Car Fires, Ghost Trains, Wife Beaters and cemeteries, The Taylor Horde Presses On...

DAY TWO, SUNDAY: PAHRANAGAT TO ELY

(Traveling in our Bounder RV, we had left Victorville and stayed at Pahranagat National Wildlife Refuge’s Upper Lake the day and night before, but were once again on the road, headed for Ely, and the Northern Nevada Railroad Museum, which touts its Ghost Train ride.)


I had calculated it was a hundred fifty-one miles from Pahranagat to Ely and the Ghost Train, but right after the town of Alamo, the signs said it was something like a hundred eighty miles. How could I have been that wrong? And when we came up to the spot where I’d calculated we’d turn west onto 375 (The Alien Highway) and then, within half a mile, turn north again on to 318, all the way to 6, which rides into Ely, the sign pointed up 93 to Ely. I pulled off across the turn-off to 375 at an empty building that must have been a substantial business in its day.

“We did this last time,” Robin said, wiping at her eyes.

I looked at my maps, resolutely stuck to my plan and turned left, and then, shortly, right. Just past the non-existent town of Hiko, a sign read ‘Ely 131 miles’.

So the recommended route, up 93, is twenty-five to thirty miles longer than the route I chose. Granted, there is nothing, no services for at least a hundred miles on this 318. The two towns that appear on my topo program, Sunnyside and Hiko, in fact, do not exist and appear never to have existed. Thirty miles, though, is a lot of miles, six gallons of gas in Bounder reality. An after-action review shows that 93 has a whole lot more grades that a thirty-four foot RV pulling a flat-bed trailer with a five thousand pound full-sized Bronco loaded on it does not like. Bake the tranny on the up-grades, bake those brakes on the down slide. The only reason you might take 93 to Ely is there appear to be several communities on the way. My route is superior to 93 if all you’re doing is getting to Ely. Just make sure you’ve got gas.

I remember the first time we’d gone this way, this stretch had been horrible. The gas needle dropped to nothing, the wind kicked our pre-Bilsteined RV all over the road. This time, no wind. We cruised at a very pleasant sixty miles an hour, even slipping up occasionally to the 65mph speed limit. This time, the miles flew by.

The engine and road noise in the RV negates anything like conversation, and besides, driving the Bounder requires focus. First you have to overcome the optical illusion that you’re not running halfway in the left lane, when actually you’re practically in the break-down lane. It’s because you’re sitting up so high, normal car references are completely thrown off. I have to keep the center-line running on the right side of the tachometer that sits on top of the instrument console. Then there’s a floating thing going on. It’s a whole lot better now that I got the Bilstein shocks and have mastered the spring air assist things, replacing the one that had blown out on the driver’s front, but still, you can’t just point the RV, you’ve got to constantly correct. Your eyes are glued to the road, the side view mirrors (The rear view mirror is worthless), the gauges.

The RV has what’s called a ‘gear splitter’, made by a company called Gear Vendors which, curiously enough, has its manufacturing facility in my home town of El Cajon. The gear splitter, mated to the three speed automatic tranny, is the equivalent of a five-speed transmission, something that didn’t exist for RVs in 1987. It allows you to shift about every five hundred revolutions per minute, staying in that sweet spot of fuel efficiency and maximum horsepower. If you’re just cruising on flat road, this isn’t critical, but if you start to climb, you want to keep the RPMs between twenty-seven and thirty-two hundred RPMs to maintain speed and effect the least amount of wear and tear on the drive-train, not lugging, not wracking it up. If you have a tough climb, you want to keep it between three thousand and thirty-five hundred. (I was just reading on one of the many Bounder chat sites where some guy was saying he kept his engine in the five thousand RPM range, but that’s with the new Ford Triton V-10.) I imagine I have lots to learn, but I’ve got something close to ten thousand miles driving this thing, and I’d like to think I have a handle on it. You can’t relax, though. Glancing around at the scenery is a luxury you must carefully enjoy.

To entertain myself, I calculate in my head how much longer we have to go, when our ETA is, how many miles more will click off on the odometer.

And I’m here to tell you, Nevada has black holes. Never mind Rachel and Area 51, flying saucers and ‘lost time’. I found the lost everythings, I found miles and miles of them.

Cruising up from Hiko to the intersection of 6, following the official Nevada DOT signs posted, we gained nearly ten miles. The sign read ‘Junction 6: 75 miles’. I noted that the last four digits on my odometer would read ‘156.7 when we got there. Forty miles later, according to my odometer, another sign appeared. ‘Junction 6: forty miles’. Forty plus forty is eighty. See? And then it happened again. By the time we got to 6, we’d gone forty-five miles, not forty. Ten miles gained out there on 318.

You’re saying, ‘the boy can’t add is all, messin’ up the simple math while driving’. Fine, go ahead and think that. Or the odometer is wrong on his rig. Nineteen year-old machine, bound to be off. That’s what I thought too, until, on the way south on 278, going to Tonopah, I lost as many miles as I had found. North I gained, south I lost. Nevada DOT giveth, and Nevada DOT taketh away.

We turned right onto 6. The road sign said we had twenty-two miles to Ely. I glanced at the clock. We’d be in the KOA by 11:30. This could be a problem. Check-out is 12:00, check-in is not before 2:00pm. Generally this is a non-problem, they don’t even say anything, but it was something new for me to worry about. Up ahead, something distracted me from my musings.

Smoke boiled up from the right side of the road, first white, then gray, then black.

“What is that?” I asked.

Cars were coming from Ely, past the smoke. Cars headed for Ely in front of us disappeared into it. Just about the time I’d decided there was no need for concern, a gout of flame burst across the length of the road into the cleared ground beyond. The smoke pumping into the air redoubled.

I pulled over at a turn-off, but even with binoculars we really couldn’t see anything. Two cars passed us and appeared to drive right by the smoke. I made the executive call and started up again, but before we got to the smoke, someone was standing in the middle of the road waving us off.

