Ely to Cobre,Cobre to Lucin, The Sun Tunnels, The Children of Toana

DAY FOUR, TUESDAY: ELY TO COBRE


The next morning I went to the KOA office and store, and asked about their mechanic.

The host/owner grimaced.

“Yes, we do have a mechanic. He should be back from vacation sometime after the Fourth of July.”

She suggested a shop on Aultman Street.

As I walked back toward our RV, I saw Kellian and Nicholas over by a new-looking fifth wheel across the way from us. My kids and a pair of little blonde-haired kids were playing with the large gravel rocks each parking spot sports. The entrance to the fifth wheel was open, the inside, with the sliders out, looked like an opulent kitchen nook. A young man was adjusting something on the rig toward the front. I walked over to the trailer.

“Does your mother know you’re over here?” I asked the twins. The young man straightened up as he heard my voice. Nick and Kel nodded ascent. I looked over to the lean young man.

“Is it okay?”

He smiled and nodded.

“Your wife and I already had this discussion.”

I smiled.

“On vacation?” I asked. He nodded now.

“Family vacation. Mine are three and four. Yours?”

“The twins are five, the eldest is eleven.”

“These two are twins?” the young man asked with surprise. Much to his credit, he did not then ask, “Are they identical?”

“Heading out, well, in a little while,” he said. “Not in a big hurry, plenty of time.”

“Yeah, I’m going down to an automotive store right now.” I hauled keys out of my pocket. “Then we’re pulling out.”

“Oh?” he asked “Trouble?”

“Genset keeps blowing its starter fuse. I gotta go and get some fuses, not that that solves the problem.”

I looked over at him pointedly.

“You wouldn’t know anything about electricity, would you?”

A thin smile graced his lips.

“Well, as a matter of fact, I do.”

He went for his tool box, and I opened the door to the genset. When he came over he pulled out a tool that I indeed possess back at home, I just don’t know how to use it. He stuck a prong to each end of the empty fuse holder.

“Yeah, something’s open here,” he said.

“The lady in the store suggested a repair shop in town,” I said. “I was going to stop by it when I got the fuses.”

“Late notice, though,” the young man answered.

“Would it be imposing on you to hang out until I got back?”

“We’re not pulling out for awhile,” the young man answered. “I’m not loaded up, even. Get back with the fuses, and maybe I’ll be able to tell you more. Some kind of a short, but where?”

.I drove down to the repair shop, right on Aultmat. It took ten minutes to find someone, the owner of the shop as it turned out, and he groaned.

“Sorry, friend. Got a ton’a work lined up for the week. No way I can get to it today. Where y’headed? Wells! Sure, just cruise downtown there and hit almost any car shop along the way. Wells is a big town compared to Ely. But I’m gonna tell y’somethin’. From what you described t’me, it’s a loose wire that’s groundin’ out, shortin’ the whole thing. Mark my words, you’re gonna find a loose wire doin’ th’whole thing.”

I stopped by the parts store, this time with the fuse. The same kid was behind the counter. He studied the fuse for awhile, then went in the backroom and was gone a long time before coming back.

“No five amp fuses?” I begged. He shook his head, his confident guarantee from yesterday forgotten.

“Not for two-fifty volts. Maybe the parts store downtown. Or the Radio shack.”

I got down to the other store, a NAPA. No joy. I went to the Radio Shack, a half block further on, and there was a sign in the window. “Gone until 1:00.”

Well that did it. We were heading out. I got to the Bronco, looking up just in time to see one of those co-eds strutting toward me along the sidewalk. Big breasts bouncing about in a sports bra, hard body in gym shorts, no make-up to speak of, jogging along with that smug self-possessed look on her face. She was alone, though, and she wasn’t a kid. She could have been in her early forties, just in real good shape.

And then it crossed my mind as I got the Bronco running. The young ladies that had been catching my eye, perky breasts, clean wholesome faces, smug self-consciousness, had I been ogling laborers in the local sex trade all this time?

My image of the legal prostitutes of Nevada is formed by a Life Magazine article from the 1970’s, a Geraldo Rivera show where he showed off plenty of ‘T and A’ at the Mustang Ranch while condemning this exploitation of women, and a talk show where some milquetoast priest, wholly unprepared, was matched against the president of a supposed prostitute’s union ,’ C.O.Y.O.T.E.’, ‘Cut Out Your Old Tired Ethics’. The visage of the prostitute seared into my mind, legal or otherwise, is best depicted as ‘Burned Out Biker Bitch’. Not ugly, garish. Sexual fantasies abounding, sultry opulence, decadent indulgence, the countenance you read on their faces is either sluttish lust, or ‘broken like a whipped dog’. Rode hard and put away wet. The young ones are sneering mercenaries, the old ones bitter and dejected.

