I had no idea where my wife and children were. It crossed my mind, I could grab my chair, sit there with the dogs, watch the sky color and darken to the east through the chain link fence. For a moment, I waited, frozen there on the steps of the Bounder. I imagined the conversation I might have with the Nye County Deputy Sheriff.

“So, Mister Taylor, y’say y’went out last night around six t’find the best gas price in town, y’come back and y’er family’s gone, and y’don’t git around t’callin’ us until this mornin’?”

“Well, we weren’t leaving until this morning.”

“Uh-huh. You don’t find anything odd about this situation, then.”

“Well, odd, yes, but in a nice way.”

The night before I had ground coffee for the morning, and was horrified to discover, this was the last of it. I couldn’t imagine how this was possible, but there was no denying it, I was down to perhaps two days worth of beans. I did not dare tell Robin. She stopped drinking coffee months ago, as a regular morning thing, but had said she would like coffee during vacation. Actually, I’d stopped as well, except on the weekends. She had then asked if we needed more beans for vacation, and I had said yes. She bought a two pound bag at Costco. I’d opened it and filled the air-tight container, then Robin had found a nearly full bag up in the pantry that I had forgotten about, so now there were two open containers, both at home, since I had figured the air-tighter container with the handy wooden spoon would be plenty. Now she had done the shopping for the week, which meant, not only would we need to buy more beans, an unnecessary expense, but it would also require a special trip to the store.

The next morning I got up early and cleaned the inside of the Bronco as best as I could. I wiped the upholstery down, I brushed out the floor. No one was up yet, it was false dawn. I’d seen a car wash on Idaho Street, so I drove down there. On the way back, I figured, I would pick up a small bag of coffee beans.

I loaded the coins into the vacuum cleaner, then carefully worked over the interior. I put the nozzle against the air conditioning vents, hoping to suck out as much dust and debris as I could from the system, then crawled under the dash and wiped and vacuumed there. I went over the Bronco so slowly that I ran out of time on the vacuum and had to load it up again. After some thought, I decided I needed to clean the outside as well. I was out of coins, so I drove over to a convenience store, it would have been a 7-11 in Southern California, and while I was there, I got myself a large cup of coffee. I always feel guilty just asking for change

I drove back to the Double Dice. Robin was up.

“Where were you?”

“I went and cleaned the inside of the Bronco,” I answered decisively. Robin thought about that, then grunted.

“Too bad you didn’t think to do that before we left home.”

It was only then that I realized I hadn’t scored coffee beans.


The second issue of the day was whether we should fuel up before taking off to Tonopah. If we took 278 instead of 305 or 306, we would save fifty miles an hour’s worth of driving, even more. We hadn’t put a hundred miles on the Bronco, and it was something like two hundred miles to Tonopah. If we fueled up in Elko, there was still a pretty good chance we’d need to fuel up again in Tonopah to get to Kingman, where we’d probably fuel up again just so we could get from Kingman to Wikieup to Quartzite. With Robin in such an acerbic humor, I decided we’d best just get going. I loaded the Bronco, made sure it was strapped on tight, threw our lines free of the shore power moorings, and once again, the Taylor Horde hit the open road.

Twenty miles west on I-80 to the Carlin off-ramp. There’s no trees to speak of in these parts, just rolling sage and endless horizons. Carlin looks old and dusty, a sleepy little town that none-the-less has commerce and industry in its streets. We skirted the town, drove several miles to 278 and turned left, due south.

Since I had not intended to take 278, I hadn’t done any research, so I make references here to things I checked after I got home.


For awhile we ran along the Humbolt River, green, the air wafting through our open windows heavy with humidity and the smells of a waterway. We were on the east side of the river, the railroad followed the west. After ten miles we rose out of that, and 278 became a straight shot of a road, a ribbon of asphalt gently undulating into the distance, disappearing into the horizon. According to the map, this is Pine Valley.

And the engine hummed contentedly. Okay, it roared so loud conversation was impossible, but I’ve talked about that. I took solace in the smoothness of the roar, the steady sounds of my machine, everything working right, everything running like it was supposed to. Rarely do I put on cruise control, the gear shifting seeming to be a constant consideration, but today, with absolutely no traffic coming at us, or gaining on us, I slipped on the auto-pilot and relaxed my right foot.

Here is another stretch of road that goes for a hundred miles, plus, with not a single town. I don’t mean small towns not worth mentioning, I don’t mean places that don’t rate a stop sign. I mean nothing. Off in the distance you might see a ranch house, occasionally we saw crops and cattle, but as far as a settlement, a grouping of buildings that might be the future or former nucleus of a town, no. Montello would have been a metropolis here.

But you look at the map, and there’s so much there. I love looking at maps. On the 7.5 Topo maps, they list individual ranches along 278, Raine Ranch up there in the pass to Pine Valley, on the western slope of the Pinon Range. Nameless springs are none-the-less marked. The Tomera Ranch comes up for the first time at Fedelford Creek. Further south it’s marked again, a grouping of little black squares demarking structures. A quick check shows that Tomera and Bailey have mine contracts with gold extractors, the Tomera Ranch $25,000 a year lease as well as a percentage of the ‘smelter ounces’ profit. I think we may have seen Bailey’s, two barns facing each other across the highway, and a ranch house and well worn corrals made from juniper limbs. Pine Valley is roughly forty miles long, growing from a little pass to a wide chasm where the mountains that mark its boundaries are out of sight. Corrals and wells are marked, and a mile past the Rand Ranch there’s a cemetery just off the road. There’s the Slagowski Ranch half a mile west of the highway, a peak nearby with the same name. Right there, just south, there’s a flurry of peaks in the middle of the valley peppered with strip mines, prospects and dumps, roughly a mile off the road. Somewhere along here we pick up an abandoned railroad grade that, doing a search of the ‘Net, someone is proposing re-establishing, from there all the way back to the Transcontinental Line. I didn’t bother to read their reasoning, too much going on. Both on the 7.5 and the 100k maps there appears something called Shannon, with a landing strip and a gravel pit nearby, but I can’t find anything on it on the ‘Net.

We saw none of this, of course. As I drove all I saw was vast sweeping meadows, grasses gently swaying in the hot breeze, there was nothing but distant mountains and a vast open sky.

And a carmine smear on the highway’s surface. At first I wondered if a truck out ahead hadn’t been carrying fifty-five gallons drums of a dark brownish red paint, and it had somehow spilled slowly out, a couple hundred gallons worth, but then I realized that the red down the center of the lane, besides being a slightly different shade, was moving.

It was crickets again, the grasshoppers that had covered the roads occasionally at Cobre. The highway was crowded with them, and the paste they made after being run over went on for twenty miles. Several times something caught my attention, moving in the side view mirror. I would look back just in time to see a ruby-colored spray being kicked up by the rear wheels.

I kicked off the cruise control. My first concern was hydroplaning on the liquid insect gore. The second was being contacted telepathically by the locust collective, telling us to pull over in this empty place to insure our deaths and subsequent consumption were quick and humane, that resistance was futile.

The debate was whether the fields around us were also covered with this mass of insects, hidden by the endless flowing grasses, or if for some reason in the heat of the day, the insect multitudes were attracted to the black asphalt.

Pine Valley ends abruptly, the road turning slightly east, through what appears on the map to be a pass. Even before that, though, we’re in Garden Valley. The word ‘Alpha’ in dark black letters is right there off the road to the pass, the Alpha Ranch nearby. Here we follow Henderson Creek, and shortly we pick up the old railroad grade that had disappeared off the map before the pass. There are no nameless springs in Garden Valley, they’ve all got names as things grow drier. McCloud Springs to the east is one of the few I spot in the eleven mile long valley, with the Sulpher Springs Mountain Range to the east and Roberts Mountains to the west. At Garden Pass, there’s Garden Spring, just outside Garden Valley a nameless spring, and 278 picks up the old Pony Express Route. There’s a stretch of four miles, jogging further east, that’s apparently Garden Pass. Mines and prospects appear all along 278, but there’s one here named September Mom Mine. Wouldn’t you love to know the story behind that?