A car burned ferociously. A lone fireman, his BLM truck parked nearby, was swatting at the flames. Not the car, an older-model minivan, which was fully involved, but the brush fire that had broken out next to it. A juniper suddenly caught and burst into flames. The smell of burning brush and weed stung my nostrils. I didn’t shut down the engine, but crawled out and ran over to one of the civilians milling around, nervously watching the fireman.

“Guess those folks over there parked their car on the side of the road, right on top of some brush. It caught, next thing they know, flames are jumping up all around them.”

The three people the woman pointed to weren’t dressed well. They looked sheepish, embarrassed, and rideless. Miserable.

“We got ‘em all out,” the woman added. “No one hurt.”

Traffic had stopped now. There was a whole lot more people coming out of Ely than going in.

The wind freshened, and suddenly, the brush fire was marching down the road towards us.

The lone fireman pointedly turned away from the fire and got back to his truck. He looked disgusted. The flames advanced unabated, the thin brush crackled and blackened with the touch of the flames that languidly consumed it. We had maybe thirty yards before the fire got to us. Just about then I wondered where all the cops and fire-fighters in Nevada were.

“I think I’m going to move to the other side of the road,” I announced to the crowd.

“I think that’s a good idea,” someone volunteered.

I ran up into the cabin, jumped into the driver’s seat and didn’t waste much time, cutting across the road into the oncoming traffic lane, and off onto the other side. The whole rig leaned over here at maybe a ten per cent cant.

The twins started reliving the Cedar Fire, the fire that had swept through Crest and burned half the homes there, the fire that had driven us out of our home and had put us in my mother-in-law’s house, watching television, Robin seeing a house she knew was ours in a complete cocoon of red and yellow flame.

We no longer were in the path of the flames. Now, though, we were a whole lot closer to the still-burning auto. I looked back and noticed few vehicles had crossed over with us.

Suddenly the burning auto convulsed with an explosion. Parts of the vehicle launched into the air, shot over the heads of the people. My very big windshield shook with the new burst.

The lady who’d talked to me earlier now ran up.

“The fireman says it’s got two more good blows in it before it’s done. He says you ought t’back it up.”

Picture it now. Though I’ve pulled my rig all the way off the road, the trailer is a notch to the right, so to back up straight, I’d have to pull forward to line up the trailer, then retreat, all at a ten percent cant. If I backed up and got on the highway, I’d have to crank the wheel to the left to keep the trailer from potentially jack-knifing, which would also drive my front wheels further off onto the soft shoulder. It all became a mute point when I looked in the passenger side-view mirror and realized someone had parked right up against the trailer. Two cars headed for Ely dashed past the burning minivan, and I was tempted to join them, but they practically ran headlong into the fire truck and captain’s truck coming down the right-hand lane.

When they arrived, the firemen poured out and went to knocking down the flames in the car. A BLM fire truck turned up, and they went to fighting the brush fire.

Several things struck me. The Nevada Highway Patrol pulled in, and the lady who had spoken to me now ran up to the impeccably well-dressed officer stepping out of the cruiser. She pointed at the people whose car was still burning. The cop walked over to them, clipboard in hand, and from his countenance, it seemed he was offering condolences to them. Later the fire captain went over to them, and he placed a hand on the man’s shoulder in solace. This just isn’t how it’s done back home. When dealing with California Authority, picture that cartoon where a mouse is stuck in a trap, and all the other mice have lined up to take their turn screwing him now that he’s down. In California the firemen would have berated the car’s passengers for parking on top of dry brush, starting a brush fire, endangering other lives, backing up traffic and commerce, damaging the Oxone layer, the list is endless. And if the cop didn’t arrest them for arson, the least he’d do is leave them stranded out there until some Good Samaritan took pity on them.

Robin leaned out at one point at my behest and called to the fireman walking out with the traffic control sign, to ask him if he could wave us up into the flow of traffic when the time came. She did this under duress, so ingrained in we Californios to avoid contact with Authority. The fireman did the unthinkable. Instead of making some snide remark demonstrating how much our very existence offended him, or answering so vaguely that there we would be wondering if he comprehended what we were talking about, he smiled and said in a reassuring voice, “we’ll take care of you. Never fear.”

After about an hour, the skeletonized car soaked with water and foam, the brush fire abated, the firemen rolled up their hoses and pulled their vehicles off the road. The patrolman had made some kind of arrangement for the people with the crispy minivan to have a ride to a destination of choice, and the traffic control guy was worth his word. He stepped back, made eye contact with me, and waved me back up onto the road.

I was sweating getting stuck in the soft shoulder. Tipping over was another possibility. Wouldn’t that be just classic? People have been waiting an hour for a fire to be extinguished, then the first car up, a rolling roadblock, tilts over and obstructs both lanes. Is there a tow truck in the crowd?

But we didn’t topple. I got up and started working my way through the gears. There was a slight climb, and I could see more ahead.

The traffic was backed up easily two miles, and people were out of their cars, standing in my lane, trying to see what was going on. That’s fine, of course, but don’t you get the hell out’a the way when you see something coming at you? It wasn’t until we were past the backed-up traffic that I managed to get up to the speed limit, just in time to start into the twisted last few miles before reaching Ely. The mountains around us began to be covered with junipers and Pinyon Pines. The smell of burning car and brush were replaced with the clean fragrances of fir and curiously, wet creosote.

Over the hump, by-passing downtown Ely, crossing over to 93, past the high school and community college that share the same campus, we turned east on the highway. This would have been the highway all the signs indicated you stayed on to get to Ely.

