Hannah was even more consoling. “Dad, you spent all afternoon building this with us, which is double awesome. Why don’t you write a Rant about our big lizard? Then, we can just forget about the whole Icky thing and call him ‘Rantosaurus’!”
As Caroline nodded in agreement, I found myself thinking that a kid’s universe is not only more imaginative than the grown-up world, but also more humane. Millions of years ago, this desert had been ocean, and someday it might be ocean once again. But for one small, already disappearing moment in the life of this place, I was the flawed father of understanding children and the co-creator of a giant desert sea monster. It would be foolish to wish for more.
“OK, y’all. Rantosaurus it is. Rantosaurus silverhillsii. Not only rare, but unique. Nothing like it anywhere in the world.”
By now Eryn had come out to “admire my art,” as she put it with a grin, and to call us in for supper. “It looks pretty fierce,” she said. “What do you want it to protect us from? I’d like to be protected from rattlers in the garage and Beauregard slobbering on my work clothes. How about you, Bubba?”
I took one more swig of the delicious Icky IPA. “Light beer, illegal off-roaders, climate-change deniers, and county commissioners. Not necessarily in that order. Hannah, how about you?”
“OK, let’s see. Mountain lions and Brussels sprouts. Caroline, how about you?”
“Dog poop. And when teachers get mad. I want Rantosaurus to just gobble up mad teachers.”
“I think that’s a fine idea, sweetie,” I said, in a tone of sincere approval.
Caroline had one last question. “Dad, I know our sea monster isn’t really an Icky, but is it as big as one—as big as one of those big Nevada ones, I mean?”
“Let’s find out,” I said, taking her small hand in mine. We then paced off the length of our monster, starting at the head, which towered over her little body, and tracing the curves of its gracefully winding spine until we reached the tip of the tail. “Well, honey, your Rantosaurus is about forty feet long, which is impressive, but Mom read that the whopper Nevada ichthyosaurs were almost fifty feet long. Are you disappointed?”
“Naaw,” she replied without hesitation. “He’ll keep growing, and next winter, when we build him again, he’ll be even bigger.”
I HAVE NEVER LIKED COWS ONE BIT. I know cattle come off looking pretty good in Hollywood glamorizations of drives on the Western trail, and cows are supposed to be cute when they appear in the form of your great aunt’s Holstein knickknack collection, but the plain fact is that cows are lazy, unattractive, smelly, ill-mannered, and can’t be trusted. I have made close observations of cattle out on the BLM land here in Silver Hills, and I do not like what I see. It is tough to manage much admiration for an animal that lumbers back and forth on the same path all day, and I am not impressed by bovine intelligence when I see fat cows standing in the only spring in this valley, plopping huge butt pies into the sparkling water, and then bending forward to lap that water up, as if they have somehow improved its flavor.
Without launching an ecogeek polemic here, it may be enough to say that cattle can be hard on wild lands, causing erosion, dispersing invasive plants, destroying riparian habitat, and displacing native wildlife. Thirty years ago, while backpacking the Escalante Canyons in southern Utah, I was so heartbroken by the environmental damage caused by cattle grazing that I resolved, in that moment, to end my complicity by withdrawing from the hamburger economy, and I have not eaten beef since. And don’t forget that the release of methane gas by bovines contributes to global climate change. Next time you see the pitiable image of a stranded polar bear adrift on a chunk of floating ice, think cow farts.
This account of my dislike of cattle makes it sound entirely principled. In truth, my main objection to cows is that they appear crazy-eyed and drunk. Out on the range they look as if they are always about to fall over, as if they just tossed back a five-gallon-bucket shot of tequila that hasn’t quite hit them yet but will momentarily. Think, by comparison, of the quickness, agility, and attentiveness of wild things—how coyote, pronghorn, rattler, and harrier are like the string of an instrument that millions of years of evolutionary fine-tuning has tightened to perfect pitch. There is no graceless motion or lapse in concentration, let alone giant tequila shots or pooping in their own water source.