The children grew bored with the wholesale slauhgter of millions of red grasshoppers, and started picking at each other. Robin demanded verbal cessation, they ignored her, and disobedience must be addressed. I proclaimed at one point. “All I can do is drive.” And I meant it, too. They have televisions, snacks, games and beds. I can’t get up and juggle for them, the cruise control doesn’t work like that. I wish I’d had my TOPO! Program available here. I think the kids would have had a hoot. These things are just off the road.

Out of Garden Pass, 278 heads east-southeast through Diamond Valley. The railroad grade appears and disappears here. The Eureka Airport was supposed to be just east of the highway here. We saw nothing.

The sign for Eureka appeared, and there was Highway 50 just before that, the map a bit misleading about how 278 and 50 meet. On the map it appears that 50 and 278 mesh just before Eureka, but in fact, 278 ends at 50. You have to stop to go either way. We turned right, west on 50, through a pass called the Devil’s Gate, with Anchor Peak to the north and the Mountain Range and Mahogany Hills to our south. The Hay Ranch appears here again as we skirt the south end of Kobeh Valley. Somewhere south of Lone Mountain there was a rest stop in a vast open rolling plain, Antelope Valley. The terrain had grown decidedly drier, the grasses and brush more spare and mean.

I can’t remember exactly why I stayed inside while Robin took the dogs out. I probably needed to go to the bathroom and maybe grab a soda. I hadn’t heard precisely what transpired between her and Alex, but he pouted while Robin wrestled the dogs outside. There were a few strange-looking people nearby, and I watched them as the wind began to buffet the Bounder. Finally, guilt possessed the eldest son and he went out to help his mother. Mom was not in the forgiving mood, and I watched her turn away from Alex as he tried to take one of the dogs. I started for the door myself. Before I could get out, Robin had returned.

“Starfire ate one!” she proclaimed. “I think she wants more!”

“Ate what?”

“One of those – grasshoppers.”

I stepped back to let her and the dogs come up the steps, finally easing back into my seat before looking out the window.

“High in protein I imagine.”

Starfire got to the water bowl and emptied it.

“Must be salty,” Robin offered

“We have now traveled two hundred miles of red locusts,” I noted as I started the engine.

The wind became urgent as it pushed across the highway. The speed limit for 50 was sixty-five, but I could barely maintain fifty-five with the wind. Past the Bartline Ranch with artesian wells, along Bean Flat and Monitor Valley into Launder County to Hickison Pass, forty miles from 278. According to the topo map there’s Hickison Petroglyoh Recreational Site, with a campground. Wish I’d known about that. The last valley floor we traversed before we turned down to Tonopah, we got down to forty-five, the engine laboring as we drove more and more directly into the wind. This is Big Smokey Valley, ‘Big’ being an appropriate tag. We were crossing near the northern end, and the Big Smokey is five miles wide there.

From a distance the intersection between 50 and 376 that goes down to Tonopah looked like it was going to be misleading like the 278/50 intersection, with 50 dead-ending into the road. As we got closer, though, we could see 50 going straight, past the intersection, an optical illusion in the drying stark desert that surrounded us.

Smokey Valley looked more like the desert we are used to in the Anza-Borrego, although there were farming communities tucked up against the Toiyabe Mountain Range that forms the west side of the Valley. The valley floor was a white crust of what I guessed might be salt. Looking at the map, there’s large tracts of lake beds, with ‘salt’ written in long hand in the middle. There were bursts of tall green wind-breaker trees guarding an occasional structure, but for twenty miles you saw only the crystal white to our east.

The wind slapped at us now with growing intensity. Up ahead, muddy pallid dust devils swirled up and charged across the road.

A dead straight road that felt like we were making a descent, and I was down to forty miles an hour in second gear. There were very few cars on the road, and they passed us with care.

A town appears on the map, far off the highway, called Kingston, roughly sixteen miles down 376. A paved road continues past the town into the Toiyobe National Forest, where there’s a campground, and a mine. Kingston is listed as a ghost town at Ghosttowns.com. They say the mill remains alone are worth the visit.

The wind punched at us so hard I thought about pulling over and waiting out the storm, but whose to say it ever stopped? Besides, we were supposed to hit the Tonopah Mine Museum and Park that day.

Off in the far distance, a monster dust devil rose. It must have been a thousand feet high as it swirled in the lakebed, fiercely dipping and dancing as it worked its way west toward the road.

“Alex, close the windows,” Robin commanded. I reached across and closed my own window, then risked reaching down and turning on the engine air conditioner. One more load on the engine I would liked to have avoided.

A wall of dust scorched the road directly ahead of us. I dropped down to twenty-five, then twenty miles an hour.

“If that thing hits us, it’s taking off paint and Brillo-brushing the windshield,” I proclaimed.

The monster devil marched across the highway, not a hundred yards in front of us and began to dissipate immediately on the other side. The wind, however, did not slacken.

A ranch house and what appeared to be a vast white lake materialized in the middle of the valley. Looking at the map now, I’d say we were at Miller Ranch, roughly fourteen miles past Kingston. For the next forty miles, as the landscape around us dried even further, rocky and desiccated, we never got above fifty miles an hour.

I look at the topo map now, and there were hot springs, lots of them, just off the highway, with the added bonus of a cemetery. About twenty-five miles from the intersection with 6, we skirted around the south-west end of the Toquima Mountain Range, and into Ralston Valley.

Somewhere around here we passed from Eureka County to Lander County, and now into Nye County.

The sign ahead said, “Tonopah, 5 miles”. 376 dead-ended into 6. Turn left and we would cruise back to Ely, or take 375, the Alien Highway, at Warm Springs, and cruise back to Alamo and Pahranagat Wildlife Refuge. We came to a stop sign, then turned right, west again.

The climb was impressive. I found myself trying to get us out of one-and-a-half gear, but I don’t think I made it past second when we saw the sign for the Joyland RV Park.

My heart sank as I looked down from the raised highway at where we were headed.

We turned right, down a dusty treeless road. Right there in front of us was a vast and long-abandoned complex, the last remaining concrete foundations of some mighty feat of industry, rising up the side of a mountain, which I can now tell you is Rushton Hill and Mount Odie. A stamp mill, perhaps. The dusty road turned back on itself and we turned into the Joyland RV Park.

Joyland had been recommended by the Tonopah Chamber of Commerce. There are two other RV parks in Tonpah, but the lady at the C of C carefully worded her response, that Joyland would be ‘more family friendly’.

The elderly lady I had spoken to a month before sounded like an old desert rat, a bit abrasive, even while trying not to be. When I asked how she wanted the payment, she seemed confused, and when she did understand I meant to pay in advance, she went off in true desert rat fashion.

“You pay when y’get here and not a moment before. Why should I have your money for a month without earning it? Silliest concept I ever heard of! You’re a big rig, you’re gonna need our biggest spot, I got it penned in right here.”

I realized two days later that I hadn’t gotten very good directions from the little old lady, so I called back. I got a guy on the line, I’d say younger than myself. His slurred speech, rushed clipped sentences, had all the ear-marks of a drunk struggling to sound sober. I reminded myself it was just for one night.

I stopped where the sign indicated, went inside the sun-bleached structure that surely was originally a private residence. A tall lean oldster tottered out and greeted me. She took my money, and looked over at our rig.

Oh, dear, that’s a lotta’ rig.”

“Yes ma’am,” I agreed. “We discussed this on the phone.”

“Oh dear. Well, number three’s the biggest spot we got. You’ll have to drop the trailer, though.”

“Drop the –“ I looked back at my trailer with the Bronco on it. I was distracted for a moment as I took note of the apparent riot that had broken out in the Bounder. I could just hear Nick wailing.

“Yes, you’ll block the other sites if y’don’t.”

“Where, then, should I put the trailer?”

“Well, number two doesn’t have any hook-ups, we never rent that one out. Put it there. Here, I’ll meet you out there and show you.”