We pulled into the KOA. The last time we’d been there, Robin had had two black eyes. Her story was that Kellian, in one of that child’s few fits, late at night, had head-butted Mom while Robin had held her. They’d both been half-asleep, and Robin didn’t realize her nose was broken until the next morning. The whole time we’d been there, the KOA hosts/owners had watched me warily like you would a wife beater. I was looking forward to showing up, no child in a cast, no visible injuries on the wife and proclaiming, “you see? I’ve changed my evil ways!”

But they didn’t even recognize us. You’d think we’d be hard to forget. On the other hand, maybe they did recognize us. They weren’t nearly as friendly as before.

KOAs are definitely the Hiltons of RV parks. RVPs generally are nothing but parking lots with water, electricity, cable and sewer hook-ups in the parking spots. I remember the first time we’d stayed in one, I remarked to Robin that in an RVP, our rig was nothing but a motel room.

“I prefer our Bounder being a mountain cabin, or a desert shack,” I opined.

But the KOAs consistently offer nice landscaping, trees between each parking spot, and a picnic table that you can actually use, along with a nice barbeque. Then there’s the playground. I don’t understand the draw of a playground, but my kids can’t get enough of them. And its’ not just the twins, it’s Alex, too. I remember being in Tombstone, shoot-outs breaking out all around us, and the kids found the playground, right next to the theatre they do the Gunfight at the OK Corral re-enactment. We could have spent the whole day there. Teeter-totters fascinate them. Teeter-totters don’t exist in California any more. I’m sure there’s a liability issue.

The KOA playgrounds are consistently new, brightly colored and surrounded by grass. And here Kellian makes new friends. This is one of my daughter’s great passions. I squirm when I see her strike up a conversation with another child who had been meticulously ignoring the other set of children in the playground. Maybe this is a neurosis of mine, but I fear my daughter’s bald-faced openness is intrusive upon other children’s world. I also worry Kellian practicing this same unarmed frankness with adults when I’m not around. What if the adult is one of the lurking perverts encouraged by the likes of John Carr, how do other parents perceive such seemingly desperate ferreting for companionship. What ghosts and demons are stirred from her innocent efforts?

At the end of the play session, I cringe anew as the child and Kellian hug goodbye as if they’d known each other all their short lives.

I found myself comparing this place to our free campsite at Pahranagat, and found the KOA paring spot wanting..

I unloaded the Bronco. We would be riding the Ghost Train tomorrow, and I wanted to know where the train station was, where the dog kennel was, stuff like that. Robin found something better. In the little store/office they had ‘things to see in White Pine County’. One of them was Garnet Hill.

“What’s a Garnet?” Kellian asked as we followed the directions we were given.

“A semi-precious stone,” Robin answered. “Like a diamond, only not as valuable.”

Kellian’s eyes lit up at the mention of diamonds. She’s so girly-girl.

It was notably cooler in Ely. I’d give it in the mid-eighties. We drove past a ghost town complete with a one-room schoolhouse, right there on the road, Highway 50. We would learn later, this is Lane City. Nicholas wants us to buy it. There was a bus up there that looks like the Manson Family might have abandoned it, and he wants it.

Robin’s eyes inflamed the moment we hit the dusty road to the Garnet Fields. Although I hated to do it, we rolled up the windows and turned on the air conditioning. Through Pinyon Pines and Junipers we meandered deeper into the wilderness. I wondered how much rain they must catch to manage such a spare yet pleasant forest. Was this still considered the Great Plains Desert? Unlike the Sonoran or Mojave Desert, the Great Plains is most notable for its blandness. There’s vast miles of purple sage. Rarely are there great disruptions of earth, no convulsive ancient earthquakes or lava flows, like in the Anza-Borrego, no Joshua Tree National Monuments, no Grand Canyon scenery. This, however, was gorgeous land. We drove further up a thinning road, and I was taken aback when we finally cleared it and found ourselves at a parking lot with picnic tables and a pit bathroom facility. There was a couple there with a pop-up tent trailer in tow. They promptly volunteered to tell us how to find garnets.

Probably the best way to find the semi-precious stone is to go back down to a turn-off just past Lane City where there’s a little-used path. You climb up a wash, and you find spots along the way that you dig down into. Mother Nature, over eons, has washed the soft rhyolite rock around the garnets away, and the naked stone is driven down the mountain into pockets, much like gold dust, settling in cracks and crannies, waiting for someone to come along and discover her little bits of art.

That’s not how most people do it. They go up to where the old digs that have been played out are, and they dig up the stone that might have garnets in them. Then they smack them down with a hammer, hoping to find garnets big enough to rate hauling home, using acids to removed the blood-red stone from the rest of the rock.

So my horde, dogs towing us along, walked down the south slope, as the little brochure told us to, and after a few hits and misses, found several shallow digs with big rocks.

Though this had been a spur-of-the-moment trip, I had had the where-with-all to bring a hatchet with the hammer end, the thing I use to sink tent stakes with. We staggered around a bit, but the kids got the idea: Find a rock, not too small, not too big that you couldn’t carry it to Dad, and have him clout it with the hatchet/hammer. I kept having to tell the kids to back up so I didn’t smack them inadvertently while wielding my tool. Occasionally pieces flew off and caught them, generally in the shin. But there were garnets inside those rocks, scarlet with a natural shine to them, like stained glass.

Robin went off on her own and came back with some rock where the garnets were sitting right there on the surface for everyone to see. With these I pounded off the excess stone so we weren’t carrying off a boulder. Robin was having as much fun as the kids. So I sat there and smacked rocks like a convict at the Yuma Territorial Prison for about an hour. By the time the wife showed up with a hunk of rhyolite that had two or three pretty big garnets sticking out of it, I was ready to take the whole thing and give my arm a rest. We brought the rocks home, and now I’ve got to find the acid that you soak the stone in to dissolve it around the semi-precious gems. Considering that Nick and Kellian used to bring home gravel stones from the RV campsites we would parked at as souvenirs, I consider this a step up.

