets or miscommunications? Was it simply a thirst for adventure? A woman? Or was it a collective; the potential only men like him could see in the precious metal nimbus setting daily behind mountains that seemed to only get bigger as he headed west, a beckoning Tantalus drawing in a man who chose only to follow the sun. I want my great-grandfather to have found his brother and whatever else he was looking for. I want to picture him in el Triunfo with silver in his pockets, a Mexican woman on his arm so achingly beautiful it made his heart clench, the grainy dirt under his leather boots familiar, assuaging whatever homesickness he had for the deserts of his middle-east, a nirvanic look on his face when he learned enough Spanish to translate the name of his new town, his face turning up to the warming sun as the word slipped quietly from his lips: “Triumph. Goddam right.”

[2] Or, “what is this life if full of care we have no time to stand and stare? Eh? Take off your shoes for a while, unzip your fly, piss hearty, dig your toes in the hot sand, feel that raw and rugged earth, split a couple of big toenails, draw blood! Why not?” Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (1968)

[3] Though I purchased a used hood and two fenders from a tooth-deficient man in southern Tennessee, Anthony used them only to patch the original parts, and the truck remains essentially 100% in the original.

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Episode IV: The Road to Pristina

I return from Ohrid, turn in my rental car and hustle to the Skopje bus station for the three-hour ride to Pristina.  I hand over a wad of denars to pay for the ticket, my stomach rumbling as I begin to feel the inner-workings of those last two for-the-road macchiatos having their way with me.  I would like to avoid a public bathroom, but I may not get a vote in the matter, and now, it seems, is not a time to be choosy.  The Skopje bus station shares a men’s room with the train station, is poorly lit, dirty, smelly, and guarded by a ruffled elderly man charging 10 denars (about 20 cents) for the right to pass.  He has an arm’s length of toilet paper, if you so desire, and Cyrillic reading material as well, and inside the broken-locked stall is a simple porcelain-lined hole in the ground.  I enter, hesitate, and reconsider: this is clearly not for the fainthearted.  But I came seeking adventure, and if it presents itself as a Balkan train station bathroom, so be it.  I pay the man, leaving my backpack at his feet, and decide against taking in my headlamp – there are, no doubt, countless things in the world worse than what awaits me, but at this point none come to mind, and I don’t need illumination to help with my evaluation.

With both mind and other processes clear, I board the bus and focus on things more important.  The short ride to the Macedonia-Kosovo border is mountainous and winding, but once across, Kosovo opens into a vast basin, the Sharr and Goljak Mountains on either side cupping a brown expanse blending the Dukagjin and Kosovo Plains, the road running through it like a daisy stem, a few houses interspersed here and there among the detritus of post-war life, wood and metal and cinderblocks and trash; oh my the trash.   Plastic and garbage line the highway from the border to the Pristina outskirts, strung-together colorful like polyethylene prayer flags, modern-day bread crumbs marking the trail to progress.  There will be progress at the end of this line, no doubt, environmental regression traded for economic progression.  People who produce so much trash are people who can afford something else.  Poor people use everything, then reuse it, but the people who leave their trash here, on the side of the road, have the luxury of selection, and either have nowhere else to put their waste or simply do not know what tomorrow will bring.

We rumble ever closer to Pristina, the rubble and scrap now forming piles, now moving back away from the road, now behind buildings, now gone completely.  In its place, progress.  Development, advancement, chrysalis, a flowering; and that’s what Pristina is, a flowering at the end of a daisy-stemmed road, the city practically blows up before me.  Shiny new boxy mirrored buildings, stuccoed and glassed, I’m at the industrialized outskirts, and then car dealerships every third building, Mercedes Benz, Volkswagen, Porsche, Hyundai, Citroen, Skoda, all here, buildings so new they must have been waiting at the international border on the backs of idling tractor-trailers, half on this truck, half on that one, Caution Large Load truck in front and back, impatiently waiting for the Kosovo Grand Opening.