I got to the Bounder. The riot within was not apparent, it was full-blown. In Chicago, water cannon would have been used.

I hadn’t been present for what had set off the altercation, but Robin was threatening, Alex was hysterically whining, and Nick was in full meltdown. Kellian had her hands over her ears screeching “Stop it! Stop it!”

“Look at that!” Robin stuck a hand out at me, and I watched her hand quiver spastically. “The lot of you are driving me to a nervous breakdown!”

“I have to drive the Bounder in now. You’ll all have to wait until I’ve dropped the trailer before this can continue.”

“Why?” Robin accused. “Why do you have to drop the trailer?”

I explained the circumstances.

“But first I have to unload the Bronco,” I continued.

“Why? Why do you have to make this more complicated than it already is?”

“Because if I have to back the trailer into the spot, we won’t be able to get the Bronco off to go to the Mine Park.”

Robin opened her mouth, closed it, then gritted her teeth.

Joyland’s parking area is a little more than a quarter of a dry dusty acre, chain link fence to the east and west, the laundry and shower facility to the south, with the highway bed rising up so high I don’t know how we were able to look down and see this place. The lot accommodates maybe ten spots.

Silently Robin and I unloaded the Bronco in record time, then I backed the trailer into spot number two.

All the surfaces of the trailer that faced forward was covered with a gooey crust of locust gore. I scraped at the dark ruby colored slime with a stick. The quarter inch-thick goop had the consistency of strawberry fruit leather.

The Bronco that I had only washed that morning was also covered with the locust paste, althoughnot as badly. There was only one other rig in the unpaved parking lot, a fifth wheel, so I had plenty of room to maneuver. Then I pulled into what I thought was Number Three spot, windshield facing east with what was indeed a pleasant view, hook-ups on one side, a metal and plastic picnic table on the other, not an ounce of any kind of shade to be had.

I got out and approached the hook-ups, which resided in a box made from 2x4 pine planks buried in the ground and filled with small stone, contemplating whether it would be worth our while to pull out the canopy.

“Wrongspot,” a sharp voice announced. I looked up and saw a man trotting by with a small boy tagging after him. Before I could say anything, and without him stopping, he pointed to the other side, closer to the check-in house. “Pullitout, backitin.”

Slurred speech, rushed, clipped sentences. It was the other voice I’d spoken to, who gave us directions, the guy I thought was a drunk. He stopped now. “pullitout, backitin, othersideoftheutilities. Cableonthefence. See?”

I looked back at the chain link fence. Cable cord was twined through the chain link and the excess hung limp to the ground.

The man and trailing little boy trotted off to some other pressing necessity.

For whatever reason, I hadn’t leveled the Bounder, so that was one chore I didn’t have to repeat. I pulled out and backed the Bounder in, and discovered this was much better. Now our camp area was a spacious lot at the northern end, a long-suffering Honey Mesquite tree for at least some shade, and a nice area for the kids to screw around, the dogs to get out and at least not be cooped up in the RV.

I can’t remember why Robin walked over to the check-in house, but she came back with free tickets to the Tonopah Mine Museum and Park.

I looked at my watch. We’d left Elko at nine, we were in Tonopah and settled in at three. The Mine Park closes at five.

“We gotta get going,” I said. “We got two hours before the Mine Park closes.”

“Where is this place?” Robin asked. “How far away?”

“Oh, well, its practically in town –“ I scooped up the 8x10 topography map of Tonopah I’d run off the computer back home. “No more than five miles.”

“What street is it on?”

“That one.” I pointed at the location on the map that I held up against my chest so she could see it. She gasped with disgust.

:”What’s the name of it?”

“See, that’s what I haven’t been able to find, but I’ve got the map.”

“I don’t want to be lost out there with these howling brats. I can’t get in a closed car with them. I’ve had it.”

“Me too,” Kellian chimed in.

“Guys,” I turned to Nick and Alex. “You wanna go?”

“Yeah!” they both crowed.

“And leave your mother and sister behind because they can’t stand your howling and screaming,” I added.

The two boys were already crawling in the back window of the Bronco, and I don’t think they heard me.

Robin turned away and went back inside the Bounder.

“Bye!” Kellian called.

We had to climb another half mile before you get to Tonopah, where you come to a stop-sign and Highway 95. The map said to turn left into the town of Tonopah.

Almost immediately you’re in a mining town, reminding me of Bisbee, the streets twisting and turning to the contours of the steep hills, the houses hanging precariously off the sides.

Robin’s rebuke that I didn’t know the absolute location of the Park weighed heavily on my mind a I cruised into town. Indeed, the park is not marked out on the topography map, and I found no maps on the ‘Net that gave me its location. On the web-site, however, the park, which doesn’t even give an address except for a P.O. Box, gives no directions to it. It lists its many mines, though, and one of them, the Desert Queen Mine, is at the end of a road on the topo map. I figured if I worked toward the Desert Queen, I’d find the park. This was, of course, pretty flimsy, if you think about it, but about a third of a mile on 95, past an impressive rock and brick building that looked like a courthouse, there appeared a sign. Small though it was, its arrow pointed up the street I had intended to hit, that I now learned the name of, McCulloch Avenue, and read ‘Tonopah Mine Museum & Park’.

We headed up the road. At one point there was a rustic two-story structure on the left with expansive parking out front, with a sign by the road that read ‘This is not the Museum.” We kept going, and finally reached a tall chain link fence with its gate open. The entrance looked like a modern mining operation.

This placed the mining park roughly a mile away from Joyland by road. Since we had made two right-hand turns to get here, that meant that Joyland was on the other side of the steep mountain to the east of us.

Inside the gate, besides tons of old mining gear on display, was a mock-up of a steam locomotive made from what looked like an old flatbed truck, and a building. I would think later that the old truck would have been more interesting than some half-assed attempt to make a steam engine. The building looked old, yet the entrance itself was gleaming glass and modern. The boys unbuckled without being told. Alex worked his door.

“Stop!” I demanded. I looked each one in the eye. “Your mother and sister are not here because you’ve cried, screamed and whined every inch of the way through the last eight days. You will not scream, cry or whine in that building or in this park. The moment you do, we go back to the RV, and from what I could see, there’s nothing to do there but sit around.”

They both nodded, but you know they were dismissing me in the same act.

From the parking lot, through a chain link fence, you could see the park and Tonopah below. There were intriguing structures down there, upturned earth and mounds of finings. I didn’t dwell too long on the view, figuring that we had about an hour to hunt around the park.

We got inside the air-conditioned museum. The first section is the gift shop. The structure itself, as it turns out, was the offices for the silver and lead mines that operated here up into the 1980’s.

In one corner, a glassed-in room filled a quarter of the space. There was a window at one end with a thin counter. Two women were at the window, a lean gentleman inside the glassed room attending to them. They had several T-shirts that they were discussing with the man inside the booth. It was animated, friendly, urgent. Getting in line did not look promising. There was no one else there.

I found myself slapping Nick and Alex’s hands as they proceeded to touch everything we came to. The section we were in were the usual stuffed animals and what I call ‘token toys’, the toys they put out there so the parents can sate the pressing need of American children to consume. We wondered around for five minutes, but still the transaction with the T-shirt had not been consummated. I looked down at one end of the structure, where there was another room that appeared to be devoid of shelves with items for sale.

“Let’s go there,” I urged.

“Dad, that looks like the museum. Shouldn’t we pay first?” Alex said. I looked back at the two women as they continued their pleasant conversation that consumed the counterman’s attention, then back at my son.

“Maybe if we go in, he’ll come chasing after us demanding payment, and we will.”

I held up our free tickets.

The room we entered was bare of any up-grades. The floor, once painted a pale industrial green to match the walls, was mostly bare wood, scuffed and worn and withered. The walls, while modern material, were scratched and beaten, the windows relatively high like you’d expect in a machine shop or garage. There were rusty metal buckets full of equally rusty spikes and cast iron tools and parts, some bent with exertion. In contrast, there were several kiosks with displays with pictures and text on clean white boards behind equally sparkling Plexiglas. I would have liked to have read the text and studied the photos, but my time was engaged with constantly slapping Nick’s hands away from all the large heavy tools in the buckets., ‘no, don’t, stop it, would you stop it?” being the primary conversation between myself and both my sons.