We ran by the train station on the way back to the KOA, so that I knew right where it was. The kennel was right on the way, just as I had planned it.

I stopped at the KOA wondering if they wouldn’t have fuses for the Gen-set. They didn’t, but I bought some fuses anyway, AGC 10As. While everyone was busy, I popped open the cover for the generator. I stood there, staring at the little sticker that read: “Only use 5 amp fuses’. Temptation was great, but finally I put the ten amp fuses away. A mechanic should embrace the Doctor’s motto: ‘Do no harm’.

That night, Robin urged the kids to go out to the lawn area. Their whirlwind energy had sapped hers.

One of my great sins in Robin’s eyes is, I can turn the kids’ off. They scream, they yell, they shriek in mortal agony, I just tune them out. Robin can’t do that, and finds my capacity to do it abhorrent.

At this KOA, they’ve got a big screen TV mounted inside a little cabin on the lawn area that doubles as a volleyball court. At dusk they open the doors so the screen is exposed, throw some family flick on, and the kids get the biggest kick, sitting there on a blanket or a lawn chair watching the movie with a bunch of other kids. If the movie gets slow, the kids play a quick game of tag. The movie picks up, and they all gather around the screen again. It gave Robin a chance to calm her nerves with wine. She did send popcorn out to them at one point, enough for all the kids and parents there.

There was a collection of new travel trailers down the way from our spot, obviously traveling together, with an absolute herd of kids, ranging from teenagers to toddlers. They caught our eye before dinner, because they were drying clothes on a clothes line, something Robin would like to do, but which is expressly forbidden in the KOA camp rules. The next thing we noticed was, they were all dressed in the simple clothes of Mennonites. We’re fairly familiar with these lovely people, since a contingent of them had arrived shortly after the Cedar Creek Fire burned out our town of Crest, and are still there today, helping rebuild lost homes. All the children and at least one woman attended the showing of the movie, and Kellian spent much of the evening making them, from toddler to teenager, one of her new best friends.


DAY THREE, MONDAY: THE GHOST TRAIN


Next morning I was all fired up to ride the Ghost Train. The directions said to be there by 9:30 for the first train to Keystone. The trip from the KOA to the train station was maybe five minutes. We left at 8:45, arrived at Cedar Groves Kennel at 8:47. It was visible from the highway, a combination feed store and kennel that looked, from the outside, clean and new, although a bit cluttered. I left the engine running as I hopped out with the dogs’ vaccination records. It was one of the things the young man on the phone had said they needed when I had made reservations. I reached the glass door and shoved on it as I attempted to walk into the store. My stride was broken with my face slapping into the glass.

I stumbled back, stared at the locked door. I blinked several times. The hours listed on the familiar listing of days was 8:30 am – 8:00 pm, but above that was a sign that read: “New Store Hours: 9:30-7:00.

This screwed us both ways. The package we had bought had us riding the train to Keystone from 9:30 to 11:00, then the Hiline train from 5:30 to 7:00 that afternoon. The kid I’d spoken to when I’d made the reservation knew exactly what I was talking about when I said we would be there to ride the train. Their new hours made them perfectly worthless for this.

Just like that, all my careful planning went right out the window.

“I’ll stay with the dogs,” Robin said. “You ride the train. Make the kids be good.”

That was one possible alternative. I hoped for a better one. We drove down to the train station to pick up our tickets.

I wish I could remember the young woman’s name behind the counter at the ticket office. At first somewhat detached, she warmed to me as I explained our dilemma.

“I’ll call around.”

She flipped open an old style Roll-a-dex, dialed a number, listened for a moment, hung up the phone.

“Busy,” she proclaimed. “Which means they’re open. Wild West Dog Grooming.”

The business was not five minutes away. This was one of the places I’d come across while searching for a kennel, but the idea of a dog grooming place also being a kennel didn’t strike me as promising. Still, the Horde once again loaded into the Bronco, and we were there at the little building on East Aultman Street. I dashed in and explained our quandary to the young woman behind the counter.

“Sure we can watch your dogs,” she said. “Plenty of room. You got their vaccination records? Bring ‘em on in. When do you plan to pick ‘m up?”

The train from Hiline gets back at 7:00.

“Normally we close around five, but there’s always someone around. I’ll just make sure t’have someone here, lets say, t’seven thirty? That’d be good? All right, then!”

Starfire sensed something was amiss almost immediately, but Nitro was trotting along just fine until he heard the other dogs in the back. With the first fusillade of barks, he just melted down. We got both dogs from the pound, and at that moment I think it would have been more merciful to have taken them out and shot them than to leave them behind. The look on Nitro’s face was a mix of hurt betrayal and abject pitiful shame.

“Can they both go in the same kennel?” the young woman asked.

“Yeah, but Starfire climbs chain link fences, so you want to be careful with that.”

“She does what?” The young lady looked curiously stunned. I motioned with my hands, making them look as much like paws as I could, aping what Starfire does to the imaginary fence in front of me.

“She climbs a chain link fence like you and I might climb a ladder.”

Starfire is a mutt with quite a bit of Border Collie, I’d say, but I wonder if she doesn’t have some coyote in her somewhere. Her bark is a pathetic whine and she nibbles at your fingers when she wants attention. She also climbs fences without so much as a circle’s worth of preparation or hesitation.

The woman looked dubious, but glanced down at Starfire with peculiar respect.

As I exited, the last look I got from Nitro reminded me of that scene in Wild Geese, where the mercs are having to leave Richard Harris behind, Mao-Mao-type tribesmen right behind him closing the gap, Harris chasing after the plane he can’t possible get aboard, and him shouting at his comrades on the plane; “Shoot me! SHOOT ME!”

