Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I entered Nevada about ten miles south of Lake Tahoe. Las Vegas had so put me off that
I had no desire to go to another sink of iniquity, though I was later told that Tahoe is a
really nice place and not at all like Las Vegas. Now I shall never know. I can tell you,
however, that Carson City was just about the most nothing little city you could ever hope
to zip through. It's the state capital, but mostly it was just Pizza Huts and gas stations and
cheaplooking casinos.
I headed out of town on US 50, past Virginia City and towards Silver Springs. This was
more or less the spot on “Bonanza” where the map used to burst into flames. Remember
that? It has been many years since I've seen the program, but I recall Pa and Hoss and
Little Joe and the surly-looking one whose name I forget all living in a landscape that was
fruitful and lush, in a Western, high-chaparral sort of way. But out here there was nothing
but cement-colored plains and barren hills and almost no habitations at all. Everything was
gray, from the sky to the ground. This was to remain the pattern for the next two days.
It would be difficult to conceive of a more remote and cheerless state than Nevada. It has
a population of just 800,000 in an area about the size of Britain and Ireland combined. Al-
most half of that population is accounted for by Las Vegas and Reno, so most of the rest
of the state is effectively just empty. There are only 70 towns in the entire state the British
Isles have 40,000, just to give you some comparison-and some of them are indescribably
remote. For instance, Eureka, a town of 1,200 in the middle of the state, is sixty miles in
any direction from the nearest town. Indeed, the whole of Eureka County has just three
towns and a total population of under 2,500—and this in an area of a couple of thousand
square miles.
I drove for a while across this fearsome emptiness, taking a back highway between Fallon
and a spot on the map called Humboldt Sink, where I gratefully joined Interstate S0. This
was a cowardly thing to do, but the car had been making odd noises off and on for the past
couple of days-a sort of faint clank clank oh god help me clank I'm dying oh god oh god
clank noise-which wasn't covered in the troubleshooting section of the owner's manual.
I couldn't face the prospect of breaking down and being stranded for days in some god-
forsaken dust hole while waiting for an anticlonk device to be shipped in from Reno on
the weekly Greyhound. In any case, Highway 50, the nearest alternative road, would have
taken me 150 miles out of my way and into Utah. I wanted to go a more northerly route
acrossMontanaandWyoming-theBigSkycountry.SoitwaswithsomereliefthatIjoined
theinterstate,thougheventhiswasremarkablyemptyusuallyIcouldseeonecarinthedis-
tancefaraheadandoneinthedistance farbehind-considering itwasthemainarteryacross
thecountry.Indeed,withasufficientlycapaciousfueltankandbladder,youcoulddrivethe
whole way between New York and San Francisco without stopping.