“Dad, it’s a tactile thing,” Alex argued. “We want to touch it, heft it, feel it in our hands, smell it, taste it, not just see it.”

I mean, how many kids argue with their dad over the unwise idea of picking up big heavy pieces of metal with non-childproof edges that you know darn good and well they’re going to drop on their foot and get me in trouble with their mother. More trouble than usual.

“I’ll give you a tactile taste of my boot if you like,” I countered. Both boys twittered with laughter. I get the same response when I bellow, “Don’t make me beat you any more than I wanna. Makes me grumpy.”

Exasperated, I herded my offspring through another door, through a room with a television and DVD set up at one end with several rows of old theater chairs in front of it, and back into the gift shop, now practically at the elbows of the two women still discussing the T-shirts and how they related to the cosmos and old mining camps. For a few minutes my children and I studied the shelves at this end of the shop. Here were the local crafts, made by some native artist or photographer. Much of it was really unique, things I’d never seen anywhere else. There were postcards, charcoal drawings of the structures we had been looking down on from the parking lots, sure enough, the T-shirts with more equally skilled drawings silk screened onto good thick shirts with solid stitching, samples of ore hung in clear liquid in small glass vials. There were VHS tapes and DVDs, their jewel cases with sharp colorful photographs that I would’ve loved to have checked out more thoroughly, but now I was batting my sons’ hands away from the T-shirts, the ore vials and the postcards. Robin had directed Alex to pick up about ten post cards, and Alex was enchanted by the delicate drawings.

“They make me feel lonely,” he intoned. Before I had gotten to him, he’d picked up about eight.

“Alex, buy them after we get back from the park.”

“Why?” he protested. “Why not buy them now?”

“Because we’re going to be traipsing around in the heat, sweating,” I started exasperated. “You will be carrying them around in a bag that you’ll wad up into a ball if you don’t just hand them off to me, so that I’ll be carrying them around sweating all over them, handling them with my greasy hands.”

He wanted to argue this point. Alex and I love to argue. We argue politics, science, the art of war, the nature of Mankind. I suppose we should have joined the esoteric debate on the nature of tourist T-shirts with the women at the counter. I pulled out my cell phone and checked the time. We’d been there for twenty minutes. We were running out of time to check out the Mine Park.

I suddenly found myself shoving past the two ladies.

“Hi there,” I said in as enthusiastic and friendly a voice as I could muster as I stretched my arm its full length to hand the man in the booth the three tickets we’d scored at Joyland.

You don’t know how difficult it is for me to do things like that. I’ve spent a lot of time learning to be patient, to not rush things, to wait. It’s Taoist to me, to ‘learn to discern the substantial from the insubstantial’, to quiet the internal conversation and find peace within. The only thing that seems to jam me out of such a thing is raked-over emotion.

The two women and the scholarly-looking man leaned away from me like I’d pulled a gun, but the startled man saw the tickets and recognized them immediately.

“Oh, yes! Thank you. Yes! Oh! Where did you get them? We like to know who’s promoting the Park. Joyland! Yes.”

Now the man’s attention completely shifted to me, even as I lunged at Nick, who stood on his tiptoes to attempt to tilt a perfectly beautiful, surely handmade, miniature of a mining shack, with pine trees and landscaping, off the top shelf.

“Yes, do please watch the little movie we have. It tells you all about the park –“ I physically pulled the postcards from Alex and set them down as a unit at an angle on the shelf so that when we came back he would find them. “Then you must remember, you’re at sixty-two hundred feet here. It catches people off-guard sometimes. Take it easy out there.” I grabbed Nick by the wrist. Those miniatures on the top shelf had his attention. There were several different-sized replicas of the shaft hoists and hoist houses, the intricacy of the miniatures lost on me as I dragged my young son toward the rear.

“And don’t forget the heat. It may be a dry heat, but it sucks the moisture right out of you. You have water? Good. Drink it before you’re thirsty. “

Back in the room with the television. There was a curiously designed soda machine.

“Can we have a soda?” Alex asked.

“’Yoda!” Nick barked.

“No,” I sighed as the movie started. This neurotic need to buy, to consume, its maddening. We hadn’t even gotten into the park yet. How thoroughly the children have been programmed. All I can think of THX1138: “Produce! Consume! And, be happy!”

But wait a minute. They were fifty cents, down-right cheap. If Robin were here she would simply not allow it, but perhaps I could mollify the boys and get something out of this. Besides, they had Squirt. I’d like a Squirt. I can’t say I’ve seen Squirt anywhere lately. I wrestled in my pocket even as I watched the movie. The boys danced with delight. Purchase, consumer, joy!

We had at least a case and a half of Diet Dr. Pepper in the RV. Robin has stopped drinking soda, but at work I drink soda instead of coffee. With the family, though, if I have one, the kids want their own, and then it seems, they get so wired out of their minds, we’re prying them off the roof, fingernail marks scouring up the walls. Robin condemns the caffeine as the culprit, but why doesn’t it work like Ritalin, the drug they prescribe for hyper-active kids? It’s a stimulant that none-the-less turns kids into compliant little zombies, quietly sitting in class, waiting for the bell to ring. No such luck with soda. In any case, I can’t drink one of my Diet Dr. Peppers without getting a withering look or a snide remark from Robin.

I can’t quite remember what made it so odd, but the soda machine was squat, and you opened a door to get to your purchase. I’d never seen anything like it, but it reminded me of the old Coke machines. I remember the one at Buckman Springs on Olde Hiway 80 headed for Boulevard before I-8 reached there. You’d drop your dime in the slot, open the long thin gate-like door, the inside always smelling musty cold, and you’d pull on your selection, a ten-ounce bottle. There was a forked prong holding the bottle in place, and as you pulled, the fork would fold out, mechanically dropping the coin into the coin box. The fork would slap back into place as the next bottle rolled down into the crook of the prong, re-locking the mechanism until another coin was dropped into the slot.

Buckman Springs, the town, is gone now. There’s an ugly story to that. I’ll share it someday when I know all the details. A lot of history meticulously bulldozed and hauled away. I’m surprised they didn’t salt the earth it had stood upon.

But of course, the boys had to argue and fuss over their selection, deciding on a pink lemonade and Squirt like I intended. I dropped the coins in, allowed them to work the cans out of the door, then pulled out my own even as I continued to watch the video.

I am tempted to try to remember the details of the video. Well produced with a professional voice-over, with fascinating mining history, I suspect my prime suggestion is, if you’re a desert rat, swing by this park, watch the video for yourself, because just about this time, still staring at the screen of old black-and-white photos of the Founding Fathers of Tonopah, especially Jim Bailey, I was distracted by the inexplicable lightness of my can. I looked down at my Squirt, only to find that the bottom of it had blown off, its form held in place by the remaining, absolutely frozen, contents.

I begged the boys to be good, as I intended to find the scholarly gentleman, when he entered the room.

“Hello! What seems to be the – Oh, Oh dear.” He stared at the can I held up, upside-down to keep the frozen content, already beginning to melt, from dropping on the floor. “Not again,” he added under his breath as he approached the machine. He sighed.

“And you put fifty cents in? -- Yes, of course you did. Would you then like another?”

“Aren’t they all frozen?” I countered.

No!” He said this with a bit of indignation. “No. Only the second can of Squirt in the row Your son has the first Squirt --- you know, I’ve told him he has to adjust it. People like their sodas cold, but this is ridiculous. I’ll – I’ll go get some change.”

Nicholas had become fascinated with the old theatre seats, how they folded up and down, and now he was working the one he sat in like a jazzercizer. Alex was attempting to parent his little brother with sharp rebukes. I wondered if I sounded that lame.

