by Sarah Vowell
Sky, Sand, Sky, Sand, Sky, Sand
Most of unincorporated America is relatively civilized. Beyond the borders of small towns we encounter rural houses, roads, crop fields, livestock, scattered machinery, an array of anthropogenic junk. In the East there is scarcely an unobstructed acre, but even in the West we eventually spot power lines, drilling equipment, ranch fences.
But the edges of Tonopah, Nevada, are sharp. There are houses and trailers with yards full of trampolines and car parts, and then suddenly there is only earth and sky. Tonopah, Nevada, is an island of civilization in a vast humanless sea.
In the desert, up is sometimes difficult to distinguish from down. After heavy rains, water pools between the blackbrush and mirrors the stratosphere. Just after sunset the crisp horizon dissolves into a hazy bluish band. An inverted Fata Morgana will sometimes appear, actual hills collapsing into an imaginary limit. Tough bald hills slope at impossible angles, as if molded under the heel of a giant. It’s easy to envision dinosaurs pounding this dry terrain with legs the size of refrigerators.
In Tonopah, I meet a man who warns me of the dangers of driving off-road in the desert at dawn and dusk. He crashed doing this once, going 120 mph on his three-wheeler. “I broke my neck out in the dunes and ripped my face off,” he says. “I told them there was no way I was going to the hospital, to just give me a beer and wipe the sand out of my lips and my eyes.”
This man has just spent a night in jail for a DUI and is sipping plain Coke through a straw. “I know where it sits now, the threewheeler,” he says, “and every time I see it I just get flashbacks to when I was flying off it—sky, sand, sky, sand, sky, sand. And that’s why you don’t ride at twilight. At twilight, you can’t tell what a shadow entails.”
The Cascadian Race
In the centuries since the arrival of Europeans, Nevada’s Great Basin has inspired scores of esoteric origin theories. In 1924, “Was the Garden of Eden Located in Nevada?” made the front page of the San Francisco Examiner. The article was about the research of archaeologist Alain Le Baron, who claimed to have found petroglyphs not far from Tonopah that resembled Egyptian and Chinese characters, but predated both. He called the petroglyph site the Hill of a Thousand Tombs and believed it was evidence of an alternative anthropological timeline. His theory held that a prehistoric society called the Cascadian Race originated in Nevada and proceeded from there to populate the rest of the world.
Earlier yet, in 1917, an amateur geologist named Albert E. Knapp claimed to have found a fossilized human footprint from the Triassic period—the imprint of a shoe made of stitched dinosaur hide. This led him to believe that humans and dinosaurs had coexisted in Nevada’s Great Basin 200 million years ago.
The New York Times took Knapp’s finding somewhat seriously, as did Nobel Prize-winning Oxford scientist Frederick Soddy, who used it to support his pet theory of a superior race of prehistoric humans that destroyed itself after achieving scientific mastery over atomic energy. In Soddy’s account, the sophisticated civilization made a technical mistake that wiped them out, leaving us—their more primitive counterparts—behind to literally reinvent the wheel.
These theories share a design: desertion by superior progenitors, the Great Basin as the point of origin for a flourishing society that eventually evacuates the region. This motif of abandonment can be located, too, in less fringe mythologies of the Nevada desert. Nevada, like California, experienced a Gold Rush that produced enormous wealth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tonopah was known as a place where millionaires were minted. But the money made in Nevada boomtowns was soon taken elsewhere, mainly to California or back East in the pockets of savvy capitalists. Briefly, many of these towns were opulent. Now they are the residue of imperial advancement. Decade by decade their elegance fades.
“What do you think people in big American cities think about Tonopah?” I ask a woman in her fifties named Linda who’s smoking a Winston 100 inside a casino called the Tonopah Station. “Like on the East and West Coast,” I explain, “places like LA and New York.”
