It is in fact a Nevada tradition to name things in honor of this most interesting of the many strange visitors we receive. Nevada State Route 375 has been officially designated “The Extraterrestrial Highway,” and that lonely road goes through the little desert town of Rachel (“UFO capitol of the world”), where I’d recommend that you stop for a cold one at the Little A’Le’Inn. (After all, the hand-painted sign out front proclaims “Earthlings Are Welcome!”) Our state even boasts an intergalactically themed brothel, the Alien Cathouse, located an hour north of Vegas on highway 95. Here patrons may select from any number of themed rooms, including the “Holodeck” and…wait for it…the “Alien Abduction Probing Room.” If this artifact of cultural bricolage doesn’t strike you as proof positive that aliens have invaded our collective fantasy life, then just try to push this one out of your mind and instead focus on cute little ET.
We Nevadans also have a legitimate reason to be cozy with this kind of fantasy, because we’ve had more actual UFOs in our skies than has any other state. The term UFO, which began to see wide use during the Cold War, simply means “unidentified flying object.” Since its establishment as a top-secret military base back in 1954, Area 51 has produced about as many UFOs as has Hollywood. In response to a Freedom of Information Act filing, in 2013 the CIA for the first time acknowledged the existence of this remote, inaccessible, and heavily guarded detachment of Edwards Air Force Base. What they do not reveal, but is generally accepted, is that well before they were made public, a number of remarkable experimental aircraft—including theU2,A-12,SR-71 Blackbird, andF117-A—have been tested here. If we Nevadans have seen our share of little green men, we’ve also seen more than our share of unidentifiable, unimaginably futuristic military aircraft and hovercraft, the sorts of machines you would expect to see on a theater screen rather than streaking weirdly across the desert sky.
It is more than just extravagantly expensive aerial weaponry that sustains our imagination of alien visitors; it is also the landscape itself. The Great Basin Desert is so remote, isolated, and uninhabited—so open, barren, and wild—that out here anything seems possible. To a human mode of perception evolved to appreciate shelter, cover, forage, and water, this is in fact an alien landscape, one that we visit much as we might visit the broken, desolate surface of a distant planet. In a landscape that makes us feel like intergalactic voyagers, perhaps the idea of other strange visitations appears more plausible. Clearly, the myth of the extraterrestrial visitor is central to our cultural imagination in this part of the desert West.
Another of the most durable myths in this landscape is that of the cowboy. Perhaps some of you were unfortunate enough to have been subjected to the abysmal 2011 “science fiction western” movie Cowboys and Aliens. Even Harrison Ford couldn’t save this bomb, which detonates stinkage for an interminable 118 minutes in the most convoluted and ludicrous plot ever to ooze from the cracks in the southern California dream factory. The movie had everything going for it: not just Ford but also Ron Howard as a producer, Spielberg as an executive producer, and a budget of 163 million dollars (maybe we should instead have used the money to build experimental aircraft?). Nevertheless, Cowboys and Aliens is the worst genre mash-up in cinema history, not only unsuccessfully force fitting the conventions of sci-fi and western but also gratuitously tossing in an Apache medicine man and, God help us all, a few resurrected nude corpses.
But if Cowboys and Aliens is an epic fail that has stolen from my mortality allowance two precious hours I’ll never recover, I can’t help feeling that somehow this terrible picture was on the right track. After all, both cowboys and aliens are among the most mythologized, glorified, and iconic figures in the American West. They seem to belong in this landscape, even when we aren’t sure if we do. Both figures come from afar, across the wide-open spaces, and both seem dauntingly independent and self-reliant. Both depend upon their trusty steed: one an Appaloosa or Pinto, the other a whirling silver disk or darting interstellar trapezoid. Both are packing serious weapons and are defined by their ability to use them, for what is a flesh-dissolving laser if not a simple upgrade of a Walker Colt revolver? Both figures are powerful and dangerous, and yet somehow also enticingly mysterious and charismatic. They ramble from town to town, galaxy to galaxy, knocking back a little red-eye, harvesting a few human organs, just trying to get the lay of a new land. Part of their mystique is that neither sticks around for long, invariably galloping or whizzing off to the western horizon, or beyond it.
