Goldfield And The Spring – Route
June 14, 2020 Filed under Uncategorized
June 14, 2020 Filed under Uncategorized
June 14, 2020 Filed under Curious, Introspection
I set out in the late morning, and pedaled slowly up through the town. It was several hundred feet of climb to the far edge, and I decided that if I felt even a little bit tired when I got there I would grab another hotel room. I wasn’t feeling pressed for time, even though the calendar was saying otherwise.
Right at the top of the hill was a long wooden building full of touristy shops, with a restaurant and casino at the end. I wasn’t feeling tired but I was feeling hungry, so I stowed the bike in a corner of the parking lot where I could see it from a restaurant window, and ordered an omelet and fried fish.
As I ate, I thought about the cultural differences I was seeing in Nevada. Sometimes I felt like I was still among “my people” – Americans – but with more small-town ruggedness and less engagement with the outside world. Other times I felt like a stranger with a head full of foreign thoughts, making an effort to pass as normal, keeping all my social interactions just a little too formal.
What would it take for me to feel at home in a place like this? How long would I need to live here? I’ve been a resident of Oakland for over a decade, back home in California, and I still feel a little awkward calling myself a “local” when I talk about it. Would I need ten years to settle into Nevada? Twenty? Would it never happen, since my politics and interests are so different?
It didn’t really matter, since in a few hours I would leave this town and probably never return again. Travel can be upsetting that way — it has a lot of endings, and you can get a little panicky if you think about them.
As I chomped through my fish, I noticed an old advertisement, placed in a wooden frame and stuck high on the restaurant wall:
“That’s funny,” I thought. “However much of a stranger I am in Nevada today, it’s probably nothing compared to how out-of-place I’d be anywhere in the America of 80 years ago, when advertisements like that were common.”
I thought about the subconscious messages conveyed in the ad:
To men it said: “If you join the armed forces and go to war, you’ll deserve the following prizes: A young sexy woman devoted to you, at least one free year of child care (because she gave birth to your baby while you were overseas), and a banquet in your honor, which you will of course not need to lift a finger to prepare. Also it includes plenty of coke.”
To women it said: “You should be pretty, good at raising a child, interested in shopping, able to support yourself (while your man is at war), and of course utterly devoted to making your man happy. Coke will help you express that. By the way if you’re not one (or any) of these things, you’re failing in your civic duty as an American. How selfish of you.”
I am, of course, considering this ad through a very modern lens of cynicism regarding the motives of advertisers and corporations. I’m inclined to see depictions of patriotism and wholesomeness as a smokescreen, or even a trap. But more interesting than that, is the social contract between men and women that’s depicted here, and how that’s changed.
The social contract… That was the thing. I tried to come up with a shorthand version of that contract, decade by decade. Here’s what I hastily poked into my phone:
This summary is fanciful, of course. The reality is way too much of a mess to describe without, say, 1000 pages and a bunch of charts. But as I wrapped up my last piece of fish in tinfoil and brought it to the bike, my hastily scrawled list reassured me that a sort of collective progress was possible, and I was still surrounded by it even 400 miles from home.
On the other hand, if I walked around that restaurant and asked the other patrons what they thought of when they saw that ad, how different would their answers be?
Starting from another high elevation point, I had 30 miles to ride if I wanted to reach Goldfield, and 20 miles if I wanted to try camping at the Alkali Flat hot spring. I decided to make for the spring, and then divert to Goldfield if the camping didn’t look good there.
So much glorious downhill, with such a wide shoulder! I enjoyed it while it lasted. The fork leading to Alkali Flat was going to be ten long miles of gravel.
It was in pretty good shape for a gravel road. In only a few spots the gravel or dirt got separated into distinct layers, each of which drowned my tire and forced me to push the bike. Less than a quarter mile out of ten.
I decided to make use of the tripod I’d been hauling around for weeks, and set up a nice timed shot of me with the bike, looking adventurous!
Just before reaching the spring, the road took a sharp left turn and got really crappy.
I passed a strange formation to my left: A wide pit had been excavated in the dirt, all around an abandoned truck, leaving the truck alone at the top of a plateau. Gotta get your art wherever you can out here!
When I got to the spring, the first thing I noticed was a large square pool.