To re-cap, Cedar Groves, the kennel that I had called, made reservations at, changed their hours so that they are worthless for someone wanting to ride either the morning train to Keystone or the afternoon train to Hiline. Wild West Grooming, which is also a kennel, not five minutes from the train depot, on Aultman Street, which is also the main drag through Ely, at the last minute was able to accommodate our two large dogs, and made it seem easy. That’s Wild West Grooming, run by Billie Sue Zeman, 822 East Aultman Street, Ely Nevada, 89301, Business Phone Number: (775) 289-2555

Disaster averted, we returned to the depot for the Ghost Train excursion.

The Northern Nevada Railroad was built to haul ore from the Ely area to Cobre, a hundred and fifteen miles away, where it intersects the Transcontinental Railroad. From here the semi-refined ore was hauled to the final processes, and copper, silver and lead were extracted. This operated up to 1984, when the mines in the area finally played out. Passenger service had ended decades before. The copper company that owned the railroad promptly donated all the buildings and rolling stock to what is now the Northern Nevada Railroad Museum. They have two steam engines. One of them, old Number 93, was bought by the NNRR new from ALCO in 1935, and has served in some capacity with the NNRR ever since. This was the train that was pulling us.

There’s also a state railroad museum on site, but you’ll never find it by accident. On the first floor of the depot, you’ve go the ticket and gift shop owned by the NNRR Museum. The second floor, reached by a thin flight of stairs that Alex and I hunted for but didn’t find until the wife went looking, is where the other museum is. It’s the original offices of the NNRR, with all the curious machines and ledger-keeping devices that, if it were a car factory, would be as boring as mud, but as the equipment the railroad used to keep the trains running, is absolutely riveting. Everything else in the railroad yard, the sheds, the workshops, rolling stock, water towers, coal bins, the track itself from Ruth to Cobre, including the cinderblock locomotive shed there, all of it is the Northern Nevada Railroad Museum. Like I said, Cobre is a hundred fifteen miles from Ely, making this a really big museum.

The steam engine that would be pulling our train chuffed out of the locomotive barn, black and ugly and glorious. When it backed up to its cars, Alex and I had stepped out with our cameras.

An old guy who’d pulled up on a Harley and the engineer who’d swung from old 93’s cab studied me intently as I went about setting up the tripod and looking down into the viewfinder of the Rollei Camera I sported.

“That’s one old camera,” the Harley rider volunteered.

“Not as old as that locomotive,” I countered.

“Not by much,” the white-whiskered engineer shot back.

I had borrowed the medium format camera from a buddy of mine. My 35 mm had given out on me (and the week before the trip was told that Minolta had gone bankrupt in April, guaranteeing my old reliable camera was now a paperweight with a nice lens.) there’s nothing like two and a quarter slides for sheer sharpness and quality. If I hoped to sell an article on this place, I had to have good pictures.

“We offer a two week photographer’s workshop every year,” the engineer volunteered. “People from all across the country come just to take pictures.”

It’s three hundred dollars a head, and they do it in the dead of winter. The steam and gasses blowing from the old engines is uniquely crisp in the cold air of December and January. The Museum makes special runs for the photographers, stopping at different locations, unloading the passengers, then backing up so the shutterbugs can shoot to their heart’s content as the locomotive and train chugs and huffs back into view.

There was only a smattering of people riding with us. It was a Monday, and I had expected it to be light, but not this light.

“All aboard!’ the conductor bellowed, and we all climbed up into the Pullman Cars.

Our only experience with train museums really is the San Diego Railroad Museum. They’ve got a steam engine, but good luck knowing when it’s running. They’ve got old cars, but nothing nearly as nice as these. The only steam engine we’ve ever been on is the 1907 Baldwin narrow-gauge engine at the Poway Railroad, that, despite being a real steam engine, runs on track laid out in a circle like something at a kiddie ride in Balboa Park.

Pulled right behind Old 93’s tender, there’s a flatcar that they’ve modified to be an open-air car. The seats are relatively comfortable and the view is much better than from inside the cars. There are two points against this car for the Keystone run. First, the ‘Voice of the Ghost Train’, which also happens to be the young lady from the gift shop, has a running monologue on everything you pass on this ride, ghost towns, haunted mines, points of general interest. On the flatbed, that, with all the noise and everything, the speakers are drowned out. Also, there’s cinders and ash falling from the smoke stack of the engine. All the steam engines on the West Coast are oil burners. (I was told it was Number Five Oil, and that it has to be heated before it flows freely through the fuel line into the fire box) Most of the steam engines this far east are coal burners, as is 93, and so you have a lot more soot and ash being pumped out. Robin and the kids spent the whole trip moving back and forth between the Pullman car and the flatcar. Robin’s eyes bothered her terribly.

Even before we got out of Ely, the Voice of the Ghost Train was pointing out things down in the town that was of interest, things that a small city might take pride in, historical buildings being renovated, a new football field. She even pointed out, with at least a hint of discomfort, the brothels at the western end of town.

‘They’re legal,” she said, “just another business in Nevada.”

The brothels in Ely are unique, even for Nevada. Most houses of ill repute are hidden from sight, out of town, out in some corner where the God-fearing folk can ignore the Oldest Profession being practiced. Ely has it right there in downtown. Off the main drag, yes, but still walking distance from the courthouse.

On the Ely City website, it seems to be stressed that Ely is closer to Salt Lake City than to Las Vegas. There’s an awful lot of Northern Nevada and Northern Arizona that is heavily LDS. The contrast of Wild and Wooly Nevada, where everything goes, and straight-laced Mormon Utah, where you can have a tough time finding wine to buy, portends an interesting point of conflict.

I would notice later that one of the sponsors of the NNRR Museum is the “Legal Brothel Association”, with a sign in the Pullman car, like you might once have found cigarette ads.

The train to Keystone passes through two tunnels, one old, another new, to accommodate the highway. Each time we started into one, The Voice would warn you not to look up. Those darn cinders again, concentrated because of the enclosed situation.

