Down To Beatty – Route
June 17, 2020 Filed under Uncategorized
June 17, 2020 Filed under Uncategorized
The “breakfast” part of “bed and breakfast” was quite pleasant. There was one other guest but I never saw her, since she departed early in the morning. It was just me at the dining room table, looking out into the back yard, while the owner rustled up a plate of eggs and toast.
We didn’t talk much, but I did ask what inspired her to get so many peacocks. “Did you just start with two and they multiplied or something?”
“No, they were already wandering around when this place was a brothel.”
I laughed. I guess it made sense. Exotic rooms, exotic birds…
When I stepped outside I discovered why they had been so loud at night. There was a railing next to the building right outside my bedroom window, and the birds were roosting along it in a line, facing the wall. They had been just a few feet from my ears the entire night. I pointed this out to the owner and she apologized, but gave no indication that she’d change anything to stop it from happening again.
“Oh well,” I thought. “It’s not my problem now. This is probably the one time in my entire life that I’ll be on this highway, in fact.”
I cued up an audiobook and got to pedaling. The day wasn’t as hot as yesterday, so I drank less water, which meant fewer pee stops, which meant more continuous time in the saddle. Hours sailed by as I gazed at the dusty landscape.
For a while I amused myself by yelling random things out loud, knowing that nobody could hear me. “Sassen fracken backen!!” I yelled. “Blithering blarney-stones! Blatherskite! Balderdash! Brig’ a Doooon!” I shouted the lyrics to “Au Contraire” by They Might Be Giants, then practiced my fake Scottish accent. Eventually I settled on screaming the word “UNDERPANTS!!” over and over at top volume.
I imagined a historian, following alongside me on their own bicycle, documenting my important words for future civilizations to ponder. Then I imagined getting flattened by a truck.
The historian would survey the wreckage, sigh, and then write with a flourish: “Let the record show that the last thing he said before he died was the word ‘underpants.'”
“Perfect,” I thought. … “UNDERPAAANTS!!!”
The hills ran out, and the road became one long downhill glide, with a roomy shoulder, unspooling beneath my wheels for over an hour. “Fantastic!” I thought, and even made a little video to remember it.
After enjoying that for a while I encountered the remnants of another brothel, with an amusing sign.
Angel’s ladies are closed! You’ll just have to wait for the afterlife to enjoy them, my friends.
I peed on the sign, since it offered concealment from the road. Then I noticed this amusing piece of junk nearby:
It was covered with an incredible sticker collection. Too bad it’s all the way out here where no one can admire it.
Probably a prop from Burning Man, dropped here by someone who either wanted to store it, it just abandon it without trying to recycle the materials.
A few miles after that lovely exhibit I finally coasted into the town of Beatty. First thing I did was walk into the casino, hoping for a cheap room. They were nearly 200 dollars. Ugh! Next thing I did was walk over to the Motel 6. Less than 100 dollars! Better.
I never did get consensus from the locals on how this town’s name is pronounced. One person claimed it was Beatty like the name “Betty”, another said it was like the word “bait” with an “e” tacked on. It was just a pit stop for me, so I didn’t keep asking.
A good, breezy day of riding! Making good progress across the state. As it got dark outside I caught up on work and ate snacks. Soon I would have to decide whether to head south into Death Valley, or try and detour around it for safety purposes.
June 16, 2020 Filed under Uncategorized
June 16, 2020 Filed under Curious, Introspection
I took my time packing up. I could see a big hill on the south edge of town, and I didn’t want to get all the way up there and then realize I’d forgotten some random item at the hotel. I don’t mind climbing big hills once, but I hate climbing them twice!
There’s something funny about that. It’s so irrational. Why am I okay with climbing a big hill even once, when I could just blast over it in a car? It’s got to be some deep instinctive thing about humans and the joy of exploring new terrain.
I took a break at the top of the hill, then began a long, easy cruise down, which flattened out into the first of several long valleys in the day’s riding.
At a wide bend in the road I stopped for a snack, and at my feet there was a giant chunk of tire tread, laying on top of the gravel.