While there is no university in the Ely area, there is a junior college that shares the high school’s campus, and I did not jump out of the Bronco and bellow after the woman jogging along Aultman Street, “Hey, girlie, you one them there Legal Brothel Workers, chippies, hooker-types, huh?” So I cannot say for sure that the females I saw in Ely, one street over from the Red Light District, were in fact trollops. Why not co-eds, or even tourists in a lovely little Great Basin Desert town? Why not firemen or ‘cadets’, as I had assumed those young handsome men out in front of the pizza place were. If, on the other hand, these women I saw were laborers in libido commerce, then either Geraldo Rivera got his guests from Central Casting, conforming to stereotype, or the women attracted to the industry have changed in the last twenty years. Granted, if your fantasy is doing co-eds and you’re willing to pay for it, Ely is the place, but I suffer the idea of girls considering legal prostitution a legitimate means of commerce. Though titillated by the blatant, bold honesty of legal prostitution, and sating my libertarian proclivity, I ultimately think more harm is done to the soul than can be gained from the experience of either being a prostitute or a customer of one. I’ve never sampled the efforts of a lady of the night, and I don’t see it happening in the future under any circumstance, so I speak about the practice from self-imposed ignorance. Just my observation and opinion.

Just as an aside, Robin, you know, The Wife, casually radiates more animal magnetism and lustful carnality while sipping a glass of wine, lost in contemplation, than the jogging jiggling ladies I saw on the streets of Ely.

When I got back to the KOA, Robin and the young man were standing by the open door to the genset. Robin launched herself at me.

“Where have you been?” she accused. Before I could answer she threw a hand back, pointing to the young father. “This man has been waiting for you. They’ve held themselves up leaving because of you.”

Understanding and chagrin replaced my confusion. I turned to the young man.

“I am so very sorry,” I started without hesitation. “I had no idea I’d be holding you up. Please accept my apology.”

“We’re right on schedule,” he said carefully after a pause. “No big deal. Find any fuses?”

“There’s not an AGC-5A fuse to be had in Ely,” I answered. “I hit three stores.”

“Bummer,” he said looking into the gen-set. “Then I guess we are heading out.”

“The guy at the repair shop said we should hit a shop in Wells,” I continued. “Thank you so very much for your help.”

“Wish I could’ve done more,” the young man said. “Something’s open in the line, just don’t know which way. Without a fuse, there’s no way we’d know if we fixed it.”

The children screamed, Robin remonstrated, I loaded up the Bronco on the trailer, threw off the moorings, the water line, the power line, the waste hose. I fired the engine up and heard the lovely engine purr, felt the anchors rise, felt the Bounder sink down onto its suspension. The warning ‘beep’ ceased. The Bounder floated free from the shore power.

We were back on the road.

Robin didn’t speak to me until we came up on McGill.

“We could’ve spent a week there.”

“Not at the KOA,” I said. “Not at forty-two bucks a night.”

“You’ve got that all figured,” she said dismissively.

Ely could definitely stand more exploring. There’s jeep trails all over the place, old mines and ghost towns and parks with lakes. There are places just off the highway to set down and watch for elk. Except for the Ghost Train, there’s nothing of the commercial tourist thing here.

I remember the last time we started down this highway, thinking how lonely it was. Not too far north of McGill, I remember driving past a car accident where the driver must have fallen asleep at the wheel and just driven off the road. Nothing that exciting this time. These roads don’t seem so long as I remembered them when I was writing about our first time here, how incredibly far everything seemed to be. There’s wild horses in the open fields. Robin and I discussed whether the snow covered mountains we saw to our west and north were the Ruby Mountains. At Lages Station we made a sharp left to stay on 93. The other way, 93-A, goes on to Wendover, sitting on the border with Utah. There was a half hour stop for some road maintenance, but the people stuck with us seemed surprisingly cheerful. We pulled into the Flying J station at Wells shortly after traffic started flowing again. It would seem we have acclimated to the vast stretches of Northern Nevada.

We stopped here the last time we came this way. It seems to be the best price for gas in the area. We needed to fill the Bounder, the Bronco, and the propane tank as well. Nothing could staunch the bleeding from our ATM card.

When it comes to the propane, though, I am in awe. It’s a twenty gallon tank, and we hadn’t filled it in three years. The last time we did we were at the Barstow KOA going to Tombstone. The attendant got only half a gallon in. Keep in mind, the water heater, the central heat, stove, oven, and just for good measure, the refrigerator when not hooked up to shore power, all use propane. We stayed at the KOA in Silver City, New Mexico checking out the Gila Cave dwellings nearby, and water was frozen on the ground in the middle of the day. We left the central heat on the whole time we were there. When we get back from a trip, we tend to leave the refrigerator on for awhile, sometimes a whole week, while the perishable items get re-located into the house. With three kids and shower facilities, the water heater gets used a lot. Over a three-year period, I’d say we’ve run the systems of the RV about ten weeks worth, mostly the refrigerator. That day in Wells we took on seventeen gallons of propane. That works out to about two gallons, four dollars, of propane a week.