The mountains are covered with Juniper and Pine, some Pinyon, some Ponderosa. The flat areas had purple sage and some weed the conductor called a curse, because everyone seems to have an allergic reaction to it. We passed Lane City, and I could see the road we’d taken to the garnet fields.

The Voice talked about the history of the mines. There was supposed to have been a great cave-in at one of the more prominent mines, right there at the entrance, and it was never re-opened. Legend had it that a thousand Chinese miners had been trapped inside, and that there are still travelers along Highway 50 that claim, in the dead of night, to see men in simple black clothes and straw coolie hats with picks over their shoulders moving in single file across the highway, eternally marching back to or from work. Apparently Stephen King heard this story and incorporated it into one of his novels. I can’t say I’m familiar with this particular book, but archeologists recently located the buried mine, dug down into it, and sent some spelunkers with a death wish into it. The explorers found no stacks of bones, no claw marks on stone, nothing to suggest anyone had been left behind, just an old mine that was slowly being reclaimed by the mountain it bored through.

Ruth, the end of the line, is where the cars once were filled with ore to be shipped to McGill, a town north of Ely where mills and cyanide leach tanks still are. McGill could stand some exploring as well, but it’s not a ghost town.

The train doesn’t quite make it to Ruth. It backs up at a ‘Y’ piece of track before heading back the way it came. This part of the track must give the route its name, Keystone. I was a little disappointed. I was hoping we’d pull into Ruth, just to be able to say we’d come to the end of the line. (My maps are a bit confusing on this point. One map shows the track going past Ruth all the back to a place called Reipetown. Another shows it ending at Keystone. You see, we have to go back to Ely and check this out.)

On the way back, at the darkest point in the Old Tunnel, with the wheels clacking rhythmically slow, the air full of steam and burned coal smoke, a curiously clean smell, a voice came over the speaker, a dark deep voice, not the young woman’s voice at all.

“This is the ghost of the Ghost Train,” it trebled with all the ghastly spookiness you’d expect of any self-respecting haunt. “Thank you for riding my tra-a-a-in!”

Lord, the kids get the biggest kick out of that kind of stuff.

The ride to Keystone is six miles according to my TOPO! program, twelve miles round trip.

The train trundled back to the station, which is in East Ely according to the topo map, at about eleven, and we took the tour of the massive locomotive barn at the west end of the yard. One of the museum’s steam engines, Number 40, is being rebuilt there in the barn. If you want more info on that, go to the NNRR Museum’s website. The volunteers at the Poway Railroad Park told me that their insurance company requires them to tear their little Baldwin down and reassemble it every year. If it’s a California thing, that would explain why the San Diego Railroad Museum’s steam engine runs so rarely. When you’re talking about volunteer labor, it happens when it can. The NNRR’s website said something about new Federal DOT standards had been made for steam engines, a new hurdle for them to keep their steam behemoths breathing. Leave it to the Feds to develop new regulations for something that hasn’t been used extensively since the 1960’s.

The tour of the locomotive barn was a bust. The old gentleman directing the tour moved so slowly, he could have been giving us a tour of those cat houses up the street, and it would have been boring. The twins quickly got antsy. When they got close to becoming truly disruptive, Robin gritted her teeth, grabbed their hands and dragged them out of the barn. Alex and I lasted perhaps another fifteen minutes, but for an eleven year old, this was just dawdling. For a fifty year old, that would be me, it was watching paint dry. I would’ve liked to have seen the rest of it, but I think we have to go back when they’ve got someone a little more spritely and engaging. We finally wandered back to the train depot, where once again the Horde loaded into the Bronco.

I had bought the Combination Fare ride. This includes both the morning and evening train. It was just about noon, and we had four and a half hours before the Hiline evening train left.

We headed for the Ward charcoal kilns., which is a Nevada Historical Site. I don’t know how that is different from a state park or campground, but if you google it, its listed in the Nevada State Park directory. The kilns are just out of town on 93. Okay, just out of town by Nevada standards, about ten miles to the turn-off, and then another ten on a dirt road. Before we reached the sign pointing towards the kilns, there was a sign to the Ward State Campgrounds. To the left was a road that ran down to what looked like a ranch house or homestead. A big sign pointed down that way, I think it had ‘trading post’ somewhere in it. We ended up pulling over just about there, yielding to a half dozen quads coming down the road. These were the cross country quads you see in American Rifleman, with the rack on the back for, what I assume, your backpack. These people mostly had coolers on the rack, apparently out for the day, not the week. The trading post, out in nowhere, looked like a booming business.

Just as we turned up toward the kilns, a ranger’s truck fell in behind me. I watched my speed, and when we pulled up to the kiosk in the parking lot, I noted that this was a fee area, which was not mentioned in the brochure.

The ranger’s truck circled around behind us, then slowly, very slowly, headed out again.

It cost four bucks to visit the kilns.

The town of Ward thrived from around 1872, when silver was discovered, to 1879, when the last big smelter was shut down, all of seven years. One of the things left behind is the charcoal kilns.

Nestled into a small green valley, the six kilns, set in a neat line, are huge. Thirty feet tall, twenty-seven feet around, shaped like beehives. Constructed by Swiss-Italian master stone masons, they’re in fantastic shape. If you’ve seen these shaped kilns elsewhere, I know there all over the place, I bet you haven’t seen ones that look this good. The Nevada Park Service site refers to them as ‘fragile’. While I don’t want anyone taking a crowbar to them, I wouldn’t be surprised if these things don’t last as long as the pyramids. For one thing, there’s very little mortar between the rocks. They must have been painstakingly chosen, and then shaped at least somewhat to make such a tight fit.

Beyond the beehive kilns are some more kilns that processed the local limestone into lime for the mortar used on the beehives. These are much cruder, one built right into the rock there, and in worse condition.

