We’re traveling across Nevada and as has been so often the case on this trip, I’m at a loss for words to describe the vistas around us. Rolling scrubland mountains, deceptively soft and rounded to give the impression of mere hills undulating out to the horizon, but every once in a while there’s a home or a car or simply a shack to give some scale to the apparently desolate landscape and you realize just how massive those “hills” are. Black rocks protrude here and there, white sands peek from beneath bristling brush and brown grasses. There are no apparent farms, no evident Livestock, nothing for miles upon miles except long wire fences to delineate some seemingly meaningless “mine” from “yours”. I see telephone wires and “no trespassing” signs and little else but occasional town names and “no services” warnings.
We’ve got something new on our weather apps: my phone reports 81 degrees and dust and sure enough the horizon is brown and hazy – but visibility on the highway is crisp and unlike the tiny, winding roads of Oregon, there’s no hesitation to meet the 75mph speed limits of I-80 in Nevada. We even hit 91 without really realizing it because you simply have no reference points against which to gauge your speed.
Last night we played Wildflower Village – a magical place part hostel, part hotel, part arts commune – that could really use a website revamp because we simply had NO impression of what we were walking into. Our friend singer/songwriter Justin McMahon had set up the gig and the place’s web presence had left me woefully underprepared for just how marvelous Wildflower was. Four separate aging and disintegrating roadside motels purchased and joined under one unique vision : the owner, Pat, is a marvelous 70-something year-old woman who’s created something simply beautiful. Maybe a third of the spaces have been combined and repurposed into artists’ studios, gallery spaces, a coffeehouse, a gift shop, a pottery studio, a bar and a wedding chapel – who knows what else – and the remaining 80 or so units are available for what Pat refers to as long-term renters (she doesn’t like dealing with people who rent shorter than a month – which, as an apartment renter, seems like a “short-term” renter to me) and wanderers. She puts up the musicians who play the coffeehouse / concert space and she has tenants that stay for a night or a week or in the case of some of her oldest renters, 15 or more years.
You could hear the headlines writing themselves – once traffic started to move again, someone about 4 cars ahead of us couldn’t get their SUV started again and the small town highway patrolman LEAPT into action!
Waking up here in this cute little room – it’s unreal how lucky we are to do the things we do. Not to understate the amount of work that goes into this – but our timing has been absurdly fortuitous all throughout.
And now for breakfast and coffee and the threat of quiche! Happy Nevada!
A roadside Jabberwocky somewhere in California. Mount Shasta and its majestic attendants. We spotted no secret monks or Bigfeet however. But we DID stop back in at the Black Bear Diner and have an absolutely amazing dinner surrounded by incredible beauty. I immediately got back to boning up on my Mount Shasta conspiracy theories while Heather asked that I keep such things to mtyself. Psh. I Love this shit! So – October 12th was a full driving day. Meaning, we got up in Salem, OR and drove to Reno, NV. It’s a long drive. But we took it easy and because we’d set the whole day aside for the journey it wasn’t too awful to get stuck in traffic for an hour. It also meant that we hit a patch of incredible darkness somewhere in Western California that was nigh irresistable. The glow in this picture is that of an approaching car… once it was gone, the world was planetarium dark. Just a couple more shots of the wonder of the sky. It was probably one of the only times I’ve been able to see the Milky Way – and even though we’ve had plenty of pristine skies on this trip, they’ve all been in the presence of an almost- or completely-full moon. Not ideal star-gazing conditions. This was simply… breathtaking.