I thought that was the spring, and figured I could at least dip my feet in and enjoy the hot water, but a couple of locals sitting nearby told me that the actual spring was further up on the hillside. One of them pointed at two small pools, each only about ten feet square, one next to the other. Some trucks were parked right next to the first pool, and a family of at least 15 kids and adults was carousing and yelling and splashing around. A heap of abandoned picnic supplies lay on a big blanket nearby. The group looked like it would be hanging out until sunset at least.
No peace for me here. I decided to continue on to Goldfield, but first I would poke around a little abandoned building that seemed cool.
Dig that graffiti!
To my surprise, the road leading back to the highway towards Goldfield was newly paved, and an easy ride. I would have probably saved an hour using it instead of taking that damn gravel road earlier. Oh well! Satellite maps can’t be up-to-the-minute accurate. Commercial ones anyway. Free ones anyway.
I spotted many a cute roadside flower as I sipped water and listened to Paula Poundstone do her latest episode of the French Trump Press Conference.
The wind moved around to my back and gave me a welcome boost up the hill. I pedaled hard to take advantage of it, hoping to arrive in Goldfield early enough to find an open restaurant.
I was sort of victorious. There was a bar with some hotel rooms attached, and I got a room for two days. The guy running the bar seemed eerily familiar, like he was a relative of mine, or a co-conspirator in some high-school mayhem from long ago. He made me a little oven-baked pizza for ten bucks, which I gratefully devoured in the room.
Tomorrow I would explore this city and try to catch up on my work a little.
June 12, 2020 Filed under Curious
Two days blurred together, as a mixture of work, napping, and riding around the town. The room at the National 9 Inn was pretty good for naps, though a bit noisy in the morning.
At first I ventured out just to find food. The nearest place was this klassy burger joint:
I ordered a burger and a big pile of nachos, intending to save one for later, but as soon as I opened the lid of the nachos I knew I wasn’t going to eat most of them:
I didn’t know it was possible for a made-to-order pile of nachos to instantly look like it’s been sitting around for two days, but this burger joint nailed it. I salvaged the avocado and picked at the rest.
The only other nearby place for snacks was a gas station. Walking the aisles, I was amused to see how many bags were bloated due to the 6000 foot elevation of Tonopah:
That was the extent of my adventure for the first day. After that it was all work and rest until the next morning. Then I got on the bike and did some real looking around.
The first thing I noticed was this communications complex built on the top a hill.
It’s visible from everywhere in town, and probably also visible for 50 miles in any direction.
Tonopah was built up around a huge silver deposit in the local hills. Now it’s all about preserving that legacy.
I also found a nifty fixer-upper project:
I brought my laptop to a couple restaurants around town and did some writing while I ate. I found two places that sold some version of “fish and chips”, and a coffee joint built into a gas station whose idea of a “mocha” was pre-mixed coffee and hot chocolate powder with whipped cream sprayed on top — but it was a vague reminder of the coffee shops back in Oakland, so I enjoyed it. None of the patrons wore face masks, but all the employees did.
There was lots of variation in proper mask usage. Several young people came up to me wearing their masks, then decided it was easier to talk to me if they pulled the mask down away from their face, and when the conversation was over they raised it again. Duh. Lots of other people wearing the mask over their mouth but not their nose, and breathing through their nose. We’ve all had over a hundred days to learn what works and what doesn’t, but good information obviously spreads at a different rate depending on where you are — and around here, your politics.
Nevada is a state full of people just getting by. Shutdowns and shelter-in-place began to hurt them immediately, and most of them had no safety net when the money ran out and were forced to make ugly life-altering changes. I sympathize with their resentment. The extent of the damage caused by an infectious disease as it spreads is not something you can see just by talking to your friends and neighbors. You need data from large-scale institutions … And of course you need to have faith in those institutions. If you don’t, you’d be inclined to think the whole thing was a scam, or something that only applied to big urban centers and wasn’t your problem.
That, in a nutshell, is why I saw regular people wearing masks in Reno, employees wearing masks in Carson City and Tonopah, and no one wearing masks in any of the small towns, regardless of their age or what they were doing.
Speaking of coverage, I noticed today that there was a gap between my cloth gloves and the sleeves of my shirt. Oops!