“Stop yelling at your little brother,” I told Alex.

“But he won’t sit still!”

“Yelling at him helps? For pity’s sakes, guys, we’re in a public place. Its kids like you that gives modern parents a bad name.”

“I’m not the one –“ Alex started working into a hissy-fit, but stopped as the lean scholarly gentleman returned. He worked the machine, and out came an extremely cold Squirt that was just short of frozen. It was good.

Though the video wasn’t over, I slammed my soda and I herded my sons out into the dead dry heat of Tonopah’s Historic Mining Park.

One structure off to the south had caught all of our attention, and we headed that way.

I couldn’t help but note that, though the buildings and displays all bore the well worn look of rust and decay, the signs looked new and well thought out, the neatly marked trails wide and clean.

This southern corner of the park is the Silver Top Mine and hoist house, as well as the ‘Grizzly’, where men sorted high grade ore from the low grade ore. Low grade ore was set aside for those times the price of silver went high enough to justify the extra effort to extract the silver, the high grade ore going out to the mill immediately. The term ‘in a state of arrested decay’ seems to suggest a whole lot more decay than the Silver Top Mine seemed to be in, in my opinion. It all looked like, with a little grease and effort, you could get it back on-line in a couple of days. This was all built in something like 1902 and 1905, and this particular mine operated up until 1948, in which case, I’m all that more surprised it wasn’t torn down and the wood and equipment sent off to another mine.

“This is cool!’ Alex proclaimed.

“Your mother would have loved this,” I zinged, and went one. “Y’know, we’ll be out there looking at old sites in the desert, you see this, and you realize what a lot of the debris we come across was.”

We charged back out the hoist house, past the tall head frame, back down the trail, headed north now, toward some other buildings and another hoist. We descended some, coming to a metal thing that had a placard declaring it the ‘stope bridge’.

I have no idea what a stope is, but standing on this metal bridge with wire sides to keep people from crawling out and off the bridge, you can look down hundreds of feet into a man-made fissure in the earth. There were wooden bridges criss-crossing the cleft, ladders leading from one level of the mine below us to the next, shovels and wheel barrows and tools, hard hats, all dusty and rusty, leading down into an absolute abyss. I could have stood there the rest of the trip, trying to sort out the jumble of planks and debris below me, but the sons were complaining about the heat.

Down a steep trail, we reached the Burro Tunnel ‘Underground Adventure’.

This is the only tunnel in the park you can actually enter, the ‘park’s centerpiece project’. Completed in 2003, it’s something of a disappointed for all the hype. It’s maybe fifteen, twenty feet long, never needing any artificial light, since it’s not long enough for there not to be plenty of sunshine pouring into it from both ends. The terminus, however, is a steel viewing cage, hanging over the stope crevice again, but because you’re actually down into it, you can see a whole lot more since the sunlight is reduced. I noted the numerous railroad ties propped up against the opposing walls, making a patchwork of discordant bracing above and below the cage. I thought maybe the park had been obliged to keep the sides of this fracture from collapsing, but as it turns out, these braces date back to when the miners worked this strike, indeed bracing up the sides to keep it from coming down on them. According to the brochure, from here you’re looking down into a five hundred foot mine.

As we came up out of the steep climb, back again across the steel bridge, Nick started complaining about the heat, and being tired. He wanted to go home.

“I can assure you, Nick-o-mon, that we’re not going home until I’ve seen everything I want to see,” I started. “I haven’t driven seventeen hundred miles not to. You’ve run off your mother, so I don’t have her company to share this with. So, you will drink water and shut up.” I pointed to the next structure, which looked newer than the one we’d just left. “You may sit in the shade of that building until I’ve sated my curiosity.”

There was only one other person on the grounds, as far as I could tell. A lone man, maybe fifty years old. I saw him from a distance earlier when we’d first left the visitor’s center already down at the newer-looking building. He was only leaving the one building headed for some other buildings as I sat Nick down in the shade and made sure he drank water.

I may have to go back and write in something I recall now that seems to have been a theme I noted: men all alone.

The first one that stood out had been a relatively young man on the Highline train. Nick had fallen asleep on my lap, and I’d noticed at that point this well-dressed young man, fashionable hiking boots, expensive Indiana Jones hat. He wouldn’t have struck me, I don’t think, if I hadn’t gotten the feeling he was consciously trying to ignore my family and I, self-conscious of me glancing at him, perhaps even striking a pose of studious contemplation of the landscape we rode through. I had seen another Lone Man at the Ward campsite, besides the ranger, and now this man, who looked at us, smiled tolerantly, perhaps even studied our little family unit longingly, but then pointedly put distance between us and him.

We got into the Mizpah Mine Hoist House, and Nick forgot he was tired. This is a very extensive display of the original hoist equipment used to lower men and equipment in and ore out of the vertical mine shaft, one of the earliest steel head frames in existence. Get to the head frame, look down the grate through to the restored mine collar, down the throat of the lighted shaft, six hundred feet’s worth. We made it to the Hesier Mineral Exhibit Hall. Robin would have loved this. There’s a black light exhibit for all the minerals that do wild things in the dark, and a turn-of-the-century mining office, which had the eerie feeling of not being a display at all. Alex and I found ourselves rummaging through drawers with invoices from sixty years ago. Odd equipment for ciphering, the open safe, the sliding doors to a bin that held platte maps. I kept thinking it felt like we’d stumbled into some old forgotten mine site. Here, you are actually encouraged to heft the displays, to ‘get a feel’ for the mining tools that lay about.

Nick and Alex both started complaining, the oppressive heat, the long up-and-down trails. We exited the Hall, went across to the framing house, where wood was cut and shaped to the needs of the mines. I looked north and east. There was a lot more to this place, what appeared to be extensive concrete foundations to the north, another hoist house and head frame up the hill to the east that I knew was the Desert Queen Mine, but I wasn’t going to get to see it. It was already coming up on five, when the park was supposed to close, and the boys were getting miserable. In this heat, I could not carry them.

On the way back, we passed the last piece of the Tonapah and Goldfield narrow gauge railroad, a trestle, an old coal house, what’s called the Glory Hole, a cave-in of part of the Mizpah Mine back in 1922. It’s a huge pit, but I really didn’t get a chance to look at it, the boys were ready to get back to the RV.

We ended up spending quite a bit of time inside the gift shop again. The scholarly gentleman struck up a conversation and didn’t seem to have any interest in closing up. We probably left around 5:30. I really would like to go back to the park sometime, maybe when the kids are a little older, when its quite a bit cooler. There’s a cabin out there called the Barbara Graham House. The notorious ‘Butcher of Burbank’ lived here before going off to California and becoming the last woman to be executed in that state. There’s supposed to be an Oscar winning movie about her, but I ran Barbara Graham and ‘Butcher of Burbank’, and got nothing worth mentioning here. I haven’t checked the Oscar-winning movies of 1958, I guess that’s next. I’ve never heard of her.

Back at Joyland, three more rigs had pulled in. Once again, our Bounder was the oldest and certainly the most beat up. The brand-new rig parked across from us had two slides. There was an older man out in front with his toad, washing it. I don’t mean just scraping off the locust, he was scrubbing and waxing it out in the sun.

Robin had the fold-out chairs in the shade of the Bounder, a glass of wine in hand.

“Any good?” she asked cryptically.

“Worth the price of admission,” I countered.

“And me and Kel missed out on it.”

Bitterness shaded her words.

“You can hit it the first thing tomorrow morning. It opens at nine.”

Robin snorted derision, then after a sip of wine, “Maybe. Did Alex get postcards?”

The Eldest heard this, leapt up with anticipation as he retrieved his purchases from the Bronco. He handed her the postcard/ drawings. She shuffled through them with growing consternation.

“What the hell are these?”

“W—postcards,” Alex answered. “See? They look hand –“

“I said postcards! Y’know? The things you put in the mail? You let him buy this?” She turned on me.

“Yes,” I said instantly.

“They were only fifty cents apiece,” Alex said.