Vulcanized tires are essentially one giant molecule of rubber, threaded with filaments of steel. To tear this piece off all at once, the forces between the truck and the pavement must have been tremendous. Was this the remnants of an accident, or a blowout? Either way it was cool, so I dropped it into a saddlebag and carried on.
Another roadside reminder of how dangerous my mode of travel is.
Hundreds of massive trucks passed by me today, only a few feet away from my body. They were my closest companions in these hot and otherwise silent valleys. As I rode I kept comparing my situation to that of the drivers, zooming by me on their own journeys. If you factor out the difference in speed, and the differences in sensation from traveling 10 miles per hour versus eighty, then my experience and theirs could be described the same way: Intervals of transport divided by intervals of stopping and looking around.
Stopping and looking around is one of my favorite activities on a bike tour. I get to do it whenever I want, which tends to be often – multiple times per hour – all day long. Any one of those people in their cars could stop, any moment, and look around the same way. And they do, but way less often. Maybe a few times in a whole day of driving.
Does looking around produce anything for me? Does it earn me money? Do I gather new wisdom out here, that makes me a better employee back home? Or is it something I do purely for entertainment? And if that’s the case, why do I find it so entertaining? Why is my sense of curiosity so well nourished by the experience of a new landscape?
At what point do I cross the threshold between deriving benefit from looking around, and simply wasting my time?
I pass within a few feet of hundreds of people every day out here, but in all the ways that matter, I am alone — with plenty of time to think. It’s no surprise that I would start asking big, sweeping questions like this.
The question of wasting my time is really about giving myself permission to do something “unproductive” by the standard of my regular life. In my regular life, I have spent an awful lot of time sitting at a desk, typing on a keyboard. That time goes by quickly, because I don’t see the desk, I see an alternate universe of logic and mathematics, where time is measured in solutions to problems. The interval between solutions – the time I spend being “stuck” and hammering at a problem – could be minutes, hours, or entire days, but it all tends to compress down into the same interval. A tick-tock of a pendulum, swinging from problem to solution, as the days of the real world flicker by around me.
It pays the bills and it makes things happen. But unless you define looking around to include the interior landscape of a mental journey – which I can’t quite agree with – I’m definitely not looking around. The instinctive part of me that’s thrilled by travel and curious about my physical world does not get any nourishment. So … Which activity is the bigger waste? Or, how much of each is proper?
On the other hand…
Some people get addicted to meth and spend half of their lives helplessly stealing and sleeping in a ditch.
If I wanted to, I could compare myself to them. I could also measure myself by the legacy of Steve Jobs, or Emperor Hirohito, or whoever. There is no objective standard for what I accomplish in life, so I set my own. And out here in the wilderness, I get to argue with myself about it. What am I seeing out here that brings this question to mind?
What would my standards be if I lived in a little town like Goldfield? They would probably revolve around my body. I’d work hard in a hot room, or a hot vehicle, or outdoors in the hot sun, and probably never make quite enough to be comfortable, but I’d have to stop and rest just from being physically exhausted. The whole idea of choosing whether to work would seem bizarre.
Or perhaps that’s too romantic. Maybe I’d spend five years gluing crap to a car so I can run it in weird parades around the country. The cars are fun to look at but then I’d have no money, so they’d languish in a dried up town, and I’d set up a donation box and linger around them like a ghost.
Or maybe I’d spend five years ripping off road signs from the highway to decorate my house on the main street. The tourists would like it, and a few more of them would stop and buy something. In the meantime, over many years, some unknown number of people would get lost for hours trying to find a road, or run into a ditch on some sudden, unmarked curve, because I stole the indicator for it.
Or maybe I’d be scraping by in Reno, turning fast-food hours into rent payments, feeling trapped, and with no idea what I was getting into, I’d stumble into a meth addiction and spend half my life helplessly stealing and sleeping in a ditch.
I may set my own standard for what I accomplish, but that doesn’t absolve me from wasting opportunities, or destroying other people’s work, or having terrible judgement and being too obstinate to seek help or advice.
Interesting thoughts. A few miles down the road from the grave marker, I picked up a round, chiseled hunk of obsidian. “I’ll keep this, as a reminder of these thoughts,” I said.
I saw more interesting things as the day shaded into evening. A helicopter hovered over the valley for a while, then landed a mile or so ahead of me.