The kid who put the propane in told me about a shop in downtown Wells that could surely fix the generator. He gave directions, but past going under the freeway, I failed to connect the dots.

There were two repair shops in town. One was so packed with RVs and trucks, I couldn’t have hoped to pull into their lot. The second shop, I wondered if it was open. I pulled the rig up to the crumbling sidewalks, and went inside. No, the man inside said, he couldn’t fix it. Give him credit for honesty.

“We’ll be going through Elko in a couple of days,” I asked. “Know anybody there?”

“Yes,” the man said instantly, “Gary Westwood. Roadside Automotive.” The man took out a business card and wrote everything on the back of it. If this was his business card, then I was talking to Carl Kelso, and the shop we stopped at was Old West Inn R&D, Auto Repairs and Detailing, on 6th Street, Wells, Nevada.

The die was cast. We were going to remote camp for three days without the generator.

We got on 80 headed east, and drove for roughly twenty-five miles. About twelve miles before you get to the off-ramp for Cobre, as you start out of Independence Valley into Maverick Canyon, you climb eleven hundred feet to seven thousand feet in six miles to the Pequop Summit, and the Bounder hated it. The transmission temperature climbed and finally peaked out at two hundred eighty degrees before we crested the pass, at about forty miles an hour. Then you have to fall down the east side of Pequop Mountain, testing the brakes all around. But don’t you just love those names? Independence Valley, which is kind’a funny since there’s a state prison at the off-ramp in it, but otherwise a vast open range. Then into and up Maverick Canyon, with Pinyon Pine and Juniper sticking out of sheer rocky chocolate brown sides. Pequop Summit. We fell into Goshute Valley headed for the Toano Range.

The off-ramp is marked ‘Oasis’. The last time we’d been there, the gas station and general store there had looked like they were on their last legs. There’d been what looked like a feed store next to the store, already closed and looking forlorn. Now telephone poles rested across the entrance to the site. There’d been a fleet of busses and farming equipment on the lot. That was all gone now. Oasis is a roadside ghost town along Nevada Highway 30.

The last time we’d come this way it was raining, the windshield wipers weren’t working, and I overshot the road to Cobre by about twenty miles, all the way to Montello. This time, no rain, no squealing front brake working to lock up. This time I hit the road without a hitch, just past the paved-over railroad rails of the Northern Nevada Railway.

Another thing we’d done last time was to follow the dirt road as far as we could, hoping we might be able to drive all the way back to the forty acres of land we own. That’s nineteen miles back. We made it only three miles before the road became too rough for the Bounder, and we ended up setting up camp in what I now believe was a China Camp, just off the track, with an ancient looking horse stall and cabin made from railroad ties.

We had decided this time that we wouldn’t even cross the tracks. There had been several spots we’d checked out with a sizeable rocky hill between us and the highway.

The dirt road we drove along, wide and fairly well-maintained, was sparsely covered with moving red somethings. Crickets? Grasshoppers? Locusts?

Something else distracted us, though. As we moved along the road, all the campsites we’d remembered from the last time, simply didn’t exist. At one point Robin predicted one spot, a big round campsite that we could have pulled the rig all the way around in , with the boulders suddenly rising to the east and south cutting off the wind, was just over the rise.

But it was gone, or overgrown. Not small stuff either, not weed growth that breaks out in winter and spring, and dries out brown with the hot months. This was sage about a foot to two feet tall.

“I think I see a fire ring back in there,” Robin announced. I stopped the RV and we both looked out the windshield. I couldn’t see anything for the brush. The road had been graded, and where there might have been an entrance to a camp spot, there was not even a trace.

You don’t park on top of brush. The chances of exhaust pipes or hot oil or tranny pan setting it on fire are real, and an RV catching fire, with the propane tank, the hundred gallon gas tank, would make the mini-van fire in Ely look like a matchstick being lit.

All the campsites on this side of the track were gone.

“How does a campsite disappear like that?” Robin asked.

“No one uses it,” I answered. “The brush grows up, and it’s gone.”

“So, no one has camped here in the last two years?”

“I didn’t think brush grew that fast.”

It was the same on the other side, because we ended up crossing the track anyway, and we didn’t find a spot to camp until we reached the old shack. That was a clear spot.

Before we got there, we made a turn up a road we’d seen last time, that rises up and turns back on itself, then bears east and follows the track. I know I’d seen a campsite right at the top of the hill there, but it too was gone, overgrown. We ended up following the road much farther than we intended, coming up on a spot where the road began easing up into the mountains and thinning out, the growth down the center getting thicker. We found a place to turn around, no small feat with the Bronco still on the trailer, and got back to the stable made of railroad ties.

The ground there is very soft. I had to dig around the debris in the area to find pieces of tin to put under the anchors, or else they would have sunk their length in, if not right away, then eventually over the time we were there.

I unloaded the Bronco and nearly got it stuck in the soft ground right off the trailer. I ended up putting it into four-wheel drive. That’s when I noticed, I’d filled up the Bounder, I’d filled up the propane tank, but in the hunt for a mechanic for the generator, I’d forgotten to put gas in the Bronco. It had a little more than a quarter tank.