“You paid five bucks for this? Crap.”

She threw the postcards down on the little end table and went and refilled her wine.

I sat for a while and re-hydrated. I had drunk the last of my St. Pauli Girl the night before, so all I had was Bud Light. In this heat, that just didn’t sound all that appealing, not yet at least. I sat and watched the man wash his car. He was meticulous.

Nick pulled out his Little Green Men and was making war on the ground. The dogs had found a wet spot in some brush at the far corner of our campsite and were digging. I sighed, hoping they didn’t damage any plants, knowing I’d be filling in the hole tomorrow that they were working so industriously to create today. Kellian had taken it upon herself to survey the other RVs and determine if there were any friends to be made.

There was no playground. The dog-run wrapped around one corner of the laundry room, and there was a faux wishing well in front of the entrance to the fenced-in run that someone had backed into.

Robin made dinner as the air became oppressively heavy. Out to the east, we could see huge thunderheads moving south. I can’t remember what we ate. I should stress that Robin is an exceptional cook. Even her plain lettuce salads are memorable. I had a beer with the meal. Normally, once I’ve popped the can or the bottle, I’m in for the night, but for some reason, I decided I needed to scope out the gas stations in town for the best price. If it seems I’m having more and more gaps in my motivations, less details to conversations, I’ve noticed it, too. Perhaps if I had written it down quicker, or while I was there, it would have helped, but there’s just another reason to score a lap-top.

I went south on 95 for a short distance, no more than a mile. There was really only one station that way, on the crest of a rise. I went the opposite direction, into Tonopah.

The town of Tonopah is a curious, even fascinating mixture of ghost town and would-be boom town. Most of the two and three story buildings in the downtown section house businesses that look more like excuses rather than actual engines of industry. Many buildings are vacant, but in their gaping empty windows, there’s well-kept displays of pictures and text, I assume, of the buildings history. I didn’t stop to look, like I should have. My mission was to find the best price in town. Tucked in between the historic buildings are modern businesses, gas stations, quicky-marts, several motel and hotel chains, decked out in their modern styles, but somehow absorbed by the ghosts of Tonopah. I liked downtown Tonopah. I even like writing the name: To-No-Pah.

At the end of town, a sign pointed up a dirt road. I have to check the prices at the time, but the price this banner touted was ten cents cheaper than anywhere else in town. My heart leapt with joy. Cheap gas. God is Great.

I turned up the road, climbed a hill, maneuvered through a dusty set of buildings and residences, definitely not the wealthy part of town, around a bend. I had begun to wonder if the Bounder could make it up the hill, when I came on a low long building with a flat roof and lots of glass that you couldn’t see through, not your usual gas station, looking more like a commercial business. Behind a chain link fence were four or even five islands of pumps. The sign outside the fence read: “Cash Only. No Checks or Credit Cards. Open 9 to 5. Closed Saturday and Sunday.”

I blinked at the sign. Well, tomorrow was Sunday, it was after five, making the need for cold hard cash a mute point. I sighed and turned away from the station, not even bothering to see if the road I was on went out another, better way, to the highway. How does a gas station this far off the road stay in business with such lousy hours?

It dawned on me, this was where all the locals got their fuel. The stations out on the road were for the tourists, who were constrained by time and methods of payment. I kind’a like that.

Driving back through town, I noted one of the chain motels. It had a wooden gazebo set on a dark green very well manicured lawn. Behind the lawn was a fairly large parking lot, and in that parking lot were rows and rows of RVs, so tightly packed together you wondered how they got their doors open. Rigs with sliders surely couldn’t deploy them. Their view from their rigs was either Highway 95 or the wall of motel rooms and balconies behind them. An elegantly dressed man, broad shoulders, gray hair at the temples, was squeezing through between two RVs, climbing the steps of a late model diesel pusher, one of those three hundred, four hundred thousand dollar models. For only a moment, a fraction of a second, we made eye contact, yet I read in his face discomfort, disgust, maybe even embarrassment.

This was one of the other RV parks that I had checked out, and had been warned away from by the lady from the Chamber of Commerce. It takes a lot to make Joyland look good. This was it.

I got back to the Bounder. The dogs were tied up outside, and they wagged their tails with vigorous almost desperate enthusiasm. Other than that, the campsite was deserted.

I looked around. I saw no one in the parking area. Far in the distance, I thought I heard thunder. Except for a small amount of noise from the highway, it was amazingly quiet.

I had no idea where my wife and children were. It crossed my mind, I could grab my chair, sit there with the dogs, watch the sky color and darken to the east through the chain link fence. For a moment, I waited, frozen there on the steps of the Bounder. I imagined the conversation I might have with the Nye County Deputy Sheriff.

“So, Mister Taylor, y’say y’went out last night around six t’find the best gas price in town, y’come back and y’er family’s gone, and y’don’t git around t’callin’ us until this mornin’?”

“Well, we weren’t leaving until this morning.”

“Uh-huh. You don’t find anything odd about this situation, then.”

“Well, odd, yes, but in a nice way.”

Then I heard Nick wailing in the far distance.

I turned to see my eldest trotting toward me, fists to his chest, struggling to manage the speed he wished to attain.

“Mom needs eggs!” he croaked at me.

I sighed.

“Where is your mother?”

“Over in Alex’s RV.”

He pointed across to the new rig with the well-washed toad.

I followed Alex into the Bounder. He grabbed eggs, I grabbed a bottle of chilled water. He attempted to explain to me why mother needed eggs, but Alex has a terrible time with telling a cohesive story. The chronology of events are lost, his ability to prioritize facts completely skewered, ultimately wandering off into minutiae. I followed him back to the newer rig.

There was a raucous party just inside the RV.

The twins sat at an opulent-sized dining table playing cards with a pasty-faced kid I would’ve guessed around twelve or thirteen. It was a loud garrulous game, and Alex, once he’d handed over the eggs, rushed to join in. Robin was fussing at the kitchenette island that overlooked the entrance. A man in his sixties stood at her shoulder, watching her as she whipped a can of tuna fish, dried mustard, mayonnaise and raw eggs together.

“David, this is Alex, and that there with the twins, that’s Alex too,” Robin bubbled with a barmaid’s husky voice.

“Alex’s everywhere!” my Alex barked too loudly.

Robin looked back at the older Alex, and pointed at me. “That’s David, m’husband.”

Robin was three sheets to the wind. For a moment I marveled at the suddenness of her intoxication, but after a moment’s calculation, figuring she’d started probably shortly after we’d gone to the mining park, figuring she really dug in after we got back, that gave her an hours worth of foundation drinking, with two hours of hard drinking. I shook the old man’s hand, twisted the top off the water bottle I carried, then pointedly handed it to Robin. After a moment she took it, and I think she knew what I was telling her, although she shook it off just as quickly.

Alex, the grandfatherly looking man, smiled with pleasantly bemused satisfaction as he and Robin discussed the nature and character of tuna fish and subsequent sandwiches.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a can of tuna fish get stretched so far,” Grandpa Alex chortled.

“Not just stretched,” Robin lectured with a burly declaration. “Tasty.”

Robin clapped her hands as she glanced back over his shoulder at the children at the table.

“Time t’let these people eat, guys.”

Nick and Kel protested, my Alex, and the pasty-faced Alex, made counter offers.

“Can Alex come over after they eat?”

“If it’s all right with his grandfather,” Robin counter-offered. Both Alex’s looked to the older gentleman. There was a certain irritation in his countenance, even as he nodded ascent.

I stood at the bottom of the stairs and made sure Robin navigated them without mishap or loss of dignity, then escorted my horde over to the Bounder.