Pristina is a frenetic mess, but things are clearly happening.  The city itself has been here since the fall of the Roman Empire, but Kosovo has been an independent nation only since 2008, and even that is dependent upon who you ask – the Serbian Prime Minister, Kosovo being a former state in his nation, has said that as long as Serb people exist, Kosovo will be Serbia.  Kosovo shares a border with Serbia, and was a Serbian state until 1999 when NATO airplanes, many of them American or American funded, bombed Serbia until Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslavian President at the time, agreed to withdraw Serbian troops from Kosovo.  It is an intensely sensitive and complex set of facts to an American ear, though I find Kosovars, many of them self-described Albanians, see it in fairly simple terms.  I am told, among other things, not to enter Serbia from Kosovo unless I came from there first, I am told to avoid northern Kosovo, where Serbian enclaves are still in abundance, I am told, more as a challenge than as a question, you are here on holiday, when I say “I am here on holiday” (illustrative is the number of pages – four – Lonely Planet dedicates to Kosovo.  By comparison, Latvia gets fourteen).  I visit the Gracanica Monastery, a few miles south of Pristina and six hundred eighty-nine years old, and find it guarded by a KFOR Swedish machine gunner.  I ask him if there is ever trouble.  “There is occasionally trouble,” he answers.

But that is for yesterday, and Pristina is for today.  Apart from the Grand Hotel, prominent both for its size and location near a busy intersection and for the industrial grime shower-stall stains all over its facade, every building seems new.  Pristine Pristina.  I find a side alley hotel, boring and fungible outside but spotless and tasteful on the inside, the black-and-white suited owner selling me on the in-room jacuzzi and wireless internet, though he is marginally contemptuous when he learns I don’t have a laptop.  My room is equally pastelled parts Stevie Wonder and Queen Elizabeth, and after dropping my bags and having a cappuccino, I head into the city.

I walk the packed sidewalks, everyone going to or coming from, knee-high boots and jet black hair and Jackie O sunglasses ubiquitous.  Urban Pristina is a maze and has accumulated as much trash as the suburban, so I try to look up instead of down.  The streets are unannounced, the concrete structures new and unpocked, the old ones aged or bombed beyond recognition or shrouded in scaffolding and I only get my bearings after stumbling upon the caged and bubble-wrapped National Public Library.  It is unlike any other building I have ever seen.  I eventually work my way back the direction from which I came, and soon realize I am woefully lost.  Not an unusual occurrence, and typically intended, but my internal gyro is effected by further bad luck: it is St. Patrick’s Day, and I seem to have found the only city in the world without an Irish bar.  Again, a cappuccino; again, a request for directions; again, helped by a stranger.  I am practically walked back to the Hotel Begolli, and after taking my first bath in about a decade, the terrible European techno-pop blaring beyond the point of recognition from the jacuzzi radio assuaged by multiple Pejas (“Kosovo’s Finest Beer”), I sleep, dreamless, the streets outside my window quiet.

I leave Pristina the next morning, on a bus and via Bil Klinton Boulevard, heading for Peja, or Pec, depending on your Albanian or Serbian point of view.  It is a beautiful town at the base of the more beautiful Accursed Mountains, and I waste the day away on a rooftop bar reading about Alexander and Henry Adams and talking with my waiter who has a friend in New Jersey and two girlfriends in Pec and would like to go to America, but it is so hard to get a Visa.  It is easy if you are American, he says, you can go anywhere you want to, your passport is like a get in free card but it is very hard to get into America.  I tell him that it is, I suppose, all a matter of timing and that he’s just a little late, a few hundred years ago his ancestors could pretty much go wherever they wanted.  This appears to be of little solace.  But a few hours later I am reminded again what it is to be American, and this time I am humbled: it is midnight, I am on a bus and leaving Kosovo for Montenegro, and at the international border a guard is saying Josep, Josep, until I realize he means me.  “Joseph?” I answer, “Morse?” And he, from the front of the bus, leans his big bus-driver hatted head towards me and says “Josep.  American.  Come here.”  And my first reaction is an internal should I bring all my things because this might be bad. I should bring all my things because this might be bad but I leave my pack in my seat and go forward, the guard tall and stern.  “You are here on business?” he asks and I say no, holiday.  “Holiday?” I hear, for not the last time.  “Holiday?” Yes, I reassure him, I am here on holiday and then the man says I have a brother in New York and my sister lives in Utah.  Utah! Utah! and I am safe.  “Utah is a long ways from Kosovo,” I offer, and then tell him I am from Nevada.  “Nevada,” he says.  “You have good horses.”  And I am overjoyed and I love this Kosovar border guard, at midnight, the day after Saint Patrick’s Day, on my Balkan holiday.  We do have good horses, I answer, and beautiful mountains and a star-filled sky at night and a high desert that smells, after it rains, like earth brand-new.  He hands my passport back to me, and I take it, but he doesn’t let go.  “God bless you,” he says, “and God bless your country for defending Kosovo.  God bless you and God bless America” and I find myself not knowing what to do with all these people asking God to bless me.