I was going to have to drive back to Wells and get gas before we could do anything.

I did not relish telling Robin this.

Robin had Alex hauling the chairs out of the front ‘basement’ storage compartment. She was setting them up in front of the Bounder, looking north along the track that was maybe two hundred yards away. She had a glass of wine and was sitting, looking north.

“Should I set up the kettle?” I asked her.

“I’ll cook inside tonight,” she said.

We had maybe four hours of light. What we call Cobre, although the actual town was on the other side of the track from us, was as I’d remembered it, hotter than last time, maybe a hundred degrees, but the breeze that came from the north made it not just bearable, but comfortable. Despite the riotous children stampeding across their new domain, I felt myself descend into the solitude and tranquility of Cobre.

I started on a beer. A St. Pauli Girl.

Alex came around.

“Could I set up my tent and sleep outside tonight?”

“Yes!” I bellowed. I had instantly realized the potential.

Robin looked over at me, seemingly miffed at my enthusiasm.

“If you really want to –“

“Can me too?” Nick asked.

“Well, its Alex’s tent –“

“Me too! Me too!” Kellian chimed in.

I imagined an RV devoid of children, my three progeny enjoying a self-imposed exile in Alex’s tent. Be still my heart.

Alex consented, and once he’d gotten the tent up, Robin supervised the moving of blankets, pillows, teddy bears, stuffed animals, toys and water, no juice, no food, into the three-man tent. When users of such camping devices see, ‘Three Man Tent’, the accepted rebuke is, ‘yeah, if you’re a midget!’ In this case, though, the occupants were. Though much too early to go to bed, the siblings practiced shoving themselves into the one sleeping bag we’d brought. No need for an air mattress or cushion. Alex had set his tent up in front of the stable, the ground is a pillow of decades, maybe even a century’s worth, of horse crap, aged and composted to near dust, but fluffy dust.

Dinner was good, but we ate inside. The little table we’ve used in the past, though still packed in one of the rear basement compartments, is quickly declining into ruin. Robin has been keeping an eye out for them, but I suspect the very fact it’s falling apart on us after only a year’s worth of use, tells you the design has some elemental flaws. I suspect that it’s a materials issue. If you were to find one made with the right plastic and strong enough metal to last, it would weigh a ton and cost a fortune.

After dinner, we got outside again, and everyone found a seat. Alex lit his lantern. The sky to the north was red, purple, pink, the mountains to the west shrouded in clouds. Though the sky was still blue, stars started appearing between the scattered clouds.

And all the kids were going to sleep outside in the tent. I sighed as I enjoyed yet another beer.
The sun was now truly setting, but the inside of the Bounder was an oven. The clouds hinted at thunderstorms, like last time. Still, the Taylor Horde huddled around Mother in front of the Bounder, Alex’s new lantern sitting on the ground.

“Anyone want to tell a story?” Robin asked. I gave Robin a curious look. What had inspired that?

Maybe Kellian had suggested it, because she launched into a delightful narrative about a beautiful princess and a witch. Ghosts get in there somehow. It wasn’t just the tale she told, but her delivery. It might have gone on too long, but in the end the story was really quite satisfying from the lips of a five-year old. Nick took a stab at it, but he’s going to have to focus a bit more to be able to crank out a yarn.

I had been Googling Cobre, and something new had come up. Less than two miles away is the site of Toana, a town that thrived just before the birth of Cobre. Overlooking the townsite was the town’s graveyard. I had seen the cross and box on the topo map before we’d been there the last time. We had visited and had been appalled. The graves have been robbed. Mounds of dirt melt back into the depressions that once held the dead, and bits of rotting wood is everywhere, I assume from coffins. Only three graves are undisturbed, the final resting places of children. Since we were last there, more precisely May 20th, 2002, someone named Dan Turner wrote a poem to those children and posted it on a Cobre site. Very short, it goes:

On the fifth of June

'Neath the cloudless moonlit sky

Three children play

Shadows cast and stars shine bright

As the children of Toano

Dance and play till dawn.




I had mentioned the poem to Robin, had run off two copies just in case I had the opportunity to read it to the kids when we got here. At that moment, I couldn’t find it. The heading says ‘Cobre’, and I had been looking for ‘Toana’. Maybe the beer was having an affect on me. That’s why I drink it, right?

But Robin then told the story of the Toana children. How bandits, hearing of a gold shipment in town, had attacked. The parents of the children had hidden the gold, and then hidden the children in one of the underground hovels that we were camped in and around right that very moment, how the bandits, after killing all the people in Toana, including the children’s parents, had found the children. They somehow knew that the children knew where the gold was, and they locked the children in the hole, and would not let them out until they told the bandits where the gold was. But the children never did, and one by one, starting with the baby, they died of thirst and starvation.

