In the middle of nowhere, there’s this.
Boy. What a slog that was. When last I left you, I had chosen to spend the night in Ely, Nevada rather than keep going . I’m glad I did. This trip taught me something, and its a good thing to remember. You can travel on the Interstate and know that, roughly every thirty miles or so, you can find gas, food, or lodging. When you take a secondary route, like Interstate 50, you pass through all the towns that were killed off when they built the Interstate. Had I soldiered on last night, I would have driven through three hours of the most desolate no man’s land in all of Nevada (which is saying something!) and ended up in the “town” of Delta, Utah–which consists almost entirely of ghosts and broken down buildings and motels that saw their last customer when Eisenhower was President.
But on the plus side, I pretty much owned the road. I pulled off to the side of the road today to take a picture of what turned out to be a dry lake bed – a huge dry lake bed – and the entire time I stopped and got out and walked the hundred yards or so to the lake bed, where a sign told me to advance no further, and walked the hundred yards back, and got in, and turned the car around–not another car came from either direction.
And there were no billboards. I didn’t feel lonely, as desolate as it was. But I sure would have had I driven it in the middle of the night only to discover a dead town on the other side.
This morning I had breakfast at the Nevada Hotel, in Ely, at one point the tallest building in Nevada, surrounded by silent brooding truckers. I was trying to figure out which one was going to kill me for sport when this hyper old man came in and started talking about ghost towns and railroads, and before I knew it, the entire group of what were clearly serial killers couldn’t shut up. Truckers know roads, and they know where everything is, even if they don’t stop for anything except uppers and chewing tobacco.
“If you like old railroads, you’ve got to get to…”
“There’s a haunted hotel over in…”
“You take the six south you’ll pass at least three ghost towns….”
“The railroad museum is over in…”
And then they started talking to each other.
“Now I know I’ve seen you at the Love’s Truck stop over near Tonopah….”
“You drive that England rig out at the Best Western?”
“Say, don’t you have a little brown dog sticks his head out the window?”
It was amazing. Like a cocktail party of lonely outcasts on xanax. I wasn’t the only one eavesdropping. The whole restaurant was caught up listening to them. It might be one of the trips highlights. Today was too much of a slog to really enjoy. I didn’t even take many pictures, except out the windshield, but you couldn’t see anything because of all the dead bugs (road trip trophies) on it.
I still much prefer backroads to the big interstates, but you don’t want to get stuck.