Eventually there was just one more valley between me and my destination.
It’s not actually a brothel, but it was one about six years ago. The most important thing for my purposes was the location: Halfway along an otherwise empty stretch of highway 95, at the base of a slow climb. If I didn’t stop here I would be riding well into the night.
The property around the rooms was alive with noisy peacocks, which were very photogenic but made quite a racket. As I stepped onto the porch, three little dogs came running around from the back yard, threading between the birds, and added to the noise with their yapping. When the owner opened the door she apologized repeatedly for the chaos.
One thing I didn’t anticipate about staying in a motel that used to be a brothel: The impracticality of the rooms. The one the owner gave me was filled with atmospheric props, and didn’t have a desk, or any drawer space, and all the chairs looked terribly fragile. I piled my gear in the middle of the floor and ate my dinner snacks leaning against the wall.
Thankfully the bed was clean. I pulled my own pillow out of the compression sack and snuggled up in the blankets with it, with some ambient music playing on the phone.
“This will be a good night’s sleep,” I thought to myself. “Middle of nowhere with no other guests, and just the quiet lullaby of some birds making the occasional –“
“BA RAAAWK! BA RAAAWK! BA RAAAAAAWWWWK!”
“Holy crap, that sounded like it was right inside the room! Maybe it’s just carrying really well in the dry air? No, that doesn’t make sense. Whatever. I’m sure I’ll just fall asleep in a little –“
“BA RAAAWK! BA RAAAAAAWK! HRRHHHLGHL!”
“Yikes! Okay, let me put some earplugs in. That’ll help. I’ll put this other pillow on my head too. I hope those birds go to sleep sometime soon. It’s going to be a long night if they –“
“HAAWRRGRRHBGHHLLBL! BA RAAAWK!”
And so it went, until about two in the morning.
June 15, 2020 Filed under Curious, Introspection
I slept pretty well, but I woke up hungry. There was exactly one restaurant operating in Goldfield so I headed for it.
There was a lot of cool stuff sitting around. The whole town was a sort of open-air museum. The contrast with Oakland was hilarious to me: If this stuff was sitting around in Oakland, it would be a matter of days before homeless people tore it all apart and carried it to metal recyclers, or built shacks out of it. Every one of these unoccupied buildings would rapidly fill with trash, soiled clothing, and human waste.
On the other hand, if you did the inverse, and brought all the homeless people in Oakland over to Goldfield… They would probably all starve or die of dehydration in about a week. The locals wouldn’t be able to feed them even if they wanted to. That’s why the homeless are in Oakland, and not here.
I wonder if it would be fair for big cities like Oakland to collect a sort of “homeless tax” from rural areas, and use it to pay for the social workers, drug rehab, and temporary housing that gives homeless people a chance to re-integrate with society and the economy…
(On a more truculent note, I wonder if it would be fair to collect a tax from the Mormon Church to support all the family members that get banished from their community for trivial things like being too gay, or too skeptical – or too brown – and have to leave Utah and start somewhere else with nothing.)
Dang, how did I get up on this soapbox? Aaaanyway, yeah, there’s some neat stuff here.
There were lots of old cars parked around the town, making a haphazard gallery. My favorites were the art cars:
The owner of these cars lived in somewhere in the town. I looked around but didn’t spot him, so I stuffed a few bucks in the donation box and moved on.
It would be incredible to restore this vehicle, but I suspect the owner would ask way too much money for it, for sentimental reasons.
Some cars were in better shape than others…
This handy sign reminded me how hungry I was. Time to eat!
The Dinky Diner! The place is as cute as the name implies:
And so is the interior!
I struck up a conversation with the owner. She talked about how much harder it was to get by in town with COVID nearly shutting down the tourist trade. Most of the local population was already gone, seeking employment in the cities, or consolidating with relatives, or just wandering around. I ordered two entire meals from the menu, knowing I would take one back to the hotel that night. Then I unfolded the laptop and sorted photographs for a while.