She’s playing electronic keno, a game that has a reputation as a working-class diversion—it was once considered too blue-collar, even, for gambling houses on the Las Vegas Strip. All around us colorful lights flash on gaming screens. The décor in the Tonopah Station is Western-fantasy, all wagon wheels and old saloon signage. The soundtrack is contemporary country, punctuated by bleeps from the gaming machines. The bar adjacent to the gaming room is doing decent business though it’s only one in the afternoon.
“Well, aside from Vegas, I don’t think they think about us at all,” she says matter-of-factly, ashing into a tray provided by the house. “They probably don’t know what Tonopah is, though it used to be a big important town. But we’re out here.”
Counter-Eaters
The first time I passed through Tonopah, I lost an hour wandering its complicated streets, wide-eyed and straining with curiosity. I took one photograph on that first encounter. It shows the window of a white brick house. On the windowsill is a gold trophy. I remember that it was snowing. The trophy pricked me, a small sharp surprise, like what Roland Barthes means when he writes about the punctum, that subtle aspect that demands acute attention and inspires a groundswell of emotional attachment for reasons that elude reason. Tonopah itself is unsentimental. Its relics are not enshrined so much as worked around, even ignored. But I grew nostalgic all the same. I lost the photograph, but I see it clearly in my mind.
That first visit, I was especially transfixed by the Clown Motel, a pair of shabby two-story blue buildings at the edge of town. A plywood cutout in the shape of a clown points to a hand-painted sign announcing that truckers are welcome. Directly adjacent to the motel is a Gold Rush-era graveyard, a few paces from the parking lot. I stared at the motel in amazement thinking Why does this exist? Who the hell lives here, works here? I had no frame of reference.
The route between Reno and Vegas is five hundred miles of America with essentially zero cultural profile. That’s roughly the distance between Boston and Washington, DC, a stretch that encompasses hundreds of hyper-distinct cultural enclaves. Even rural Nevadans themselves, like Linda at the casino, will admit that they are neither contradictions to nor embodiments of any particular social archetype. The nation draws a blank on rural Nevada.
In 1940, the Works Progress Administration published a guidebook to the state that betrays a kind of sour-grapes attitude toward Nevada’s abandonment in the broader American imagination:
Relatively few Americans are familiar with this land. If the citizen of other states is asked what he knows about Nevada, he is apt to laugh and mention gambling and divorce . . . Pressed for the state’s physical characteristics, he will usually mention the Great Basin, envisioned as a huge hollow bowl . . . There are various reasons for this vast ignorance about the sixth largest state in the Union, but the chief one has always been the reticence of Nevadans themselves. They have always known their State’s great beauty and are unusually sensitive to it, but humbled by long neglect on the part of the vast traveling public, it is only recently that they have begun to tell the world about Nevada.
And yet, when it comes time to enumerate the specificities of Nevadan culture, all the writers can muster is that Nevadans like to eat at counters, a characteristic so trivial and generic as to be absurd.
It is doubtful whether there is a restaurant in the state without one; even the smartest places feature counters. Usually the board is high and the stools are mounted on a small platform. No Nevadan is quite sure why he likes “counter-eating.”
Rural Texans have the stalwart cowboy, Iowans have the forthright yeoman, and Mainers have the hard-bitten seafarer with rubber boots up to his knees. Nevadans have the counter-eater. Evidently I am not the first to grasp at straws.
In recent years, perhaps Cliven Bundy’s high-profile standoff with the federal government has replaced the counter-eater of yore with the modern right-wing libertarian wea
pons stockpiler. But that still doesn’t explain what a clown-themed motel is doing next to a graveyard in the middle of the treeless wilderness, or what that trophy was doing in that window.
For years, I’d think of Tonopah and be socked with the realization no matter what dramas and excitements visited my own life, some kind of existence continued out there in the desert, inscrutable to me. My enigmatic compatriots—I was and remain both curious about and troubled by this blind spot. I came to Tonopah to write, eventually, not because I wanted to answer a specific question, but because I had no idea what kinds of questions even applied.