The children’s lifeless bodies were found by the posse, and they were buried in the graveyard, after the bandits had dug up the graves of all the others, looking for the gold.

And sometimes at night, every so often, the children will come out with their lantern, the only thing the bandits had let them have down in the dark hole. They come looking for playmates, other children their own age, just to play, nothing more. Just to pretend they’re alive again, not robbed of their futures by the bandits from so long ago, to be happy again, like children should be, at least for a little while.

We stayed up pretty late, but the kids didn’t forget. Robin finished the job later on.

“Do you see a light?” she asked, pointing in the direction we’d been contending was the direction of the cemetery. “I thought I saw a lantern swinging…”

The evacuation of the tent was disorderly, loud, and punctuated with furtive glances into the darkness past the stable.




DAY FIVE, WEDNESDAY: COBRE TO LUCIN, THE SUN TUNNELS, THE TEN ACRES, THE CHILDREN OF TOANA



The next morning I drove twenty-five miles back to Wells in the Bronco, filled it up and drove back. The oil pressure gauge showed unusually low. Something new for me to worry about. Of course, there was nothing I could do about it, short of parking the Bronco and not using it any more. I had changed the Bronco’s oil before leaving on the trip 20W-50 Pennzoil. On the way back, I stopped at the summit, hit the bathrooms there, and when I came out, popped the hood and checked the oil level. It was perfect.

This was the day we were going to go find the ten acres we’d bought in Utah. It was going to be a scorcher.

On the way out, we saw what looked like a small step van going up the road we’d started down the first day when we were looking for alternate camping spot. I’d think about that only after we’d gotten home.

A mild forty-mile trek due east of Cobre on 30, Through Montello, listed as a ghost town at Ghosttowns.com, even though there must be at least eighty people still living there. Across the Utah border, and after awhile, with the option of turning left and going to Grouse Creek, or turning right and going to Lucin,, we turned right.

The landscape had changed from the purple sage prairie to more like a desert dry lake. Extremely flat, any slight mound a mountain, the monotony of the browning plants dreary and depressing. Any sight of greenery was a relief to the eyes.

Lucin is an important historic sight. This is where the mighty Transcontinental Railroad line once turned sharply north and wound its way through torturous and twisted terrain to make its way around the Great Salt Lake. This turn became a bottleneck, the difficulty of these miles slowing commerce and the March of Progrees.. Then, at the turn of the century, some really daring and brilliant people decided that they needed a railroad bridge right across the Lake. It would shorten up the route, and rid it of the elevation climbs and twisted terrain. It was a monumental undertaking that took ten years of phenomenal effort and great capital. The bypass was finished in 1906. It shaved forty miles off the Transcontinental and wiped out the bottleneck On the west side of the Lake, the by-pass started at Lucin.

Lucin already was an important place along the railroad. Water piped down from Pilot Mountain supplied the steam engines with water. It remained an important location up into the sixties. Once again, the Diesel-electric locomotive made yet another town obsolete, like Cobre, and Montello, and Valley Pass.

Lucin, though, held a special place in the hearts of those who had worked there. Retirees from the railroad, and their spouses and children, moved to Lucin in the seventies and eighties, and founded a small retirement community. It thrived for years, into the nineties. And then retirees did what retirees do, what we all eventually must do, they died off. The town of Lucin disappeared for a second time, this time for good. I’d read there was nothing left of the two Lucins that had been. All the structures have been torn down, simply disappeared. The only thing that remains is a tree-shrouded pond with crumbling walls made from old railroad ties.

I was wondering whether we were on the wrong road when we came over the hill and spotted the railroad tracks and a large oasis of trees in the bland flat terrain ahead of us. We found a crossing, then worked our way down toward the trees.

The dogs bounded out the rear, the children spilled like water.

A very new-looking set of steps, a wooden ladder of sorts, went over the top of the barbed wire fence down to the other side. Starfire climbed up and over them, dragging Alex after her. Nitro burrowed through the fence between the wire, and I performed an impromptu acrobatic stunt, never releasing his leash while climbing the steps and grabbing Nitro from the other side.

Sweat flowed freely from all of us, but just striding up to the square reservoir of Lucin felt like stepping into a cool, breeze-driven cave.

The exuberant dogs suddenly calmed when we reached the water, and both of them hesitated, tenderly eased into the silent pond, up to their forelegs, stopped and stared serenely across the water to the far end.

The trees press in from all sides. For most of the pond you can’t get past the tree line without falling in the water. The east side affords you this luxury, though. There’s trash that someone has tossed in the water, a plastic gallon jug, wrappers. I was tempted to pick the trash up, but this annoys Robin. She doesn’t understand why I want to clean up after others when it only benefits someone who we’ll never meet, that will come to this place behind us.

Water in the desert is always magic. Squeezed from among rocks, caught in depressions in boulders, choked with dead creatures or swarming with larvae, it is nonetheless power. Indeed, the force of life and death. I’ve found myself scrambling over a mound of rocks marked Indian Hill on the topo map, smelling water, swarms of bees around me, but not being able to find it. I assume it was some sheep guzzler beneath the rocks. Still, it was water. It was life.