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Smells Like Home

 

The Great Basin/July 10, 2001

     It starts when you cross over Hoover Dam. The stars seem to get brighter, the night sky darker. You can smell hints of it: sagebrush and afternoon thunderstorms, freshly-cut alfalfa, the dairy if the wind is blowing the right way. You can picture the vast, comforting emptiness of the Great Basin, despite the darkness of the night and the interruption of Las Vegas. It doesn’t really hit you – that you’re home – until you’re well north of Las Vegas and its neon dreams. Vegas is merely a facade of Nevada. Ask someone from Las Vegas where they’re from, and they’ll tell you Las Vegas. Ask someone from Reno where they’re from, they’ll tell you Nevada. Someone from Carson City? Nevada will be their answer. Jackpot, Ely, Wendover, Austin, Gabbs, Dayton. All crappy little Nevada towns that you don’t care about, that no one really cares about, and if you’re from one of those places, you know it’s a place no one really cares about. So you tell them you’re from Nevada. If you press them, you will get the real answer (“small ranching community approximately 80 miles south of Reno“). Same if you disparage their crappy little town, or any other crappy little town in Nevada. Outside of Las Vegas, Nevada is a tie that binds. Wide-open spaces; hours, not minutes, between towns; half the town your relation.

 

 

     And so it begins, 100 miles north of Las Vegas. Lights and tourists and artificial everything behind you, nothing but space and eye-blink towns in front. Human form in the Great Basin is a hiccup; it appears without warning, and is a memory before you know it. Towns so small your mind can’t grasp that they are anything but transient, desert gypsies. Cinder blocks under their mobile homes give them away, however; they are here for good. No one out here really travels. There is too much distance between you and what is next, and it’s too damn hot to do anything about it anyway. Nothing moves when it is this hot. A herd of wild burros so still I momentarily mistake them for iron sculptures. But they are real. Anything here not sculpted by the elements is an invasion, an optical distraction that steals from the overwhelming desolation of it all and focuses your eye on one particular object, and that’s not how this desert should be viewed. The Great Basin and its literally hundreds of mountain ranges are best spied from the valley floors. The closest ranges blended pinks, oranges, and whites, barren and scarred by hundred-year old switchbacks leading to some long-forgotten mineral deposit; the furthest ranges sparsely covered with pinon pine and shaded the same gray as the patched concrete roads stretching through the desert. Nothing is here that doesn’t belong. The things that are here fit, and the things that don’t fit are driving like hell to get out. The roads escort invaders to the exit: long stretches of open highway that present oncoming traffic from miles and miles away. Anyone can pass here, it’s just a matter of gauging the distance through the heat waves rising from the pavement. Telephone lines announce any confluence of dirt road with the highway; the poles, with their mid-slung cross beams and upright insulators, reminders of the giant Saguaros I just left behind. Or lonely grave markers for all those who came long before me, but failed to make it through this tired beauty. The roads, too, are lonely. So empty that if you’re not from here, you constantly question the map, straining to remember if you took a wrong turn somewhere despite the fact that the road hasn’t given you that option in a hundred miles.

I come upon a beat up old Ford, four shades of primer gray with knobbed-hands gripping the bus-sized steering wheel. He is from here, I can tell; he drives too slowly to be going anywhere else. There is an oxygen tank standing in the bed of the truck, and a small tube runs over the bed railing and into the open driver’s side window. As I pass, I see the opposite end of the tube wrapped around the driver’s head and inserted up each nostril. He turns and makes eye contact with me; wrinkled face and mouth toothless and open. He is a dead-ringer for Munch’s The Scream. He belongs here, as does his truck. So too the hundreds of species of sagebrush, the turkey-vultures, wild burros, rocks, ghost towns, and ten-thousand foot snow capped peaks.

I am home. I am going home, and I find myself driving like hell to get there.