It only took part of each day to ride around Tonopah from end to end and see everything. The town was really not that big. One of the restaurants I ate at displayed a giant photograph taken in the 1910’s, and the houses and mining facilities marched off to the edge of the frame on all sides, but the population and the mining activity decreased all through the 1930’s, and in the 1940’s a huge fire broke out and destroyed much of what remained. Even during the days of the the silver boom the population never climbed much higher than a few thousand and in 2010 there were 2500 people living in Tonapah.
Oh, did I mention there’s a nuclear testing range about 30 miles outside of town? There’s that.
At the end of the second evening I listened to the rest of the BBC Dracula radio drama that I’d started on the climb into town. For some reason I always forget that the original story actually ends with the protagonists pursuing Dracula all the way back to his home country — perhaps because all the dramatic retellings do it in a bit of a rush, after spending most of their time in England. Thinking about that sent me down several internet rabbit holes: The 1990’s movie. The town of Whitby, featured in the novel. A related tale from Jules Verne, called The Castle Of The Carpathians, photos of Colț fortress which was the likely inspiration for that, and a list of tourist activities in the area. It was all a fine contrast from the history and environment of Tonopah.
At the end of the second day I knew it was time to move on. Tonopah was a nice place to hunker down and work, but nothing more for me. The road was calling.
June 11, 2020 Filed under Curious, Introspection, Stress
I got nine good hours of sleep — just what I needed!
As I was rearranging my tent, I considered my next move. If I made the ride to Tonopah today I would need a lot of food. The local burger shack didn’t open until 11:00, which meant waiting around for almost two hours, but leaving with enough food was more important than leaving early.
I’d probably stand around eating some of the food right after I got it, so I wouldn’t leave Mina until noon. Then I’d have around 60 miles and 2000 feet of climbing to do, assuming I could ride through the construction zone. My instincts said that was at least 12 hours. With rest breaks, I’d arrive in Tonopah some time after midnight.
If I got to the construction zone and they turned me away, I’d be forced to go back and spend another night in Mina. Then I’d just have to hunker down in the RV park until the road opened. Not a terrible fate, since I could get work and writing done.
Time to get some answers. I washed and shaved in the RV park shower, then packed everything onto the bike.
Then I rolled downhill to the burger joint.
A woman was outside sweeping dust away from the tables. Long sun-bleached hair, strong arms, in her 50’s perhaps. When she saw me she said, “Go ahead and order; Mom’s in there.”
I approached the window and an older woman inside raised the screen, blasting me with a column of air-conditioning. The day was already heating up. She leaned forward and said, in a squeaky birdlike voice:
Just then the phone rang inside the building and she vanished. I heard her writing down another order, then she came back and I paid the bill.
As soon as I backed away from the window, another woman walked up. Early 70’s, tanned and wiry with a short gray haircut. Much smaller than the other two women. I looked behind me and realized she’d emerged from a gigantic RV that pulled up across the street.
The woman in the building took her order, using a different and more official tone of voice, and without using the word “dearie” at all. Then the daughter finished sweeping and went inside, and the mother-daughter team began cooking up a storm.
The woman from the RV leaned against a table, a respectable distance from me and my bike, and struck up a conversation.
That was good news to me. It meant I could slip onto the closed highway without being spotted, and then negotiate my way around the actual construction when I was already upon it. The crew would be less likely to turn me away if I was already halfway through.
We chatted some more about travel in the time of COVID-19, and the difficulty of knowing what each day might bring. She was friendly but I could tell she was stressed out — probably from having to detour over 40 extra miles of winding mountain roads this morning.
A man walked up to the burger joint. Top-heavy, with tattooed arms sprouting from a sleeveless flannel shirt, and a friendly, almost goofy expression beneath his thinning crewcut. The mom inside broke away from her cooking to take his order, throwing in a few “dearies”.
He chatted with the woman from the RV. His truck was just down the street, and it had a busted alternator. He’d been stuck up in the mountains for a couple days trying to fix it, then getting ahold of a spare battery so he could limp it into town. From Mina he planned to hop to Hawthorne, where he knew a good mechanic.
