It took a little over three hours to get from Reno to Elko. In between those two places there’s a whole lot of nothing, or rather, the empty spaces that pass for nothing. What we talk about when we talk about nothing, that’s what’s between Reno and Elko. There were salt flats and highway that disappeared into the horizon and sometimes, there was a functional looking structure over there, reached via no apparent access road. It was a beautiful day for a drive. The air was warm and the sky was decorated with interesting looking clouds.
We — my friend Andy and I — stopped to take photos of the big wide nothing. We stopped to get gas and ended up in the cold back room of a second hand store, surrounded by old furniture and piles of coats and broken electronic devices. “You don’t mind if I shut this door, do you?” asked the proprietress. “I want to keep the cold out.”
“I guess we die here,” I said, because it was required to make a horror movie joke, as we did again later when we found an abandoned motel, a low rise place painted in peeling turquoise, under a gorgeous broken neon sign. That was in Imlay, population approximately 200.
“I want to shoot a horror movie here,” said Andy.
“I want to buy this place and open it as a writer’s retreat,” I said. “It’s got everything.”
By “everything,” I meant nothing. The doors were boarded over and there were bits of grass poking up through the concrete and asphalt courtyard. I’d packed for the weather of a bitter plains winter, but my parka was in the car and the sun was warm. I tried to imagine the motel in the weather I’d come prepared for but it was hard because, after being so starved for sunshine at home in a Seattle January, the blue sky was positively medicinal.
A little further down the highway we pulled into the dusty fenced lot that contains Thunder Mountain Monument. In nowhere, one of the other requirements, after you check the box on horror movie jokes, is that some crackpot decides that they’re Native American and sets to making outsider art. It’s as though these lost souls need to claim the heritage of a people they aren’t in order to give themselves permission to do something weird.
Frank Van Zant was one of those guys, he built Thunder Mountain on this flat bit of land and when things didn’t quite end up the way he’d planned — the apocalypse he’d counted on never did lift his place to the sky — he shot himself. We crunched around on the dry grounds while big trucks flew past on the interstate just beyond the access road. The light was so sharp you could see every detail, even in the shadows. The air had that clarity that makes you think you can read the discarded wrapper of a Big Hunk candy bar stuck on a twist of barbed wire four miles away.
The sun set behind us and as it did, a fat round moon appeared in the sky in front of us. We kept checking the rear view mirror to admire the neon pink and orange highlighting the underside of the flying saucer shaped clouds. No wonder this is where everyone claims to see UFOs, the regularly spaced altocumulus lenticularis looked just like they could be delivering big-eyed strangers to this empty place. Why wouldn’t they land here? It’s perfect for seeing into the distance, into forever. You’d have plenty of time to hightail it back to the ship before hostile earthlings arrived with their assumptions that you were up to no good. Or maybe they’d be friendly earthlings, and they’d know that you’re just like them, another stranger on a road trip, looking for thrift store scores and great diner breakfasts and a way to get some bright nowhere sky into your light starved soul.
I have been on that road–several times. You describe it with more poetry that perhaps it deserves. Beautifully written.