Comparing the two C class RVs was probably not a wise thing to do, but I did. Judged against almost anything out there, our rig is a shabby, beaten-up rag of machine. The paint is faded, the front bumper rusty, the rear bumper bent all to hell, and there’s that tear at the back of the Bounder passenger side, where the fiberglass got crushed, that one storage door that hasn’t opened since before we bought it. The compartment goes all the way to a door on the driver’s side, so I’ve never felt an overwhelming need to fix it. Still, it looks like crap. The coloration where the canopy used to be stands out. I popped my second beer of the evening fantasizing the different options that exist. Thing is, you go to the Anza-Borrego desert in the Bounder, and you find yourself surrounded by other equally seasoned RVs. Its just other people, like us, going out to enjoy the desert, or, during the summer, going to the mountains. In Fish Creek, along S-2, there’s as many old rigs as there are new, and there is no social shame to it, but you travel cross-country, and suddenly you find yourself dealing with another class of people. Rich People, who’ve done things right in their lives and are out there now reaping the rewards, cruising around in RVs worth what our house on an acre of land in Southern California is worth.


When going cross-country, you must deal with the sheer stress of status. And there is a tension to status. I hope the kids don’t care, hope they don’t look back on these vacations like they were waifs out there with their hippy parents in a beat-up old school bus, ‘doin’ their own thing’, rebelling against American Imperialist Wealth. I want to be wealthy, I admire the wealthy, the vast majority of the wealthy I know having worked their asses off for it, taken the risks, made the sacrifices, which apparently I have not been willing to do. I can argue the only debt we have is that house, that we have no credit card debt, no car payments, but guess what? That’s what we can afford. There’s plenty of car salesmen out there ready and willing to assure me that with our incredibly fantastic credit rating we could buy just about anything on the lot, but I know there’s a big difference between purchasing a car, and then paying for it for the next three to five years. I know how much money comes in and I know what goes out. Three college tuition payments loom in our immediate future, there’s cars and insurance for three teenagers as well, and I turn sixty-five the same year the twins turn twenty-one. And they still keep telling me my job is going away sooner rather than later.

None-the-less, I found myself once again mulling the powertrains the newer RVs come mounted on. Almost all the old rigs are on the Chevy P-30 frames, while the newer units are either on the Ford V-10 frame or the GMC Workhorse frame. Chevy seems to be favored again over the Ford, but either one is far superior to the P-30 truck frame

Considering I had not been a big champion of buying an RV in the first place, this is quite telling. Priorities will out, though. And the less money you earn, the more hard and fast and merciless those priorities become.

“Alex seems like a nice boy,” Robin said as we arranged our chairs outside the baking RV. (We could have turned the air conditioning on, since we were connected to shore power, but it wouldn’t dawn on us until after the sun had set.)

“Except for his funky hair-do.” I ran my finger across my head, following the pasty-faced kid’s part from ear to ear. “What is he, some kind of punk rocker?”

“That’s from the surgery,” my Alex volunteered.

“Brain tumor,” Robin clarified.

“Oh.”

I wanted to know more, but no one volunteered anything, and now I was too embarrassed to press.

“He’s in all sort of trouble, though,” Robin continued. “Pissed off Granddad good.”

“Over what?” I asked.

Everyone shrugged their shoulders.

The Alex’s ate pretty quickly. The grandson Alex trotted over to our camp, Grandfather followed in his wake.

“Y’know, my wife’s cooking is good,” he called to me, even before he’d reached our camp, walking toward it, “but that has got to be the best tuna fish salad I’ve ever had, and there’s plenty left. I can see us living on that for a while.”

“How’d Robin inflict herself upon you?” I asked.

“Don’t say it like that,” he chided. A tall lean man, dressed in slacks and shirt, spotless. “I came over, wondering if she might have a can opener. All that rig over there, and no can opener.”

I laughed easily as he continued.

“I tell your lovely wife, I really didn’t know what I was gonna do with the tuna, next thing I know, she’s making us a real meal. I tell ya’, we haven’t really eaten a decent meal in that rig since we left.”

For the life of me, I can’t recall where they were coming from, or how long they’d been on the road. It seemed it had been a relatively short time, like a week.

“Joining us?” I asked, motioning toward the picnic table.

“Not right now,” Grand Dad begged off. “Gonna watch the weather channel. Find out what we’ve got in store tomorrow.”

I nodded and looked north over the house where the little old lady lived. “Monsoon season in the Mojave.”

Grand Dad parted, the older Alex and his grandson pointedly ignoring each other. It must have been a great transgression, I thought, to stayed angry with a kid that’s gone through what this young Alex has suffered.

Once again, I find myself not too sharp on the details here. The kids settled into playing Pick-Up-Stix, something else Alex had picked up at the gift shop at the mining park, but I was also pressed into hauling out the fire kettle and setting it up, with the intent that we were going to roast marshmallows. I went to the house where the little old lady was to make sure it was okay to have an open fire, and though she was at first confused about what I was suggesting, once she understood, she thought it was a grand idea. I invited her to join us. She declined.

“My legs are all swole up,” she contended. “Can’t walk around on a night like this.”

It still wasn’t really dark. I got the fire going, and that’s when we realized we didn’t have any marshmallows.

“Go get some,” Robin commanded.

“I’ve had three beers now,” I countered.

“Ple-ea-ea-se.”

This was from Our Guest Alex. I looked into his pallid face, his sutured scalp showing through his short blond hair, running ear to ear. I sighed and grabbed a water.

I loathe driving when I’m feeling the effects of my pint of bitters, but I drank my water, got into the Bronco, and drove over the hill and turned left, where I had seen what I think was an Albertsons. In any case, it was a large super market grocery store.

Modern, clean, all glass and steel façade, the cookie cutter precision of corporate America has its stamp here on the edges of Tonopah. I went inside, found the marshmallows, contemplated the incredible variety, size, color, shapes, then picked the white cylindrical ones. Walking back towards the counter, I passed the coffee bean section.

I stopped and smiled. Had I not completely forgotten the need for coffee beans? There was a grinder right there as well, but for some reason that did not suit my esthetics. They didn’t have the particular brand of beans Robin buys at Costco, but there was a half-pound bag of generic coffee beans. Would Robin be able to taste the difference? Did I have a choice? I grabbed the bag, and bought my booty. When I made it out to the Bronco in the parking lot, I extracted the bag of coffee beans from the shopping bag, and hid it behind the spare tire in the back.

Night finally had fallen. Ripples of lightning filled the northern sky. Thunder rolled in the distance.

The Guest Alex took command of the marshmallows, fussing over the twins’ wires so they could get the white puffs of sugar blues over the flames. Our guest seemed to know all the traditional aspects of camping, the games, the stories to be told, the proper methods of toasting marshmallows. My Nick has his own style. He first mounts one marshmallow on his wire and sets it out over the flames, working it through and down into the hot licking tongues until the poor tortured thing finally catches fire, then my youngest son manages to scrape the crisping glop from his wire, mounts two new marshmallows, pops a raw marshmallow in his mouth, and proceeds to incinerate the next skewered confections until it’s time to scrape them off as well. Robin and I agree, this is far superior to them actually eating the damn things.

The Guest Alex, however, was generating a creamy brown product, crispy on the outside, warmed, not scorched, sticky goo on the inside. He fed them to the twins, while they focused on filling the fire kettle with charred sugar.

My Alex brought out his lamp, bragged on its price and many features, and the two Alex’s sat and played card games as the marshmallow sacrifice continued at the hands of the twins.

And all this time, we watched the light show to the east and north. Big gorgeous belts of ragged lightening, shooting across the sky or dancing on distant ground. I look at the map now, and I can see we were looking out across Ralston Valley to mountains on the other side, seventeen miles away.

Grand Dad Alex came over. Young Guest Alex scooped up the cards.

“Let’s take it inside.”

“Hey, turn on the air conditioner,” Robin said. “Blow th’hot air out’a there. Wait, I’ll go with you, play a couple hands.”

“Can I get you a beer?” I offered to our new guest as we settled at the vacated picnic table.

“No, I gave up that sort’a thing years ago.”

I had been heading in for another beer for myself, but instead grabbed a water. It seemed the prudent thing.

“Where ya’ headed?” I asked softly.

“Oh, figured we go south.”