When I look into the eyes of cows, by contrast, they gaze back with a disturbing blankness that seems to say, “I might kill you, or you might kill me, or I might just stand here and fart, and it’s all the same to me.” This is not the kind of calculus I want to see revealed in the eyes of a fellow mammal. And while these spindly legged, dung-encrusted knuckleheads hardly look threatening, I can’t help picturing the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain—or Elko, Nevada, where we continue the venerable, Old World Basque Country tradition of getting drunk and daring angry cows to kill us—and I wonder how long it would take one of these cranky fat boys to go from bore to gore, from trying lazily to bum tequila off me to turning me into a ranting shish kebab. I have looked deep into the black hole of those bovine eyes and have lived to tell the chilling tale: There is no there there. It is pure existential void.
When I was in seventh grade, a big kid named Billy Green, who had failed the fifth and sixth grades a number of times and was thus approximately twenty years old at the time, punched me in the face as payback for my having accidentally hit him with a softball during recess. I handled this difficult moment with my usual courage and aplomb, by crying like a baby, spouting blood, and blubbering helplessly, “Billy, you’re…you’re going to have to pay the doctor bill!”
I doubt I appeared very threatening, since several of my front teeth were, at that moment, protruding through a gash in my lower lip. Ever since that time, I’ve had problems with those teeth, and recently I received the troubling news that the abused choppers would have to be yanked out, and that deterioration in my jaw would have to be remedied with a bone graft. Speaking as a person who would rather be punched in the face by Billy Green every single day than sit in a dentist’s chair for thirty minutes, I respond poorly to terms like “surgery,” “extraction,” or “implant,” and least of all did I welcome the idea of a “bone graft.” My situation went from bad to worse when I asked my nerdy oral surgeon where he would harvest the bone that would be used in the graft. His disturbingly enthusiastic reply was, “From a cow!”
As you might imagine, this news caused me genuine consternation. A perfectly intelligent man of substantial professional training and experience was casually proposing that he should pull teeth out of my head and replace part of my jaw with freeze-dried cow bone. Was this a cruel joke? Looking up helplessly from the chair, I carefully explained to the oral surgeon all about the hollow eyes and the tequila shots and the iceberg-thawing flatulence, and I begged him to perform the operation using bone from a chimpanzee, armadillo, or wallaby. He replied calmly that it had to be cow, and added, reassuringly, “Oh, and don’t worry about contracting mad cow disease from this.”
“Thanks a bunch,” I said, drooling prodigiously onto my clip-on bib. “I wasn’t worried about that at all…until now.”
Yesterday I went in for my operation, which I don’t have the stomach to relate in detail. When I was placed in the dreaded chair—a memory that already feels dreamlike and surreal—the radio was tuned, unhappily, to our local country station, KBULL, which happened at that moment to be twanging out Johnny Cash’s cover of “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” a terrifying ballad about “a mighty herd of red-eyed cows” whose “brands were still on fire” and whose “hooves were made of steel.” The surgeon revved up the drill just as the Man in Black described the “bolt of fear” that went through him as the demonic cattle began their deadly stampede. I do not remember much after that, and the fragments I do recall were processed through the distorted filter of hallucinogenic fear: a synesthetic blending of the sound of drills, the feeling of splattering water, the metallic taste of blood, the charred smell of grinding
bone, and the horrific imagination of rising from the chair to look in the mirror and discover that my head had been fully transformed into that of a cow.
I survived the procedure, but it is certain that I will never be the same again, for part of my jaw is now built of the bones of my enemy. Once fully human, I am now a hillbilly cyborg, part man and part cow. Like Captain Ahab, whose prosthetic leg was crafted from whalebone, if I continue to bad-mouth cows, I will have to do it with a mouth that is part cow. Perhaps my own epic account of man and monster will begin like Melville’s, but with this opening line: “Call me Cabeza de Vaca.”
