Fallon, Nevada To Delta, Utah:
Highway 50, "The Loneliest Road in America"

leaving the motel in fallon at 3 AM farm machines in the dark highway as light just begins


     A sleepless night, even after going to the all-night Wal-Mart Superstore in Fallon, led to a 3 AM departure from the Fallon Lodge. May as well use the time. Too much caffeine, too late in the day yesterday, the most likely culprit.

     The pictures above will give you the feeling here of the dark night, leaving, being the only thing moving in a sleeping town. The motel's on the left. The middle picture should be accompanied by a wonderful smell of earth and grass! It's a couple lighted farm machines, working all night in the fields.

     A little later, I was shocked to notice the sky starting to lighten at 4 AM (see the picture at right on the top of the page.)! In case you skipped the poem on the preceding page, below are a couple pictures of the glorious desert sunrise.

desert impressionist, larger picture
desert sunrise, larger

     Highway 50 really did seem like the loneliest road in America, though I didn't feel lonely — just inspired. I may have passed one or two cars in three hours. The guys at the convenience store on the outskirts of Fallon had warned me, "no services for a hundred miles!" So I filled up on gas, got coffee, and a lot of ice.

     No radio stations stayed in range, though for a little while, oddly, I picked up a staton playing Hindi bhajans. I'd started a new Book on CDs, having finished the Bob Dylan one. I was listening to a 19-CD (23 hours!) book by my favorite "travel" writer — a misnomer, for he explores culture, human character, politics, art, and sociology, as well as geography — Paul Theroux: "Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown". I'd wondered if it might bend my mind too much, driving across the USA while vicariously going along on someone's journey through Africa! But no, I found my senses and my thoughts surprisingly able to assimilate the two.
     "Travel is transition and, at its best, a journeying out from home, a setting forth," Paul was saying. Earlier, I had noted his saying "All travel is a lesson in self-preservation." That would be important for me later.
     Theroux also wrote about travel as a freeing from the numbing that routine can cause life in one place can become. This trip certainly represented such a freeing for me.

     Here's a haiku, expressing another fact of drivind this lonely, dawning desert:

kamikaze jackrabbits
throw themselves at my headlights —
nothing I can do

     Within a few miles, one rabbit leapt under my front tires and a second one just missed them; a small bird flew smack into my windshield as I drove at 70 miles and hour; and I narrowly missed squashing a prairie dog that ran across the road. And that was pretty much my experience of "wildlife".

     Every fifty or a hundred miles a charming, small town punctuates the wilderness with a little cluster of the accoutrements of human life. I pulled into Austin at a quarter to six. A sign had pointed me to the International Hotel and Cafe', along the tiny main street. My tummy was growling as I walked through the doors. It leapt in joy to find the doors open and proprietors awake in the restaurant, but growled all the louder when it heard them say the place didn't open till six.
     As I started to walk back out the door, the man at the counter said his wife, the cook, had offered to make breakfast for me even though they weren't "officially" open yet. My tummy smiled and put on its bib.

International Cafe' and Hotel, Austin, Nevada
Donna and Kevin Varney, proprietors of the cafe'
The hotel part of the International Hotel and Cafe' is a thing of the past, but the cafe', run by Donna and Kevin Varney, right, was a godsend. This building, Kevin said, was somehow split and transported here from Virginia City, back in the 1863. Above is one of the few pictures I took of the Nissan Maxima I was delivering to Chicago.

austin, nevada, from the hills above, on the way out of town

     Take a good look at the picture above, a view of Austin from the hills above it on my way out of town. It's the last photo I took for a few hundred miles. What I really wanted to get was a shot of several old church steeples and other interesting "verticals" in Austin, but my digital camera suddenly shut down and wouldn't do a thing. I got some batteries at the next town, Eureka, but the camera still just made its funny beeping sound and wouldn't work.
      A couple hundred miles down the highway, I realized disposable cameras would work until I got to a camera store in a big city. And it took a couple thousand miles for me to realize that the "new batteries" might have been duds, and to try some others. Voila! Four disposable cameras and $50 into purchasing and developing later, my digital was working again.

     But the world will never see, through my camera's eye, at least, that long, hot, spacious drive through the rest of Nevada and part of eastern Utah, until I arrived at around 7 PM in the small "oasis" (using the term liberally) town of Delta, both exhausted and discombobulated. And, as we are wont to do when we need to recover, I took a room at a nice Comfort Inn; basked in the air-conditioning and the smoothly-made beds; brought in a salad and ate it while checking e-mail on my laptop, called Barbara, and crashed!


vast, arid lands
The vast, arid land around the Nevada-Utah border .
                  

Essay #1: "Order and Entropy In a Mini-Universe"

OR

Skip the essay and Get Right Back On the Road:
DELTA , UTAH TO THE I-70 INTERCHANGE


back to Carson City

back to Tahoe
back to the Sierras
back to Placerville
back to the pre-trip Indian Brunch
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