By contrast, Lucin is an elegant refuge in the desert; serene, soothing. Once again we had found ourselves at an oasis and were the only ones there. Just like Pahranagat.

There was something to the east past the trees. We walked back out into the sun. I regretted it immediately.

A rise marked the path ahead of us, and in the side of the rise were at least two dugouts. The first one we reached reminded me of a gunpowder magazine. Another structure of railroad ties, this one , except for the entrance, buried in the hill. The dugout had once sported a door. It lay nearby, torn from its hinges.

The inside was dark. My eyes did not adjust quickly. The dogs kept a respectful distance back.

“C’mon, Alex.” I shoved at him. “Get on in there, tell us what you see.”

“I don’t have a flashlight.”

“Don’t let that stop you,” I countered, shoving him a little harder.

“You go!”

I put my hands on my hips and glared in shock down at my first born.

“Alex, why do you think we had children? Hm?” I pointed into the dark dug-out, “So we could say, ‘Alex, climb that mountain, tell us if you see anything interesting’, or, ‘Alex, stick you hand into that hole, anything squishy or slimy?” I put my arm around him. “Your life serves a purpose, it has worth. Now go, into the abyss, justify your existence! Don’t make me send in Nicholas.”

Robin stepped by us, intently staring into the dug-out, and only then lifted her sunglasses.

“Maybe ten foot by ten. There’s what looks like a manger in the back, boards stretching the length of the room. Maybe even a bed. Dirt floor, real silt-y.”

I sniffed at the cool moist air within.

“I don’t smell anything bad.”

There was a cupboard that still had doors on it. Refracted light fined down through a ventilation pipe from above. Had people lived in here on the hot days of the year, or was this hole for storage, blasting powder., something like that. We walked down to the next one, but it had completely collapsed. The heat of the day turned our attention back to the shade of the trees.

Crumbling concrete foundations stretched out now back to the greenery partially buried under fine dirt with clumps of plants, turned brown in the summer heat. A cottonwood had suffered a collapse of one of its major limbs. The limb still lives. It leaned all the way to the ground. Nick pointed and asked me something, then started hard toward the thick limb.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“Daddy, can I c’imb d’e t’wee?” And with that Nick started scrambling up the limb.

Robin, Kellian and Alex had peeled off and were exploring further south. I had Nitro, and he wanted past the tree to the water.

Nick bounded up the limb like a monkey.

I gave Nitro a mighty jerk, long enough to buy me enough slack to grab Nick and pull him back down to the ground. He struggled mightily.

“I wanna c’imb d’e t’wee!” he wailed.

“Remember the last tree you climbed? You fell out of it and broke your wrist, remember?” I chastised. “The nearest emergency room is more than a hundred miles away.”

“I – DID – NOT – FA’W!” he screeched at me, taking a sharp breath between each word. “I JUM’ED!”

Nick was doing a pretty good impersonation of Charlton Heston in ‘Planet of the Apes’, when he did the; “Damn You! Damn you all to Hell!” Or maybe the ‘Madagascar’ version; “Darn You! Darn you all t’Heck!”

Sometimes I wonder if we should have Nick in some music course, a voice coach training him to sing opera. I picture him singing Faust. Not so much the singing, but the hand-wringing, the shaking of the fists at the injustice and futility. It would have to be translated into Shoshone or Klingon, of course.

“If you’re going to break something, do it in Elko,” I told him as he railed. “Make it a city park.”

I had, have, this impression of Elko as a prosperous little city. Deep Pockets.

Curiously, Nick got over this hissy-fit in short order. By the time Robin and the other kids got back, we were studying the mosquito fish swimming amongst the frog eggs.

On to the Sun Tunnels.

The ‘Center For Land Use Interpretation’s’ Website puts it thusly.

‘The Sun Tunnels: An artwork by Nancy Holt, completed in 1976, consisting of four large concrete tubes, laid out in the desert in an open X configuration. The nine foot diameter, 18 foot long "tunnels" are pierced by holes of varying size, that correspond with the pattern of selected celestial constellations. There is a tunnel for Draco, Perseus, Columba and Capricorn.’

With the coordinates offered at such sites, we located the ‘Tunnels’. They’re right along the road to our ten acres.

Concrete drainage pipes with holes drilled in them. Standing in them, it was nice to get out of the sun.

I’ve been trying to find an e-mail addy for Nancy Holt. She’s still an active artist. She’s doing well enough to pay the property taxes on the forty acres the Sun Tunnels rest on. Back in 2004 someone put the ‘Tunnels’ up for sale at E-Bay. Nancy was not amused.

I’d like to e-mail her, in any case, and ask her, ‘What the hell were you thinking, back in 1976’. Maybe I should ask what she was smoking.

Yeah, the 1970’s: Disco, Vietnam, Stagflation. Good times.