The main thing cowboys and aliens have in common is that both come in search of new frontiers of knowledge, experience, or power. Both represent a myth of movement, domination, and possession. The cowboy and the alien both come to the American West as colonizers. Perhaps we love the cowboy because he represents our successful colonization of this region; perhaps we fear the alien because he instead represents a terrifying desire to colonize us. The cowboy embodies a utopian myth of unlimited freedom, the alien a dystopian myth of inescapable captivity. Who better to fight off the invading aliens than cowboys, they who were the vanguard of the last wave of invading aliens?
I really don’t mind having a daughter who is a space alien. Many Nevadans apparently believe that extraterrestrials have already hybridized with normal humans—just like the cowboys did—so perhaps that spaceship has already sailed in any case. But out here in this vast desert landscape, so bright with uncertainty, one thing is definite. I’ll be taking Norm to our favorite tack and boot shop to have him custom sized for that enormous buckaroo Stetson.
WHENEVER I RECEIVE a summons to jury duty, I respond to it truthfully—which is to say, I respond to it in ways that would appear, to any normal person, to be so ideological, polemical, overzealous, and doctrinal as to appear perfectly insane. But I rationalize that a functional democracy depends upon the candor of its citizens, and so, in the questionnaire sent to me by the county, I express exactly what is on my mind. Eryn suspects that my intemperate replies have prevented me from ever actually being called to join a jury, much as I have always wanted to serve. I, on the other hand, blame her family, which consists exclusively of public-interest activists and cops, all of whom intersect with the judicial system in ways that make them biased—though, in their defense, their biases cancel each other out, with one half of the family helping out the same folks whom the other half of the family tackles and cuffs.
Recently, however, I was actually summoned to appear, a phrase I love so dearly that I now use it to call Hannah and Caroline to breakfast. On the morning I was to appear I was so excited by the prospect that I even dressed properly (cowboy boots, clean denim, and an unwrinkled shirt constituting formal attire in the desert West), and I gathered a legal pad, a pen, and—just to be an especially responsible citizen—an extra pen. Over breakfast, I waxed rhapsodic to my rather bored daughters, extolling with unbridled enthusiasm the inspiring virtues of our democratic judicial system. Now, at last, I would have my own hands on the wheels and pulleys of justice, working together with my fellow citizens to produce a fair outcome for some yet unknown person whose fate would hang in the balance. As I descended Ranting Hill in my seventeen-year-old, juniper-green pickup, I hollered joyfully out the window to the girls, “The Revolution was not fought for nothing!”
My patriotic fervor was instantly dampened by the scene I encountered upon arriving at the county seat. A line of people trailed out the front door of the courthouse and wrapped around the corner, and to a person they looked as if they had been up all night drinking cheap liquor. One portly man, who was wearing rainbow-colored suspenders over a torn T-shirt, had a ring with approximately two hundred keys dangling from his belt down almost to the sidewalk. A young woman wearing work boots and Carhartt dungarees was also sporting what can only be called a tube top. Another guy had a beard so long and gray that he had to have come either from ZZ Top or 1849. An otherwise respectable-looking, middle-aged man wore a tweed jacket with elbow patches, which was fine, but on h
is head was a deerstalker—that weird, double-brimmed hat that is worn only by people who are costumed as Sherlock Holmes for Halloween. When a middle-aged woman, who looked like the only sane person in the lot, turned around, her hoodie sweatshirt revealed an image of Minnie Mouse, complete with polka-dotted dress, pink bow in hair, arm up, and middle finger extended. These were my fellow citizens, which made me wonder what the criminals around here might look like.