I search my imagination for some ennobling analog for my bizarre transformation. As a kid who watched too much TV during the late 1970s, I remember The Six Million Dollar Man, in which a cool, handsome astronaut who sustains serious injuries is rebuilt with cutting-edge technology that makes him stronger, faster, and even better-looking. And six million dollars is approximately what this oral surgery has cost me. I run some quick numbers on the procedure and determine that the amount of money I have paid to have a few milligrams of cow bone stuck into my head would have bought 800 pounds of fresh ground beef—or, perhaps better, a half dozen full-grown steers that I could keep on the back forty, in case I need additional cow bone for future operations. I also learned that the cash spent on my smidgen of cow bone would have gone a long way toward buying an entire cobalt-chrome hip joint, which makes me wonder if it would have been a better value to skip the cow and simply rebuild my jaw using a prosthetic hip.
I am no handsome astronaut, and I am neither stronger nor faster than before I raided my kids’ college fund to become a cow head. But at least I do not eat cows, which, under my new circumstances, would seem rather like a person who had received a heart transplant from a pig waking up the morning after the operation to scarf down a plate of bacon. I try to make light of my dental misery, telling Hannah and Caroline jokes that I have crafted for the occasion: “What happened to the cow whose bones are in Daddy’s face? Nobody’s herd!” But beneath this strained humor, my relationship to nonhuman nature seems more visceral and intimate than ever before. I still distrust cows, but now, when I meet them out on the BLM, I detect a strange kinship. Somehow they look at me a little differently, as if to ask, “Hey, smart-ass, where would you be without us?” And when I brush my teeth in the morning, I sometimes notice an irrational, vacant, slightly insane look in my own dark eyes, as if my bovinification has led me closer to the profound metaphysical question being asked each day by cows everywhere: Got tequila?
THE QUINTESSENTIAL NEVADA film is John Huston’s 1961 picture The Misfits, starring Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, and Montgomery Clift. The movie had its origin in playwright Arthur Miller’s trip to Nevada in 1956. While doing his mandatory six-week Nevada residency in order to divorce his first wife so he could marry Marilyn Monroe, Miller closely observed the landscapes and people of Nevada, even witnessing a wild horse roundup out on the Smoke Creek Desert. He documented his Nevada experience in the short story “The Misfits,” which appeared in Esquire magazine in October 1957, and which he subsequently rewrote as a screenplay he described as a “valentine” for Monroe, for whom he created the starring role of Roslyn Tabor.
The plot of this dark film might be summarized as follows: Roslyn, a fragile, lost woman seeking a divorce, comes to Reno, where she meets three lost men—three different sorts of washed-up cowboys—each of whom is also in escape mode and all of whom soon fall in love with her. This odd crew remains impressively drunk most of the time. At last, they head out into the desert to hunt wild mustangs in a roundup so violent and tragic as to compel the realization that the values of the Old West, now gone forever, have been replaced by nothing but uncertainty, instability, and loneliness.
Sound fun? The story gets better. In addition to the production of The Misfits being an over-budget and behind-schedule nightmare of emotional volatility, psychological pressure, drug addiction, alcoholism, and excessive gambling on the part of cast and crew alike, the picture now has an overhyped but irresistible reputation for having destroyed many of the people associated with it. The newly minted, highly publicized Miller-Monroe marriage imploded during the making of the film, as Monroe spiraled downward into narcotics addiction. Gable, who at age fifty-nine insisted on doing many of his own stunts, said of Monroe on the last day of shooting, “I’m glad this picture’s finished. She damn near gave me a heart attack.” The next day, he suffered a heart attack; ten days later he was dead. The Misfits was also the final film for Monroe, who died of a probable suicide in the summer of 1962. She was only thirty-six. Monty Clift survived a few years longer than his costars, but the film plays a strange role in his demise as well. The Misfits was on television on the evening of July 22, 1966. Asked by his partner if he wanted to watch it, Clift headed off to bed with a curt reply: “Absolutely not.” Those were his last words. By morning he was dead.
I call The Misfits the quintessential Nevada film because it so powerfully dramatizes the restlessness and uncertainty of whatever the New West is and is still becoming. Miller insightfully described Nevada as a fascinating, alien place inhabited by people who had in common only that they had come here to “escape something somewhere.” As Miller observed decades later, “In a way they were free people, but they were unfree in the sense that there was an unrequited longing for something they couldn’t name.” “Misfits” are these free yet unfree people who remain trapped between a troubled past and an uncertain future, between the erasure of the iconography of independence associated with the Old West and the radical mobility and instability of the New West. They have managed to escape the encumbrances and responsibilities that burden most of us, but in severing those ties they have also become unmoored, set adrift in the chartless immensity of a shoreless sagebrush ocean.
