A warm afternoon in Winnemucca

At the Humboldt County Museum, in Winnemucca, a woman came out of a small office and stood in the doorway. She pointed to a guest register, and I put down my name while she told me a bit about the exhibits. A red dot from a laser pointer was flashing over the register as I wrote, but I didn’t think about it consciously, as I was listening to the woman. But when I had finished, and the woman had returned to her office, I heard a short laugh and looked up. Two kids were hanging over a second-floor balcony smiling down at me, and one was holding the laser pointer.

They were both blonde, a boy about nine and his sister, a couple years older. I expressed my admiration for the joke, and asked if they were visiting the museum too.  “Our mom works here,” the boy said. “She made us come with her.”

They both came down and followed me through the first floor exhibits, as I examined several old cars and numerous timber industry tools. The girl drifted into the office, and after a moment I heard the woman say, “I’m not going to put up with your crap, kiddo. That’s not something I’m prepared to do.” For some reason I didn’t think that the woman was the mother mentioned earlier.

I went upstairs alone, and when I came back down the boy claimed me again. “Did you like the guns?” he asked, referring to a glass case of rifles and pistols.

“Yes,” I said, “but I was more impressed with that cigar lighter.” It was the size of a small lamp and dated from the late nineteenth century. My preference confused the boy; he didn’t seem to know what I was talking about, though the lighter was in the case adjacent to the guns.

“Do they shoot fire, do you think?” he said.

“The lighter? Yes, you would trip the lever and fire would come out and you would light your cigar.” I bent over, holding an imaginary cigar to my lips, as if demonstrating.

The boy said, “No, the guns.”

I said, maybe but I didn’t know for sure. I asked his name and he said, “Robbie.” He stood beside me as I perused more cases, but he didn’t bother to look. He’d seen it all before, I suppose. He asked if I’d been in the schoolhouse, a separate building, and I said, no, and we went outside together. But the schoolhouse was locked. A rather subpar museum, as county museums go. Robbie and I shook hands when we parted.

I had reached Winnemucca at lunch time, after a four and half hour drive south from Boise, through the Owyhee Mountains in southeastern Oregon, down into Nevada and along the Santa Rosa Range. The temperature had cracked ninety by the time I came to Winnemucca, and I drove around town for some time looking for a park before giving up and going to the museum….

I also visited the Buckaroo Hall of Fame, in the town’s seedy Convention Center, a collection of photographs and saddles of local cowboys of merit. Members include Santy Jaca, Jiggs Catterson, and Albert Skidaddle.  As a bonus, two men in cowboy hats, clearly buckaroos themselves, were also examining the exhibit; the younger, a teenager, wore a number on the back of his western shirt, indicating he was participating in the rodeo that’s in town…. There was also a belt buckle collection on the opposite side of the big open room, and the winnings of a local big game hunter on another—several dozen heads of ungulates from around the world. The sportsman did have a lion too, which was snarling and about to take down a gazelle…. Across the street I made a stop in a junk store, where an elderly woman wearing a substantial amount of make-up talked loudly on the phone about her upcoming chemotherapy appointment. “Jerry wants me to tell them to let me wear one of those mask things, but I don’t think I’m going to.”

After I’d taken in the Winnemucca highlights, I drove east out of town, a half dozen miles up a dirt road to Water Canyon, a narrow defile grown with stands of cottonwoods. The slopes of the mountains above, part of the Sonoma Range, were grassy, up to rocky outcroppings at the ridge tops. I found a shady spot beside one of the BLM campsites and parked and put up the table in back and opened the side door and wrote for a bit….

The early evening didn’t offer much respite from the heat, but at five I went on, west on I-80, then south on US 95 to Fallon, easily the most appealing of the Nevada towns. Fallon, population 7500, occupies the middle of a broad valley, and is surrounded by green alfalfa fields…. I should have camped at the fairgrounds, in the shade of big cottonwood trees alongside one of the resident RVs. But I still had an hour of daylight, which I used as a bad excuse to go on….

Just at dark I came to Walker Lake, a large reservoir in a wide desert valley. No greenery to soften or cool the land. Too far south, or too low in elevation, or just a hot spot. But for one reason or another, the true summer desert. 

As a result, the campground I’d picked out on the map did not meet my expectations of comfortable shade and succor. It was below the road, between the foot of the mountains and the shore of the lake, in the empty midst of the broad open slope between. A desolate, gravelly expanse dotted with a few half-dead creosote bushes. There were no sites, just a few moribund fire rings scattered along a faint dirt road; a cement block outhouse stood alone, the only item above knee-height and inside was a scene grim enough to match the surroundings….. Rather uninviting, but the light was gone and I was tired….

The temperature seemed significantly higher than in Fallon, probably up near one hundred, and a hot wind rushed down off the mountain buffeting the side of the van…. I opened the side door and sat in back, shirtless, and read for a time, listening to a Triple A ball game from Reno, as the arid wind rushed about the inside of the van.