Once inside the chambers with this motley bunch, the judge and attorneys began the jury selection process, which I found fascinating. After all, it was easier to see why most of us should not be allowed to judge anybody than why we should. Soon enough, the dismissals began. One man knew the witnesses. Another spoke no English. A woman swore loudly that she would need to pee every fifteen minutes for the duration of the trial. A young guy said he didn’t believe in government at all but wanted the forty dollars per day they would pay us to serve. Then, to the considerable exasperation of the judge, the guy wearing the deerstalker explained, in an obviously fake British accent, that he was urgently needed down at Area 51 to perform an autopsy on the remains of an alien whose wrecked spacecraft had recently been recovered by the NSA. I realized, suddenly, that I was the least weird person in the room. This was an entirely new experience for me, and I didn’t like it one bit.
On this went, with folks being dismissed left and right, until the plaintiff’s attorney, informing the jury that one of the witnesses was a minister, asked if anyone was so biased against religion as to find it impossible to listen objectively to a minister’s testimony. At this point, approximately half of the remaining potential jurors raised their hands, prompting the judge to intervene.
“We aren’t asking if you attend church, which church you attend, or even if you believe in a deity. We’re asking only if you can listen without bias to the testimony of a fellow citizen who happens to be a minister. This testimony will in no way be related to religion. Please raise your hand only if you remain so biased as to be unable to perform your civic duty here today.”
Now all the same hands went up, plus one more—that of a hungover-looking guy who had apparently just regained consciousness. At this point the judge, who was clearly aggravated, began a series of ambitious attempts to impress upon these recalcitrant would-be jurors the importance of their task. Did they understand that our judicial system is the envy of countries around the world, where people languish in prison simply for speaking their minds? The reply was a nodless sea of blank stares. Did they understand how rarely our citizens are asked to perform this vital civic duty and how foundational it is to the core principle of fairness upon which true justice depends? If anything, the jaws slackened a bit. At last, the judge had recourse to baseball metaphors, which indicated pretty clearly that he was running out of ideas. “Would you say that an umpire in a baseball game couldn’t be trusted to call balls and strikes simply because he believes in God?”
Although the judge had not asked for it, the same group of folks raised their hands again, a little higher this time, including the recently awakened guy and now even one more lady, who was wearing an “Aces” baseball cap. The judge rocked back in his big leather chair and rubbed the temples of his lowered head between his thumb and forefingers.
“Someday, you’ll be at a barbecue or a ball game,” he said slowly, in a very tense voice, “and you’ll hear people complain about what’s wrong with our judicial system. Well, now you know. You’re all dismissed!”
People think I am joking when I say that I do not like leaving Ranting Hill—that I would rather stay out here in the sticks than come to town—that, if I had my way, I might never come to town again. As a confirmed desert rat, I would rather be hungry and thirsty in a windstorm with a pack of howling coyotes than be in town for free drinks and dinner. But the dark side of this otherwise salutary isolation is that it may lead, incrementally, to the rainbow suspenders, the 1849 beard, or the deerstalker cap. I understand that we are bound by a social contract—that we have a civic duty to perform when the otherwise invisible state summons us to appear. But there is an odd sense in which these social relations seem abstract to those of us who live long enough in the West’s remote deserts, where we forge primary allegiances to silence, weather, night sounds, alpenglow, imagination, the pungent scent of sage. We are not joiners; on the contrary, we secede religiously. I don’t mean to say that Henry Thoreau was necessarily right when he concurred with the maxim “That government is best which governs least.” In fact, the experience of being summoned to appear has caused me to wonder if our fierce independence may be a real threat—even to forms of social organization that ultimately protect our freedoms rather than endangering them.
I find it helpful to address this kind of question using RIs. RIs are “Rhode Islands,” a unit of measurement we Great Basinians sometimes use to convey the vastness of our place in the big West. For example, at more than 110,000 square miles, Nevada comprises roughly one hundred RIs. The county in which I live, and from which my fellow jurors and I had been randomly selected, has an RI factor of six. What does it mean to live in a county six times the size of a US state? It means that you might be asked to drive hundreds of miles through a snowstorm from your remote desert home to the courthouse at the other end of this long, narrow county to perform your civic duty.