A car parked nearby and two young women got out, both showing an unwise amount of skin for the blazing sunlight. They placed an order – no “dearies” for them – and then tucked themselves into another corner of the courtyard. It was getting crowded here.
The screen slid up. “Turkey sandwich and feesh!” said Mom.
I gathered two tinfoil-covered plates and placed them on my bike, then wheeled it about ten yards away. As I was scarfing down the fish, a man in a serape and a wide hat, walking with a stick, came ambling down the hill. He drew near and I saw he was unmistakably African-American. I was secretly delighted to find someone of his ethnicity out here in the boonies of Nevada, and we struck up a conversation.
We had a lively talk about the wonders of bicycling. He drew in the gravel with his stick, describing his favorite routes. He’d gotten six flat tires on his way to Sacramento, and it had taken three days. He’d lived in South San Jose for a few years, and rode his bike up to San Francisco on a regular basis. He said that in the beginning, when he was still struggling, he was homeless for a while and would ride from town to town sleeping rough. The police would threaten to arrest him, and he’d say, “Hey, please do! At least I’ll sleep somewhere secure, you know?”
“So how’d you get out into the middle of nowhere in Nevada?” I asked.
He described a land-stewardship program that the state of Nevada was running. They sold him a chunk of land on the edge of Mina for a hundred bucks, and he promised to manage it, perhaps try ranching or farming.
“It’s tough out here, though, because of the thieves,” he said.
“Really? I figured people out here would be more honest.”
“Oh most people really are. But it’s the addicts. They’ll sneak onto your property and steal anything then can get. As soon as I got here I had to build a fence around my land, then I had to MacGyver myself a firearm to keep scaring them off.”
We both commiserated over the economy, the lack of social programs and support for addicts, and how it was hard to do the right thing while still being safe. I walked my empty plate to the trash can. He wished me luck on my journey, shook my hand, and went over to the burger joint to place an order.
Time to get rolling!
First up: Several more amusing critter-crossing signs.
Then some serious utility infrastructure of utmost Kwality™:
And then, to my astonishment, a brothel.
The main building was a big flat square, surrounded by freestanding white Roman columns like posts for an invisible fence. The columns were probably meant to add a feeling of classy reverence, like “here be goddesses,” but they appeared to be melting in the weather as though they were made of plaster, and the building itself badly needed a coat of paint. This weird establishment was plopped down in the center of a dirt and gravel parking lot. No cars were near it, though several broken or wrecked trucks and some construction equipment slowly roasted in the sun on the opposite side of the lot. The effect was like the building actually repelled cars.
Some distance behind this weird “temple” was another building, rectangular with a metal roof. Four joined rooms like a motel, each with a door. Printed across the roof in ten-foot letters was the word “PLAYMATE”.
I rolled by too quickly to get a picture – in fact I felt a sense of revulsion that compelled me to keep going, like the building was a giant predatory insect – but now I wish I’d taken a few shots just to document the sheer absurdity of it.
Later on I did some reading, out of curiosity:
Wild, weird stuff.
I crested a hill and then began a very long, slow descent into a valley. The wind was blowing squarely against me at least 20mph, so I had to pedal to make downward progress. I felt less frustrated than usual because I might have to turn around at the detour ahead, and in that case the wind would blow me right back up this hill with ease.
I rolled up to the intersection with the cones and saw a truck parked next to them. I dismounted my bike nearby, and a woman in an official uniform and a hard hat got out the truck.
Before I could ask her anything, she said: “You can probably get through. There’s just a small section a few miles in where we’re resurfacing the highway, and it has a 2-inch drop, so you’ll need to be careful of that. But I can radio ahead to my boss and let the trucks know you’re coming, and you can probably just ride on through.”
What a pleasant surprise!
“That would be wonderful,” I said. “‘Cause that detour would probably be too much for me to handle.”
She nodded and got on her radio, and I took out my thermos of ice water and poured a cup. When she finished I offered her some.
“Oh no, I’ve got plenty in the truck, thanks. You can go on ahead!” She grabbed one of the big cylindrical cones and pulled it aside, making a gap wide enough for
Dang; that was easy!
I pedaled onto the empty road, feeling like royalty. Every twenty minutes or so a big-rig dump truck clattered by, going in or out, but aside from those I had the whole surface to myself. I stopped to drink more water and fish out a chocolate bar, and was disoriented by the silence. I could see cars moving along the detour in the distance but I couldn’t hear them at all.