Later, the kilns were used for shelter by cowboys and shepherds, and were even rumored to have been hide-outs for stage coach robbers.

What I wonder now, at the mercy of the pointed questions of my children, is why wood was processed into charcoal. Why not just use the wood to run the smelting process that turns ore into metal?

The town of Ward is long gone. The sparse local wood, Juniper and Pine, that was used in the kilns, soon ran out, the ore started petering away, and coal became available. The only thing that is supposed to be left is the cemetery. We drove over to the camp and picnic area, north of the kilns across Willow Creek. It just seemed to me that surely the town of Ward would be close to the kilns, and surely the boot hill would be somewhere near that.

We hunted around. To the south of the road that goes past the campgrounds, is the picnic area. The grounds looked as if they’d only recently been excavated, and everything appeared new, the bathrooms, the map kiosk. I saw a ranger’s truck, but before I could get to it, it drove away. We followed the road west until it ran into a state park gate. We drove back and checked the campground to the north of the road, keeping an eye out for the cemetery.

Ten bucks a night to stay at this campground. First come, first serve. As we drove around the nearly deserted campsite loop, it dawned on me. Camp spot after camp spot would have accommodated our RV. There were several pull-throughs, most of them occupied, but not all, and then you had real wilderness, a mixture of creosote and Juniper, an occasional Pinyon Pine and Ponderosa. Big hunks of terrain separated each campsite. This was real camping, and yet there we were packed into an RV park. No hook-ups here, no electricity, no cable, no running water, no dump station, but there would have been no need for any of that. Dump your tanks for five bucks, fill up your potable water tank for another five in town, at the KOA, or use the water that was available there at the campground. Remote spigots appeared often enough to make them accessible.

There’s another state campground nearby called Cave Lake. I’m sure it’s more popular, what with a lake, but my point is, we could have been in a campground, you know, camping, instead of holed up in a motel where you have to bring your own room. It wouldn’t have been as good for riding the train, but for what we usually do, finding ghost towns, checking out curious places out in nowhere that appear to be thriving businesses, it would have been perfect.

I spotted the ranger truck near the bathrooms, and I pulled right over, sharing with the wife my brainstorm.

“You made the reservations.”

“I’m talking about next time,” I enthused.

“The kids like the playground,” the wife countered.

I fell out of the Bronco, wondering where the ranger was.

He came out of the brush with a few scraps of trash in his hands, a distracted expression on his face. He absently looked up at me, then jerked up startled.

“Hi!” I said. The ranger’s disturbed countenance did not dissipate. I stopped my approach. I noted his gun on his right hip. A Glock I think. He studied the Bronco.

“Yes?” he asked gravely.

I tried to sound conversational as I pointed back to the Bronco.

“Yeah, hi. We-we were just visiting the kilns, and we read in a brochure we got, that the only thing left of the town of Ward was the cemetery. Could you give us directions?”

The ranger pondered me for a moment, holding the bits of trash in his hands to his chest, as if for protection. He licked his lips as he nodded.

“Where you coming from?”

“Ely,” I said. “We’re at the KOA.”

The ranger nodded some more. I could not read his face. Was he chagrined? Relieved? Embarrassed? Fearful? There were hints of those in his eyes, his lips, but he did not move from between the two Junipers that seemed to give him some cover, still holding the trash to his chest.

“Go back the way you came. Watch for a pretty good road to your left. There’s some private property between here and there, don’t let that throw you. Turn left on the good road. Keep an eye out. “

I thanked him, backed up to the Bronco. As I drove away I glanced in the side-view mirror, and saw the ranger peaking around the Junipers, watching us leave.

I can’t say I’ve ever had that affect on a ranger before.

I just had a thought, just now. I keep forgetting what we’re driving. The old Bronco we’ve got is a National Forest surplus vehicle. Sure, it’s been painted a dark green, and its got a roof rack, and three screaming children and two weeping adults inside, but time and again people see us coming and, suddenly, off-road motorcycles lock up their brakes and get out of sight, dog owners call back their pets and get them back on their leashes, campers check their fire rings and hide their beers. I didn’t think of that until just now. I bet the ranger saw a FDA Bronco and wondered what the hell the Feds were doing on his turf.

We found the cemetery, and we walked around it a bit, trying to sense the people there. Not much to see, really, but it looks like it’s pretty much left alone these days. There’s a metal box to keep a guest book at the entrance, but the guest book was gone. There was a pamphlet, last one. Just a little about the cemetery, who was buried there. There was something about how Ward was even more rowdy than Tombstone in its day, that forty people were buried there before anyone ever died of natural causes. We’ve noticed, though, that just about every town we read about claims they were tougher than Tombstone. Holbrook, Arizona, Austin, Nevada. I guess Tombstone wasn’t ‘Too Tough to Die’ so much as it was just too prim and proper to make a scene that exiting this world might have caused.

Looking at the TOPO! Program after we got home, I see that Ward is in fact further up the ‘pretty good road’ from the cemetery, some three miles from the kilns as the crow flies, and closer to five by road. There’s also a slew of mines and digs, adits and wells, and something simply marked ‘graves’ along the road to and past Ward, even though the town itself is nothing but a ‘site’ on the map. What I need is a laptop, so that I can load my programs up and carry them with us. You never know when you’re going to need to know what’s off the road just from looking.

I remember thinking it would have been natural to follow that road up, but it was time for us to get back to Ely for the afternoon train.

The train left right on time. We had the same conductor, but the locomotive was a Diesel-electric. It was brightly painted and it indeed hauls nearly as much history as 93 and 40, but steam is just so much more romantic, the chuffing smokestack, the bursts of steam shooting down the bedding as the living metal monster labors along the ‘magic carpet made of steel’.

This is called the Hiline run because it leaves the main track and rides along the edge of the valley to McGill and the long-silent mill and smelters there. The ride is longer than the Keystone route. The Valley spreads out to the north and west. I studied the highway, since this was the way we’d be going to Wells tomorrow.