As I was finishing my meal, two more customers came in. The woman was in her mid-30’s, powerfully built, wearing shorts and a halter-top with a sports bra underneath. Long brown hair was tied in a braid down her back. She had a serious, intense look on her face. The man she entered with was in his early fifties. Well over six feet tall, wearing a sleeveless shirt and loose pants covered in dirt, with thick leather boots. He had grease stains on his forearms. His face was weathered; his graying hair and beard were long and unkempt.
The woman did all the talking, except for a few words muttered by the man as he asked for a giant hamburger and a tall glass of soda. They ate quickly and left just as I was packing up.
I looked at them and thought about modes of dress, and all the assumptions people can make when they meet strangers in strange lands. With very little effort, I could make what felt like an educated guess about the work these people do, the kind of life they lead … even the way their romantic relationship works. I could make assumptions about their politics. I’d use words like “working-class”, “antisocial”, “libertarian”. I’d assume they owned firearms and thought awful things about “liberals”.
How much of that ‘educated guess’ would be about my own status as a visitor?
I thought about what New Yorkers see, when they come to the Bay Area and find billionaire CEOs – people with astounding power and influence – wearing t-shirts and pants around the office, giving presentations in blue jeans, prowling the factory floor in loafers or even sandals. Does it bother them? Do they think it’s pointlessly confusing? Do they assume that these people are relinquishing some kind of power by not wearing a suit? Or maybe they feel like they’re being mocked?
I thought this over as I packed my leftovers and paid the bill. “There is a common idea here,” I realized. “It’s always about disorientation. It’s about outsiders feeling disoriented because they’re applying the categories they have back home.”
“So these people here in the restaurant with me are dirty, and tired, and their relative ages are bit off. What can I really conclude from that? I’ve placed their mode of dress on a scale, a few notches below mine, because that’s where I would place it back home in Oakland. It’s just like the New Yorker reacting to the CEO in sandals: I’m bringing my categories with me like baggage, and unpacking them around me for my own reasons. It barely has anything to do with these people. That’s kind of dumb. Why am I doing it?”
I walked outside. The man and woman were just pulling onto the road in a beat-up truck. Bundles of rebar were stacked in the back, held together with wire. “I guess it’s what feels natural. The trick is learning how to stop.”
Again, I thought about how different my ideas would be if I lived here for a month, or a year, or ten years. If the world beyond Nevada faded away, and I thought of everything in terms of the desert, and hard work in small towns, and an American landscape slowly emptying out, getting dryer and more lonely, just as it remained beautiful and liberating and vast.
In a year or so I’d probably start to unwind, in an interesting way. I’d think of the frenetic churn of technology and culture in the coastal cities, and it would seem like a mirage, flattened out into little wrinkles of heat. Easy enough to ignore. I’d get my hands dirty building a house, clearing land, fixing machines. I certainly wouldn’t find it remarkable to see some fellow covered in dirt walk into a diner. Instead I’d probably say “Hey, Bill.”
Bill and I would probably be too tired to talk, so we’d just sit there and eat. Maybe some some dust-free Californians would give us the side-eye as they skipped through town on their way to somewhere else. We would barely notice. I probably wouldn’t think much at all about “liberals”. I’d be thinking about my ranch, and the fence I need to repair, and whether I should put new tires on the truck.
Feeling thoughtful, I rode back towards the hotel. I couldn’t really see myself embracing that life. Right now I was definitely too enchanted with bicycle touring to stop here, and in the broader view there were too many fine things and people waiting for me back in California.
Along the way I passed by this building, outlined in the twilight:
Quite remarkable. Some internet searching informed me it was the old Goldfield high school building. Suddenly I was gripped by a compelling idea: I could buy this building, and spend a few years restoring it to a glorious state with my fancy California money, and turn it into a museum or a hotel or a restaurant – or all three – or just make a grand house out of it, and it would be finished just when the economy was recovering from COVID-19. What a cool project!
A few more minutes of internet searching revealed that a project to restore it was already underway, and had been for quite a while. Local volunteers and donors were repairing the building a piece at a time, and when it was done it would be owned by the community. That was a far better outcome than a private individual – and a stranger – like myself coming in to do the job.
Still, it was interesting how much I liked the idea. That meant something. “I should keep that in mind for later, when I’m deciding what the next couple of years are shaped like,” I thought. “Perhaps something with house restoration…”