The vexing relationship between independence and interdependence can be difficult to discern. Seen in the shimmering immensity of this high desert landscape, even a town with a courthouse comes to seem like an abstraction, until—and sometimes even after—you’ve arrived there. Is it any wonder that some of us have gone so feral that we are now beyond the reach of baseball metaphors? Come to think of it, my fellow jurors seemed just as fascinated by my weirdness as I was by theirs. If I can at least say I have not reached the alien autopsy stage of rural desert living, it may be that I have already traveled farther down the unmarked gravel road to Area 51 than I’d like to admit.
OUT HERE IN the windy expanse of the wild Great Basin, highway 395 is our lifeline. Not simply the route south to Mono Lake and Yosemite, and north to the Lassen lava lands and Shasta country beyond, it is also the only way we can access diapers, tractor parts, beer—anything that can’t be beamed to us from a satellite. Our remote home here on Ranting Hill rests within a labyrinth of ridges and canyons on the eastern flank of our home mountain, which trends north–south and carries the Nevada-California state line along its rocky crest. On this side of the mountain is a classic, high-elevation desert landscape—a sandy, expansive ocean of sagebrush dotted with bitterbrush, rabbitbrush, and ephedra, gooseberry, desert peach, and chokecherry. On the west side of the mountain is a broad, sweeping valley through which runs the distant highway, curving past the lone outpost of Hallelujah Junction. Beyond the highway to the west is the pitched escarpment of the Sierra Nevada, which rises dramatically in a heavily forested palisade of sheer granite turrets and crags.
Many world religions recognize sacred mountains, high places of spiritual power or significance. Mt. Sinai is vitally important to Judaism because it was upon this mountain that Moses is said to have received God’s commandments. Likewise, Mt. Kailash to Hinduism, for that consecrated peak is considered to be the home of Shiva. The Greeks considered Mt. Olympus holy, and the Romans worshipped Mt. Etna as the abode of Vulcan, the God of fire. The Shinto of Japan pay homage to Mt. Koya-san, while the Taranaki people of New Zealand worship Mt. Taranaki, and the Nepalese deify the 23,000-foot-tall Machapuchare. Sacred mountains are also foundational to the cosmologies of many Native American peoples, including the Navajo.
Because sacred mountains are so often identified as special sites of inspiration, revelation, and transformation, many rituals have developed to honor them. Holy mountains, which are sometimes venerated as living entities, are often worshipped through practices that involve walking. For example, Buddhist and Hindu devotional practice includes the kora, a ritual circumambulation of sacred peaks b
y which the devotee makes a pilgrimage not to or up the mountain but instead around it. This ritual of walking meditation, which is always performed clockwise in order to follow “the way of the sun,” is said to “open the mountain.” One of the most famous North American circumambulations occurred in 1965, when the American poets Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and Philip Whalen made a sacramental pilgrimage around Mt. Tamalpais, on the Marin Peninsula north of San Francisco. It is a lovely ritual hike, one I have repeated many times, pausing at particular spots to read from the stanzas Gary Snyder wrote about those same spots, made sacred in his poem “The Circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais.”
Because our home mountain is twenty miles long and is surrounded by broken flanks of foothills and canyons—not to mention a few ranches where a meditating circumambulator might get a load of buckshot in his britches—rather than opening the mountain I have instead made it an annual ritual to close the mountain before the first snow renders its summit inaccessible until April or even May. Closing the mountain requires a long hike; but, as the comedian Stephen Wright has observed, “Everywhere is within walking distance if you have the time.” To honor my home mountain, I hike from Ranting Hill all the way over the mountain’s high crest and down to Hallelujah, a ten-mile-long transect of the range that lifts me to almost 8,000 feet before dropping down the mountain’s steep western face and, eventually, all the way to the highway, which snakes through the distant valley below. Much like the bear, my annual ritual is to anticipate winter by going over the mountain just to see what I can see. Although in closing the mountain I am a transect-ambulator rather than a circumambulator, my pilgrimage, like the kora, is a devotional gesture of respect and veneration for my home mountain.
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