We settled in the open car, this time for good. Without a steam engine, there’d be no cinders to worry about, and the diesel-electric is a whole lot quieter than the steam, making it possible to hear the Voice of the Ghost Train’s monologue. As it turned out, though, the Voice didn’t have that much to say. There’s a whole lot less history this way than into the mountains around Ely and into Ruth. Less to see, less to talk about. The clickety-clack of the track, the wind blowing softly across us, the temperature just a little warmer than that morning. Long before we reached Lavonne, the switch-track location where the engine swaps ends, Nick’s spring of energy had run out. He laid his head down on my lap and felt asleep, greatly limiting any pictures I might have taken with that cumbersome Rollei Camera I’d dragged along.

Once again, we didn’t go to the end of the track. Surely there’s something at both Ruth and McGill that’s worth seeing, a few structures with stories and history to them.

We returned to the depot. There was another chance to take the engine barn tour, but it was seven o’clock, and it was time to pick up Nitro and Starfire.

The dogs were so glad to see us it was pathetic. Nitro wet himself, Starfire did her whole submissive bitch routine, crawling around on her belly, nibbling the ends of our fingers, exposing her throat. They charged us eight bucks a dog, the same price that Cedar Grove would have charged.

If you’re going through Ely and you decide to check out the train, but you don’t want to spend the whole day there, take the Keystone route, preferably with the steam engine.

Coming back from the depot, we detoured through downtown Ely, and I dropped Robin off to run into a pizza place and order a few pies. There was no parking, so I circled the block until she came back out again. Several pretty young girls walking along the street, in running clothes, caught my eye. I immediately related them to some college nearby. They just had that college-age look in their eyes, always traveling in pairs. We had thirty minutes before the pizzas would be ready. I wanted to hunt around for some AGC 5A fuses. My plan was to drop the kids off, run by a car parts store, get the fuses, then pick up the pizzas. Heading back to the KOA, there were more young ladies, walking along in pairs, dressed in jogging clothes, with that self-aware look I always relate to co-eds. They know they’re gorgeous, know they turn heads, self conscious, freshly mindful of the power they possess. I dropped the family off, turned around and went to a parts store I’d seen on the way back from the depot, not too far away from Wild West Grooming on Aultman’s Street.

“I need a box of AGC 5A fuse, please,” I said.

“Okay, there’s a letter after that,” the young man behind the counter said.

I blinked.

“After what?”

“After the number.”

“A?”

He smiled tolerantly.

“Have one with you?”

No, of course not. I kicked myself. I had five burned-out AGC-5As in the box they’d come in, in the toolbox in the RV.

“We’ve got it, whatever it is,” he assured me. “Every conceivable fuse you can imagine. Just need the whole number.”

I sighed.

“Know anybody that works on RV generators around here?”

“KOA has a mechanic,” the young man said. “Specializes in all things RV.”

There were a half dozen young men standing out in front of the pizza place when I arrive. Anywhere else this might be considered a problem, but since this was Ely, and they all looked like models for GQ, I feared not.

“Do you know if the food is any good here, sir?” one asked as I closed the gap between me and them, going for the entrance.

“Sorry, guys. Tourist myself,” I answered.

“C’mon, Chip,” one of the other young men chided. “We’ve ordered already. Relax.”

I noticed one of the billboards on the way back said something like “Welcome Firefighters and Cadets.’. I also noted more young women walking along the road in jogging shorts. They all seemed to be scrutinizing their surroundings with smug confidence. Several seemed to be working to make eye contact, but I made a point to look away. I could imagine how that would be construe d by some scrub-cleaned co-ed feeling her oats. Juniors and Seniors, I imagined. Some of them could have been Freshmen. No make-up, just hardbodies in gym shorts showing off their asses.

I can’t remember the name of the Pizza place, but its downtown on Aultman Street. The kids and I liked it well enough, but Robin found it bland. That’s something we found about most ethnic foods in Nevada and Arizona, Idaho, Utah. I remember, before the Vacation-Into-Hell went completely to Hell, we ate at an Italian restaurant in Boise. Ordered the lasagna, and I still can’t figure out what they served us. There were noodles, but they must have seen Attack of the Killer Tomatoes II, and used raspberry sauce or something like that instead of tomato sauce. The red wine was cold AND sour. The bread looked right, but shouldn’t you have garlic on garlic bread?

If I come across the name of the pizzaria, I’ll stick it in. It was good enough to be mentioned. Besides, good or bad, I mention every place that made an impression. Just like the Red Apple. I wrote about it in ‘Land Baron Bounder’. It’s closed now. No great loss.

While I was on my quest for fuses and pizza pick-up, the children had gone playing at the playground, and Kellian and one of the Mennonite girls had fallen into one of the innocent conspiracies children plot, and after dinner, before the movie on the lawn, the little girl was going to come over to our campsite. Kellian waited and waited, glancing furtively down toward the three or four trailers that demarked the Mennonite camp, but the little girl never came.

“She said she’d come over right after dinner,” Kellian proclaimed again.

“Sweetheart, you’re probably going to see her at the movie.”

“But I wanted to show her my garnets,” Kellian countered. Her little heart was broken. I made a note to myself that I’d try not to breach any promises to my children, so that I would never be guilty of causing such a dejected look on my children’s faces.

That night the kids went and watched the movie on the lawn. I told Robin about the KOA having a mechanic as we sat and watched the stars outside the RV.

“We didn’t even think to ask them,” she sighed.

“We can ask tomorrow morning. We don’ t have to jet out of here. It’s a hundred fifty from here to Wells, fuel up, another thirty to Cobre. Four hours.”

For the next three days, we go back to more Taylor-ish vacations, off-roading to ghost towns, pioneer cemeteries, and investigating mysteries.