Having sated our earth art urge, we proceeded now to find our ten acres of land. We headed due east on what the map said was Little Dove Mountain Road.

I had put the platte map down, figured out as close as I could where our property might be, but unlike any property in Nevada or Arizona, I didn’t have the TOPO! National Geographic program to check out everything. I can’t get it down to a surveyor’s level, but I can get within thirty feet of our property boundaries with the TOPO! Program. I’ve done that with all the properties we’ve bought in Nevada and Arizona, before we bought them. We bought an extra ten acres at the Wikieup property so that we got out to the main road. Along with the on-line research of the community and area around the land, we knew the location and terrain before we even bid on the property.

In the case of the Utah property, I had to use TopoZone. TopoZone doesn’t have all the cool tools that TOPO! has, and I’m not operating at the snail speed of dial-up. With TOPO! I can measure out a ‘townsite’, tear down a platte map’s clues and legends, and mark out a piece of property. With the Utah property, the best I could do point out somewhere close to the middle of the ten acres.

We had to go through a gate made of barbed wire, and the road did get a bit rougher, but the land here is phenomenally flat. The Bounder could make this.

But my hopes faded as we continued down the trail a couple more miles. The little arrow on the GPS, pointing toward those vague coordinates I’d plugged in that I guess-timated our land’s location, moved further and further to the north as we headed east, until finally it was pointing directly left of us, with our distance from the property now growing instead of getting closer.

“We are one-point-one-nine miles from our property,” I announced.

“But that’s from the center,” Robin pointed out. I looked again at the GPS, did some minor calculations.

“Okay, so we’re just about a mile from our property.”

We all sighed in the sweltering heat of late June.

“Wanna try to boondock it?”

I hesitated, then eased off the road.

The ground here was covered with what looked like dried salt. Just eye-balling it. It looked like flat ground all the way back to the railroad track. Stunted mesquite seemed to be the only thing that really thrives, in clumps, that we could work our way around. In four-wheel-drive and low range, I headed due east toward our property.

The crumbly ground crunched underneath my tires. I looked in the rear view mirror and saw the deep rut my tires were digging down.

“Robin, I’m worried about getting stuck.”

“Me too,” Robin answered instantly, then gasped, “I can’t hold my breath for a mile of this.”

“At five miles an hour, a mile is going to take twelve minutes to get there,” I said.

“We’re doing five miles an hour?”

I glanced down at the speedometer.

“Actually, we’re going so slow, it doesn’t register.”

We turned back toward the road.

“So there’s no road to our property,” my wife reiterated.

“We can hunt around, but there was no road on the map.”

Robin mumbled something about the lady who’d sold us the property said the land was accessible, and ‘she seemed so nice’.

I felt vindicated, and though I did not say anything, I hope she remembers this. She used to tease me about wanting a GPS. “Know where we are now?” She sighed when I collected topography maps, and tools for reading them, and she gritted her teeth when I begged for the TOPO! Programs. Tools, Robin, tools of knowledge. Now I’m going to campaign for a laptop.

We hunted around for awhile, checked out a large outcropping of volcanic rock, got good and lost, the road petering out against an ancient-looking fence. We finally found our way back to Lucin, where we spent more time by the water and the cool serenity underneath the trees. Then we headed back to Cobre.

Before we made it back to the highway, we spotted a grove of trees off to the east. There were well used roads that seemed to go to them.

The road was in good shape. I never did shift down into four-wheel-drive.

It must have been something of a popular spot. Someone had left a fold-up chair that was mostly duct tape in the shade, and over and around the trees.

The water no longer is on the surface, but as it turns out, this was an important spring for pioneers crossing through here before the railroad. There is no sign of structures, but the land has been reshaped into reservoir underneath the trees themselves. Robin took a picture of the sign that we found, but for some reason I apparently did not copy them over from the cameras. I can’t explain this. The fact that this spring is not mentioned by anyone who has traveled this area makes me feel like I’ve explored something nobody has thought to investigate before.

It is, in fact, Owl Spring. It is here, they believe that Nancy Kelsey, considered to be the first white woman in Utah, and her husband, decided to abandon their wagon and continue on to California by horse, and ultimately by foot. You’d think there’d be more of a write-up about it, wouldn’t you?

We loaded up and headed for the highway.

I can’t quite remember what got it started, someone shoved someone, some point of honor was violated, a principle perceived as that sacred Right and Wrong, debased. It’s one of the reasons we got the RV in the first place. Strap three kids in next to each other within easy poking distance, and once again, the bickering escalates to a delirious hysteria. By the time we reached the Bounder, the twins were howling, Alex was weeping, and Robin was denouncing the lot of us.

Alex stomped off. Robin went to make lunch. She suggested I take the kids to the Toana cemetery. The story of the children of Toana still lingered from the night before. Alex declined to join us as he retreated to his book of dragons.

“Daddy?” Kellian drawled. “The story Mommy told us, is it true ?”