We Are After Freedom
From the balcony of a dive bar amid a cluster of short-term residences called Humbug Flats, you can see every building in Tonopah. Small ranch-style houses with tidy facades alternate with puzzling complexes of shacks, sheds, and mobile homes. The town sits in a saddle slung between steep hills, and the houses are crowded together, gradually terraced on the gentler slopes.
Tonopah is a striking anomaly, a small town in the middle of a great desert characterized by relative density rather than by sprawl.
The cause of this peculiar urban geography is that Tonopah is completely surrounded by public land. You can’t build on it, but you can do just about anything else—hunt and trap, rummage for rocks and artifacts, drive your four-wheeler or pre-runner as fast as your heart desires. At the town’s border, roads turn to dirt and extend faintly across the desert toward distant purplish mountains.
I’m told that there are two forms of entertainment in Tonopah: drinking and off-roading. People drink because of the isolation—“there’s nothing else to do”—while the off-roading is a consequence of proximity to hundreds of miles of unobstructed public land. So these recreational proclivities spring from the same source: the desert, which functions as both the town’s playground and its quarantine.
Tonopah sits roughly halfway between Vegas and Reno on route US 95, about three and a half hours away from each. Its population is less than 3,000, and even at that it’s the biggest town for more than a hundred miles in any direction. To the west is the imposing Sierra Nevada mountain range, with its snowy crests and flamboyant vistas. On the coastal side of the Sierras is California’s productive Central Valley and its lush coastline. On the inland side of the divide spans the Great Basin, an arid region characterized by spindly mountain ranges stretching north to south and the flat desert valleys between them. From an airplane, the ranges look like slithering snakes.
Wallace Stegner wrote that one has to get over the color green in order to appreciate the American West. Natural green is a rare sight in the region around Tonopah, but hypnotic combinations of bruised purple and burnished gold at sunrise and sunset make a decent substitute.
In the bar of the Mizpah Hotel—built in 1907, carefully restored in 2011 after long abandonment, and now the most upscale business in town—I overhear two men introducing themselves to the bartender as federal employees. “The dreaded BLM,” they say, and laugh. The Bureau of Land Management controls nearly 48 million acres in Nevada, about 67 percent of the state. Its mission is sprawling and contradictory—it monitors the health of plants and wildlife, maintains trails and recreational areas, and issues permits for drilling, mining, and cattle grazing.
With so many interests competing for its use, Nevada’s BLM land is a battleground for opposing visions of the role of the federal government and the meaning of the term public. Consider the Cliven Bundy standoff: Bundy was up against the agency over unpaid cattlegrazing fees, a private disagreement that quickly turned ideologically epic. “We are after freedom,” he told the press of his ad-hoc encampment of far-right armed militiamen. “We are after liberty. That’s what we want.” The BLM was the enemy in the Bundy party’s fight for nothing less than independence.
In theory, the people of Tonopah are not thrilled about the BLM. They wrinkle their noses at its mention—to many it’s both a symptom and agent of federal authoritarianism, bureaucratic tyranny, and government overreach. At the same time, somewhat confoundingly, people tell me that Tonopah is a stronghold of individual liberty (one calls it “the last bastion of free America”) precisely because they can largely do whatever they want out in the desert. The very same people who despise the BLM call the neighboring desert “the people’s land” and refer to it proudly as “my backyard.” There would be no bobcat trapping or informal desert drag racing if the land were private.
Managed though it is, BLM land is the freest and most open land in America. Perhaps the people of Tonopah have grown accustomed to a degree of autonomy with which the rest of us are unfamiliar, for their primary complaint about BLM land is that it’s not free enough.
Horse Management
I stop in at the University of Nevada in Reno and speak to Leonard Weinberg, an expert on grassroots right-wing politics, about the political landscape of Nevada. Nevada owes its blue-state badge largely to the Reno and Las Vegas metro areas, he tells me. The rural parts, by contrast, are characterized by staunch libertarianism.