The landscape of the Great Basin is crucial to the film’s thematic force and visual aesthetic. Miller was fascinated by the fact that in this wild desert, “the people were so little and the landscape was so enormous.” “They were practically little dots, and you felt that with them,” he observed. “They were like specks of dust across the road.” Speaking as one of those specks, I agree that the existential reality of life in the Great Basin is a matter of scale—both a temporal and spatial scale within which the illimitable openness of the big empty offers a constant reminder of our own inconsequentiality. This is the realization the unhomed characters in The Misfits seek desperately to avoid but must ultimately face.
Crucial to the film is the place where Roslyn and the three men finally confront this loss: a remote playa—what we call the vast alkali flats in the basins between desert mountains—that is the site of the roundup of wild horses that so dramatically concludes the picture. It is a painful scene in which the tools of the New West (an airplane and a truck) are used to capture six wild mustangs, which are to be sold for a pittance and unheroically rendered into dog food. Although the horses are ultimately released after Roslyn has a breakdown while witnessing their cruel treatment, it is clear that the Old West is headed for the meat grinder and that no one has the slightest idea what to do about it—or how they will possibly endure whatever might come next.
As an admirer of this desperate film, and as a man desperate for an excuse to skip work and go hoofing in the desert, I decided to try to find the spot where this dark crescendo of The Misfits was shot. After some research, I discovered that the mustanging scene had not been filmed on the Smoke Creek Desert, as some sources suggested, but instead on a playa near the waterless wide spot of Stagecoach, down in Lyon County. Unlike roughly 85 percent of Nevada, this playa turned out to be private land, which meant that an unauthorized visit could be hazardous to my health. Who in hell owns their own desert?
Eventually, I tracked down the owner, a guy named Lester, who agreed to meet me in Carson City to tell some stories and give me access to “Misfits Flat,” which is what this unnamed desert playa came to be called after it was fatally associated wit
h Miller and Huston, Monroe and Gable. Before leaving Ranting Hill for Carson Valley, I invited my friend Cheryll to ride shotgun. She’s an expert on Nevada literature and has a passion for the Huston film; even more important, she wears a bright-red snowsuit that looks cool out on playas, where the bone-white immensity of snow and sand constantly threatens to diminish humans to invisibility.
Cheryll and I met Lester at a little Vietnamese restaurant on the edge of Carson City, where, by the time we arrived, he was eating a big bowl of hot-peppered pho and drinking beer. He soon began to reel off amazing stories about his life both before and since coming to Nevada. Lester had been a good suburban kid who, in the mid-1960s, jumped the ship of middle-class respectability to join the freaks in Haight-Ashbury. When the scene in the Haight began to commercialize, he lighted out for the territory, where he became a big-wall climber at Yosemite, routing pitches with rock legends including Galen Rowell, Dick Long, and TM Herbert. Moving from stone to surf, he later lived in Santa Cruz, where he became a skilled sailor. Only after these and other adventures did Lester make his way to the backcountry of Nevada, where he became a world champion in what he calls “dirt boating,” a slang term for “land sailing,” a challenging sport that, from my point of view, amounts to racing insanely across the playa at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour in a three-wheeled go-cart driven by desert winds that fill a giant sail that rides atop it.
When we asked Lester how he came to acquire Misfits Flat, he said only that he reckoned it would be easier to buy it than to see it posted with No Trespassing signs. No further comment. He had purchased the 2,000-acre tract from the flat’s longtime owners, who still had the handwritten receipt showing how much United Artists had paid for the privilege of shooting The Misfits there in the summer and fall of 1960. I broke out a printed satellite map of the area, and, over another beer, Lester annotated it for us, indicating various shooting locations. He then gave us directions and permission to spend the afternoon on Misfits Flat.
Rants from the Hill Page 16