For the next hour or so I went slowly into the mountains. The dump trucks continued to roll by. Then at the top of a hill, I saw a regular truck coming down towards me. It pulled to a stop and another woman in a construction hat waved hello.
“Hello! My boss sent me down here to talk to you. We’ve got a lot of trucks passing in and out of here, and sometimes when the road is closed they don’t pay a lot of attention to where they’re going. So my boss is worried for your safety. Do you need to pass through?”
I explained that I was on a bicycle trip headed south, and the detour would be too difficult, so ideally I could pass through instead of turning around.
“Okay, well, we don’t really want you riding through the site, but how about if we put your bike in my truck and I give you a ride to the other side of it?”
I quickly realized this was my best option, as well as a generous offer. The only other thing I could do was turn around and spend the rest of the day biking back to Mina, then probably back to Hawthorne from there.
“That sounds great; thank you!” I said.
She turned the truck around on the road, and I detached all of my bike bags. Together we lifted the bike into the rear of the truck and I tucked a few bags under it to keep pressure off the lower rack. Then I hopped in the cab. She spoke briefly on the radio, and we were off.
For the next half an hour she drove me slowly through the construction zone, threading around large trucks and earth-moving equipment. We kept up a light conversation about landmarks to see in Nevada, the economic impact of COVID-19, and teaching the old members of our family how to use the internet. I learned that this particular repair job was sandwiched between two other tough jobs, and was being rushed in order to keep the schedule. The recent earthquake – a long one in the 6.0 range – had pulverized several parts of the road and the crew had less than a week remaining to clean it all up.
“Oh jeez,” I said. “And here I come along on my little remote-work joyride and slow you folks down even more.”
“Oh don’t worry about it. This won’t take much time at all.”
In the back of my mind I was a little disappointed that I could no longer claim I had pedaled every mile of this journey, but I knew I didn’t have a choice — and besides, she’d carried me over the hardest part of the day’s ride on a day that called for way too much riding anyway. 65 miles and 2500 feet was beyond my standard budget. She’d subtracted 1000 feet and probably 10 miles from that.
Once we were beyond the construction, she pulled aside and we unloaded the bike.
“It’s all good road from here,” she said. “Be safe on your ride! I hope the wind is with you!”
“Thanks! I hope your work gets done on time!”
I hooked my bags in place, then poured some more ice water and stood around drinking it.
Then I checked my phone and realized I needed to be in a work conference. I dialed in, then got on the bike and pedaled as I took part. Two bars of LTE signal out here in the middle of nowhere. What a world.
While the call was going I spotted a lizard by the road, and this time I decided to take a photo instead of just chasing it into the desert like a madman. I rolled to a stop, with the conference still going.
A few more miles of easy riding later, I reached the end of the detour. Now the road would get noisy again. Oh well.
I recognized the intersection from my route research. This was Coaldale. The wasted buildings scattered here used to be a truck stop and motel. It was populated and running in 1991, abandoned by 1998, and burned mostly to the ground by 2006. Now it looks like this:
In another bizarro juxtaposition of modern life, I walked around the site snapping pictures while actively taking part in a teleconference for work.
I rode on. The conference ended. I chomped my sandwich from the burger shack. I listened to more of the materials science audiobook, then some podcasts. The scenery continued to be mesmerizing.
I still had about 30 miles and 1200 feet of climb to deal with. The motel I’d called in Tonopah was open 24 hours, so at least I didn’t have to worry about showing up to a locked door.
As the sun went down, the wind shifted direction and finally favored me. I covered ten miles of flat ground quickly as twilight became full darkness.
On my left I noticed a column of blinking red lights in the distance, like a radio tower, except it was too low on the landscape. Radio towers are usually up on hills. I got curious and pulled up a satellite map. A few seconds of scrolling around showed me this:
It’s the Crescent Dunes Concentrating Solar Power Plant. Pretty fascinating technology!
The darkness felt comfortable, like the walls of a familiar home, and a little bit spooky as well. To complement the scene I listened to some radio shows:
These turned out to be a perfect fit, because the ride into Tonopah was extremely taxing, and I needed something to keep myself awake and keep my – pun intended – spirits up.