“Nevada has the lowest rate of church attendance of any state in the union,” Leonard says. “So it’s not like the South. What we call the Cow Counties, including Nye County where Tonopah is, are overwhelmingly right-wing Republican, but the issues that excite people there aren’t questions of morality and traditional values like you have with Southern religious right-wingers. Additionally, racial prejudice is not the driving force of right-wing politics here the way it is in the South.”
Instead of the Ku Klux Klan or Christian family values groups, far-right organizations and movements here primarily include the Tea Party, the Sovereign Citizens, the Oath Keepers, and various armed militias united in their deification of the founding fathers, fear of socialism, hatred of the federal government, contempt for taxation, mistrust of all politicians, and abiding commitment to the Second Amendment. “The main issue that gets people going is the government telling them what to do with their property,” Leonard tells me.
“What’s the situation with the wild horses?” I ask. I’ve read that they’re a major source of tension between the federal government and rural Nevadans.
“Wild horses are accused of eating too much rangeland, harming cattle operations,” he says. “There’s a tussle that goes on between ranchers’ associations and the environmental types who are defenders of wild horses. The ranchers want fewer wild horses roaming this territory.”
They got their wish in 2007, when seventy-one wild horses wandered onto the Tonopah Test Range, a highly classified military base, and died of nitrate poisoning after drinking the water there. This was not the first year horse poisoning had been recorded there—Tonopah Test Range employees were even known to have operated a betting pool to guess how many would die. The poisoning may not have been intentional, but neither was it unwelcome.
At the Mizpah Hotel bar, one of the BLM employees—an abandoned mine specialist—explains, “They’re not really wild. They’re feral, and they need to be managed somehow. So there’s a federal program to manage them, and there are areas called horse management areas, or HMAs.” The bureau, for its part, is “just trying to deal with the situation and listen to all sides the best we can.”
I ask Leonard if rural right-wingers in Nevada are patriotic. “They would probably tell you that they are,” he says, “but that’s debatable. I remember there was one Iraq War general who retired to Douglas County,” a bit west of Tonopah, “and said that it reminds him of Iraq—everyone hates the American government and they all have weapons. There are people here for whom the Second Amendment is the only part of the Constitution with which they’re familiar, and they consider defending it to be the ultimate act of patriotism.”
“Is immigration a big right-wing issue in Nevada?” I ask.
“Sure, there’s anti-immigrant sentiment in Nevada. But even that manifests more as loathing for the federal government than for individual Hispanic people. There’s racism here, no doubt,” he concede
s, but there’s also an individualist live-and-let-live streak that precludes certain forms or manifestations of prejudice that one finds in other conservative regions, namely the South.
“Keep in mind that the Nevada state nickname is Battleborn,” he says, “because it was created during the Civil War as a non-slave-owning state. There’s a fair amount of pride associated with that here. In a sense, the anti-slavery cause relates to the local theme of ‘Leave me alone, do whatever you want to do but just stay out of my way.’” He laughs and says, “In fact, now that I think about it, that seems like it should be the state motto,” in place of the ill-fitting All for Our Country.
Time Machine
Tonopah is, in many ways, the apotheosis of rural right-wing Nevada. It’s an isolated town in an isolated and isolationist state, a self-reliant town in a state where rural residents not only prize but insist on selfreliance, a town fully surrounded by federal land in a state that feels besieged by the federal government.
Unsurprisingly, many people I speak to in Tonopah are vocal about their right-wing political views. I hear that the government is planning to confiscate private citizens’ firearms, that Barack Obama is not an American citizen, and that Obamacare is the biggest current threat to American liberty besides Islamic terrorism.
Most people I speak to, however, tell me they don’t care for politics at all. I ask one woman whether she’s more liberal or conservative. “I don’t follow that stuff,” she answers, annoyed. “All I know is I wish I had a time machine so I could go back to the 1700s with George Washington, back in the time when people didn’t rob their neighbors so much.”
