DAY 44: Snowy night, Sierra Nevadas

BRIDGEPORT, CALIF. | Thursday, April 22, 2010 | Hwy. 395, Redwood Inn, Room No. 16

Snow here. Big slow flakes. In trout-fishing, deer processing country. In the parking lots outside the inns and restaurants, snow falling on four-wheel drive pickup trucks.

In Texas, in New Mexico, it was hot. We were wishing we had air conditioning. In Florida, same thing. When we left Seattle, back in early March, it was full-blown spring, forsythia all out, lilacs coming. I'd just tilled the ground for a vegetable garden. We were behind the ball. Needed to get things in the ground. Now, today, we run into snow, roads closed, winds blowing over tractor trailer trucks. Maybe we should have known. It's only late April after all. In Maine for instance, it can snow about now. There can be a blizzard, often is. So it goes here, too, at 7,000 feet, in the Sierra Nevadas. Socked in. All grey, the sun unable to break through its yoke of bright blur. Snow came down all around us in the afternoon. Grey in the distance, dulling, hiding the mountains. Then we climbed up into it, among the thick redwoods above Mono Lake. Not going anywhere tonight. Most of roads to Yosemite closed. Will detour north in the morning, to Route 88.

We eclipsed 7,000 miles today coming south on Rt 376, in Nevada. We'd been driving since late morning, come south off of Route 50, known as Nevada's loneliest road. No coffee. Then 376 south, thinking we'd have coffee by early afternoon. But towns on the map turned out to be intersections only, like Basalt, Nevada, nothing at all, just an intersection and two tractor trailers pulled over. Or Coaldale, Nevada, just a metal building emptied of all its windows.

So when we got to 7,000 miles, cruising south just to the east of the Toiyabe Mountain Range, in a valley of beautiful nothingness between the Toiyabes and the Toquimas, we pulled over and stopped. We got out the gas grill, packed the espresso maker full of coffee and made a pot there on the side of the road. It was delicious. It took forever in the wind. We half-covered the grill with a woven mat, draped that over the grill cover, which was lean-to-d on top of the espresso maker. Delicious. Back going, driving, the coffee in our Dunkin Donut plastic mugs, the Decemberists playing on the ipod plugged into the tape player, flying through the valleys of nothingness as though we had mastered this thing and could manage to never arrive and always be within striking distance of arriving. We are so close at this point. 

I am typing standing up in our motel room, back-support belt on, pain pills going, a bit of whiskey and honey, old Cuban recipe for recovery, whiskey substituted for rum, in my plastic motel cup.  Back should be okay. Was just a bad spasm. No gurney, no forced respite for now.

We were in Eureka, Nevada last night. The self-proclaimed friendliest town on the loneliest road in Nevada. We caught Idol on a flat screen TV in a modest room, pocket door to the bathroom that didn't open or close, just stayed where it was, open. Very good show. Sort of a good show. More truly, Idol is a ritual, something we can insist on, so that we have a concrete deadline some reason to stop driving before the middle of the night, two nights each week. So, good-bye finally, Tim Urban. You should have taken the bullet for Lily, many weeks ago, for Lily who was canned far too soon. 

We drove thru Tonopah, Nevada, today. Sad, beaten down former mining town, built with and stripped bare by East Coast money long ago. The man we stopped on the sidewalk to ask about the disappearance of the Silver Queen Motel, where I once stayed on assignment as a cub newspaper reporter, who was shoveling snow into the street to be run over and melt, told us the motel had been built badly, grown mold, been torn down a few years ago. For lunch, instead of the diner that had been on the motel's ground floor, he suggested McDonalds, Subway or Burger King. 

Not one local lunch place left in Tonopah, home, for the school sports teams, of the Tonopah Muckers. No place to eat lunch out other than at two scrubby casinos, both filled with smoke. Except the Mexican place, which our guide, native Nick Bradshaw, good man, fast true talker, man who stayed in the town he was born in, remote and difficult as it was - he didn't mention the Mexican place, but I remembered it. So we went there. 

The mines today are in Elko, east and north of here. Huge strip mines, two of the largest anywhere, still pulling out gold in Elko. They use biodiesel there, too, if only because it burns cleaner, and means less money spent on the fans blowing fresh air down through miles of tubes to the men and women working down there. But not in Tonopah. In Tonopah, only historic, tourable mines. Another Cincinnati. Another American city that had its golden era a hundred years ago and has been declining ever since, hanging on and dying. Empty homes boarded up below the hilltop mineshafts, hanging out the historic signs, scraping together memories, knitting together rest stops that tourists, outsiders devour in minutes. 

When we went into a hock shop, we said hello. The owner was slumped toward the back at his seat behind a glass counter filled with pocket knives, an unseen TV playing a cartoonish intergalactic movie. His hair was longish. He was a bit of an unshorn mountain. He never answered us. And again, no answer, when we thanked him as we went out, on schedule for fuel, hurrying across the main street, settling into Yellow Truck, picking up Route 6 past the weirdish Clown Motel, headed west and south.

Our roadtrip has transformed us. We have become pros of silence, of shared smiles and nothing said, as we pass by a train of cows in scrub desert, plodding through the high desert on some unknown mission for tastier fodder, we turn and smile, are able to make out each other's thoughts and eyes through sunglasses, say nothing, know what the other has seen.  

It is eons since we first filled Yellow Truck with fuel at a nameless gas station in upstate New York. 

The trip at some point will end. Has to. Soon it will. Spring sprung. Winter over. Snowmelt. We will return to the apartment that has been there in Seattle, existing all this time. But still it is too early for thoughts like that. We aren't there. We can't know now what we will find when we get there. We are in the end game. The arc is flattening. But it is still too early to say. We should be in San Francisco by late Saturday. By Monday we will be, at minimum, redesigning my sister Margaret's back stair, readying for construction, to break out the tools in Yellow Truck's bed.