“No,” I answered instantly as I drove. “Your mother pulled it out of thin air, fabricated it from her twisted mind.”

“Bu’k d’e ligh’k –“ Nick started.

“There was no light,” I rebuked stridently as we ascended the hill toward the graveyard. “Your mother placed the idea in your head, and you saw what she wanted you to see.”

“Wha’k hab’en’ d’o d’e bang’iks?” Nick asked. “Did d’e b’oss-ee catch ‘em?”

“There were no bandits. Grave robbers tore up the graves. You’ll see.”

We stopped just outside the battered boot hill. Two years ago there was a BLM sign saying to the affect, ‘don’t loot’. That’s gone, but the chain link fence the sign hung on still limply marks the yard’s boundaries. We found our way into the burial ground.

In some time past on this sacrosanct ground, someone sank as low as humans can get. They dug up the dead, I assume looking for jewelry the bodies might be buried with. I’ve been told the coffin handles also are valuable. According to NVGHOSTTOWNS.COM, there are more than thirty graves at Toana, making me doubt the chain link fence encircles the whole cemetery. Six graves remain un-violated within the fence. Only three have tombstones, the three Children of Toana, also spelt Toano.

The twins moved across the potter’s field, stepping around the short scrub, greasewood, and sage that chokes the cemetery, a blustery breeze tugging at all of us. The sky grew appropriately cloudy, although it was still hot.

We walked up to one gated area, the wrought iron fence being consumed by the rust. Within this enclosure there are four headstones. Marble lambs curl sedately atop the two taller tablets, two small markers sit at the far end.

“In Memory of JOHNDAVID,” one inscription started. “Son of John and Margaret LEWIS, Born June 15, 1891, Died Dec. 21, 1901”

Ten years old. My Alex was eleven.

“What did they die of?” Kellian asked. I sighed.

“Well, sweetheart, diseases, flu, small pox, tuberculosis –“

“No!” my daughter countered. “The bandits killed them!”

“No,” I countered back. “That’s mom’s totally fabricated, completely –

“In Memory of MARY,” the headstone next to John David read. “Dau. Of David & Olive MORGAN. Born Dec. 3 1878, Died February 14, 1880.”

A year, two months.

“Over here!” Nick crowed and he bounded off toward the other fenced patch.

The smaller markers at the base of the plots had just initials etched in them. It took me a second to realize they were the same as John David and Mary. I frowned. Why would they do that? Perhaps it took time to get the headstones, and these had been temporary memorials. But why then would they leave them? And why did Mary and John David share this yard for eternity? They didn’t have the same family name, they died twenty years apart.

I followed my children to the next fenced area, the four corners of the wrought iron decorated with ornate knobs, a lone weathered marble tombstone within.

“In Memory of WILLIE, Son of H. & M. Schodde, born April 26th, 1882, died Sep. 14, 1882.”

Such a gilded grave for a baby. How they must have missed him.

“Are the bandits’ ghosts here?”

I pulled myself back from my reverie and turned toward the twins.

“No,” I said, “No. There are no bandits –“

“Wi’ d’ey come and p’ay now?”

I looked down at Nick.

“What?”

“D’e Toana chi’d’en.”

“Come and play, Toana Children.” Kellian called through the fence. She wrapped her fingers around the wrought iron and pleaded to Willie’s headstone. “Come and play in the sun. We won’t be afraid. We’ll be your friends.”

“Come and P’ay!” Nick bugled as he ran back to John David and Mary.

“You can come home with us,” Kellian whispered.

I clapped my hands.

“Okay, guys. Time to get back to camp. Back to the truck.”

The view here is restful. I looked though the gently sloping mount we stood on, through Junipers toward the track, where Toana existed for thirty-eight years, 1868 to 1906. Its demise was sealed when they moved the town’s buildings down the track to the ascending Cobre and the Northern Nevada Railroad, and finally bulldozed and buried under a second set of track. Despite that, there are still concrete foundations along the track, and along the road we took back to camp.

We had dinner. Shortly, Robin told the story about how the treasure of Toana, hidden from the bandits so long ago, had never completely been found, that there was treasure yet to be found under sticks that made an ‘X’. Ten minutes later Nick was whooping “A ‘E’ksh! A E’ksh!”

The twins dug far past the coins and rocks we had painted silver before we’d left home, that Alex had buried and made an ‘X’ with twigs over them while we were away.

Dusk was upon us. The occasional trains passing by, perhaps three times while we watched, proved a disappointment. When we were here two years ago, every train Alex waved at had blown its horn in greeting. This time is was maybe once every three trains. One engineer, he looked like a young guy, blew his air horn, then leaned out the window of the engine and waved a big gloved hand at us. He looked somewhat startled at seeing anyone there in that desolate place.

The children tentatively discussed the possibility of sleeping in the tent again. Some toys and a pillow were even moved to it. Then Robin thought she saw a light swinging like a lantern off to the north-east on top of a rise, and we were all inside the Bounder for the evening, with a night light on.