The last ten miles of the approach to Tonopah were straight up a steadily increasing grade, so progress became more difficult just as my legs became less energetic. I could see the lights of the town above me in the distance, growing larger imperceptibly as the hours passed. Just to add to the challenge, the wind had turned on me again and was blowing an irregular 10mph.
It was 3:00am by the time I reached the motel and checked in. If that construction worker hadn’t given me a ride earlier in the day, I would have been cycling until 4:30am or even later, or probably just set up a tent in the “rest area” at the base of the mountain and had a dusty, noisy night of sleep.
It all worked out! Time to sleep six hours and then do three hours of work meetings…
This was a comfortable and affordable motel, so I was a bit sad to leave it, but the road was calling.
First it was time to ride around town and look for more snacks!
Eventually I found this nifty burger joint.
After chomping two orders of deep fried fish – one salmon, one cod – I was feeling fortified. Just one more thing before leaving town: The Ordnance Museum!
Wild, weird stuff. Okay, now let’s get out of here.
The highway to the east brought me close to some of those weird bunkers.
When those faded away, it was just open road, shared between me and the truckers. The sky decided there weren’t enough mountains around and decided to add a few — or maybe it was going for a giant winged serpent?
A small anonymous road went bending away on the right, and I decided to follow it for a minute or two just to look around. It brought me to a tiny improvised graveyard.
I thought about mortality and memory for a bit, then went pedaling down the road some more. I was leaving a region of clouds and cool air, and slowly entering a region of clear skies and heat.
During a roadside pee break I spotted a lizard, and decided to chase after it, screaming “RUN LIZARD! TWO-LEGS IS AFTER YOU! RUN RUN RUN!” and cackling like a maniac. Eventually the lizard plunged into a burrow in some sagebrush, winning the race. I pouted, then looked up and realized I had gone about a hundred yards from the road. Tricky lizard, leading me away from all my supplies!
While walking back to the bike I found a neat rock, though:
The day wore on. I listened to desert-y music and chatted with my workmates, doing some followup from yesterday. I threw in a few chapters from an audiobook about materials science called Liquid Rules. The wind, which had been blowing softly but directly against me for hours, decided to step it up a notch and slap me around.
I passed through the microscopic “town” of Luning. Google Maps promised me that the remaining miles were “mostly flat” but that turned out to be a lie.
At long last I rolled into Mina — and kept on pedaling. The RV park I was due to camp at was on the opposite edge of the town. Up a hill of course.
There was exactly one place in town that served food, and they were about to shut down the grill. I ordered a big basket of chicken strips and was quite happy with them even though they cost me almost as much as the campsite fee.
The bar patrons were all locals, and they asked the usual questions about where I started and where I was going. A friendly group. Above the jukebox was a four-foot banner reading “TRUMP 2020”. I sure ain’t on the west coast any more.
One of the patrons – a man with work boots, shoulder-length hair, and a big toothy grin — in fact, a kind of smaller landlocked-state version of Aquaman – said, “If you’re heading south, watch out for the highway construction. There was an earthquake a few weeks ago; tore up the highway. They set up a long detour.”
“Uh oh,” I said. “How long of a detour?”
I pulled out my phone and the man pointed to a section of highway about 30 miles south of the town. The detour was a big V-shape, using highway 360 and a chunk of highway 6. I poked a few buttons and realized it added 40 miles and several thousand more feet of climbing to the route, which was already a grueling 65 miles and 2400 feet. There were no services anywhere along it. If I had to take that detour, I would need to stealth-camp, and bring along an absurd amount of food and water.
“They might be already finished with the work, though,” said Nevada Aquaman. “Maybe you could find someone who’s been that way and ask.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m gonna have to do that. There’s no way I can take that detour on a bike.”
I finished my snacks and pedaled back to the RV park, thinking about my predicament. Should I just turn around tomorrow? Should I try to ride out to the construction and then ride back? I decided to sleep on it.
Now all I needed to do was put together the tent. Good thing it’s easy in the dark. Hooray for the inflatable tent!
This was the first time I’d deployed the tent since Iceland, almost a year ago. It was just as cozy as I remembered.