I think back on this conversation, and I chastise myself. I did not practice my writer’s prerogative. You’ve got a kid who has recently had brain surgery, traveling with his grandfather, thousands of miles from home, from mom and dad, the granddad’s wife. What’s the story? Had young Alex requested a trip to get away from the pain and suffering he must have endured, maybe still suffered? How could the Grand Dad be angry with his suffering grandson, knowing what the kid had been through? I did actually ask what young Alex had done.

“He –“ The Grand Dad paused and screwed his face up, studied me carefully, “He just won’t do like he’s told. Y’know? All he has t’do is just do it.”

“Chores,” I agreed. “Tough to get kids to do their silly minor chores.”

Grand Dad listened to me as I went on, but I could tell I was irritating him, missing the mark, the depth of Young Alex’s faults.

We usually think of someone who’s gone through something like this to be, because of their tribulations and survival, to be better people for it. Is that a false assumption, a stereotype that doesn’t endure scrutiny? Brain tumor survivor or not, was young Alex a rotten human being, testing the patience of his grandfather. For a short time, I did slip into interview mode.

He was machinist, the Elder Alex was. He’d worked for some huge aeronautics firm in Oregon or Washington for years until a lay-off. He’d ended up at some company like Harvester or International, Caterpillar, something like that. Then he’d been painting his house, fell off the ladder.

“That did me good,” he said. “Put me in the hospital.”

“Didn’t get better?”

“Well,” Grand Dad shrugged. “Got on disability and, y’know, why work if you don’t have to?”

I coughed a laugh and nodded, but Grand Dad read me.

“Where you headed?” he asked.

“Tomorrow, Scotty’s Castle,” I started, “then Mummy Mountain. I know nothing about Mummy Mountain, except it’s a National Park. Then down to some property in Arizona we own, hit the Grand Canyon, then cruise down to Cibola National Wildlife Refuge, then home.”

“Listen, you got a – map?” he asked.

“Sure –“ I started, straightened up. “Of what?”

In retrospect, this seems like a really weird conversation. The guy is hundreds, thousands of miles away from home, but he made no preparation for the trip? We pored over several maps. He got excited about Cibola, and we discussed the quickest way to get there. At that point he rose.

“I better get to bed,” he announced. “Long drive tomorrow.”

“Hey, Alex,” I called back into the Bounder. “Grand Dad’s leaving.”

There was no answer, and after a moment’s pause, the older man turned and walked away.

Shortly after that Robin leaned out the door.

“I’m goin ’t’bed.”

I hopped inside. I was still going to have a beer, by God.

“I’ve done more than my fair share,” Robin mumbled as she staggered into the back room. “You handle it.”

Alex and Guest Alex once again exited the Bounder, which was getting cool, despite all the windows being open to the hot night air. The lightening had abated, but far to the east, we still heard the occasional thunder roll. Before they left, they helped change the dining table into the Twin’s bed, and folded out the couch for Alex’s bed.

The two Alex’s sat for a short time outside. They were tired of playing cards, and we just talked.

“Where are you headed?” I asked Guest Alex. He shrugged.

“South, I guess.”

“Just cruising, huh?”

He looked away and did not answer, then looked up.

“You do this a lot, do you? These RV trips of yours?”

I suckled my beer, looking north. The show was long gone. The sky rested upon the distant horizon like a blanket.

“Maybe a serious long one once a year. Two weeks, this’ll be a record. Nine days is the best we’ve ever done before this.”

“You like RVing?”

“Not really,” I answered. I looked over with a smile. I found no distress in his eyes, no confusion at my contrary retort. “I think we like to camp. I know I like to camp, or do most anything, in the desert.”

“Anything in the desert?” he echoed.

I don’t know where my son was. I thought he was sitting there with us at the picnic table, but I don’t remember him participating in this conversation. I was ready for Guest Alex to go home and let us get to bed, but in a garrulous misstep, I started opining.

“Y’know, there’s all sorts of different ways to camp. Some people wouldn’t camp outside of a campground to save their lives, others think a blanket and a couple cans of cold beans is plenty, sleeping in their cars, tens miles off the pavement. Me? I like to do what we call remote camping. You load up the Bronco over there, you get to a spot you can’t get to without four wheel drive, then you pitch a tent or just lay out a mat and throw the sleeping bag down on top.”

I made eye contact with our guest, and I was confounded by the casual comfort he displayed. It was like he’d slipped down under a warm blanket on a cold night, and we were sharing the gift of gab. He was perfectly happy to just let me keep babbling.

“Truth be told,” I continued, “we’re not RVers. We’re desert rats that can’t accommodate our numbers without dragging a damn shack on wheels with us. Set it up as base camp, then go exploring from there.

“Listen, Alex, we gotta go inside. It’s late.”

My son turned off his lantern and led the way. I followed him in, and Alex the Guest came right up behind us, and settled into Robin’s spot, the chair behind the passenger front seat with the little end table. I found myself sitting down on the driver’s seat, wondering what had gone wrong. The guest did not wish to leave.

The twins snored like five-year olds do, gentle breathing through their mouths. Alex flopped onto his bed and pulled a light blanket over himself. Once I turned off the air conditioning, it wouldn’t be needed. I worked on the last of my beer.

“So, how long are you and your grandfather going to be on the road?”

A pained look filled our guest’s face.

“That’s – as yet to be determined.”

And then he looked at me, and there was a depth of sadness in his eyes that no thirteen year old should ever know, and I sensed he wanted to tell me something, something horrible, something that weighed upon his young shoulders. Though his lips stayed closed, there were words on his tongue that he wanted to speak but could not.

You’re going to die, aren’t you, Alex, I wanted to say. The surgery was a failure or a stopgap, and you’d rather die going to see things than staying at home, wasting time getting treatments, buying minutes of boredom on this earth with experiences you might have out here on the road.

Is that it, Brain Tumor Alex? Do you need to tell a stranger of your doom, in hopes my sympathy and fatherly love might ease your burden?

He could not loose his words, and I did not seek them out. What good could my solace do, really? Was I not the ringmaster of this dysfunctional three ring circus, this carney freak show of a family? Who was I to offer anything.

“Listen, Alex, we all have to get to bed.”

“Right,” Guest Alex responded, rose and with ‘good night’ and ‘see you tomorrow’s, we parted.

This next piece happens the next day, but I’ve decided it’s tied too tightly to this part of the story, chronology be damned. We rose, we ate, we unhooked our moorings. Robin decided going to the Mining Park would keep us there too late, but opted that we should drive up and check out the ruins which, if you look at the map, is just on the other side of Mount Odie from the Mining Park. Grand Dad and Grand Son Alex were up and out.

“Where ya’ headed?” Young Alex asked.

“Well, y’see those ruins over there?” I pointed. “We thought we’d investigate them before we pull out.”

“I wanna come,” Young Alex pleaded. For a thirteen year old, he sounded quite sweet, a gentle supplication to participate in an adventure.

A minor complication. We were out of seats. We’d have to work something out, the boys sitting in the far back, not grinding up the hills, maybe walking them. My mind was already calculating all this, but Grand Dad cut in.

“No,” he stated flatly. “After this morning? No.” He gritted his teeth as he glared at the grandson. “Maybe this’ll be a lesson.”

The younger Alex blanched, said nothing, and we left to go exploring.

This is the first time since getting home that I’ve thought about this incident. I remember thinking at the time, how can you deny this dying young man anything, a simple journey, a short distraction. Now, though, having sat and contemplated the words I remember, the looks, the mysteries, I find myself wondering if I had been sublimely blind to something darker than what, at the time, I could imagine. I won’t even write what I’m thinking, not something I intend to post on the ‘Net, but as unwelcome as death is, it is a part of life and nature, something that will visit us all sooner rather than later. In that way, it’s innocent, not evil at all. I fear though, so wrapped up in my little, quite frankly, vile petty wounds, that I did not see a soul worthy of my effort to assist, to delve into the pain, and perhaps have offered a better thing. If I’m wrong, and I pray that I am, then it’s my imagination gone wild on a dark and stormy night, but if my bleak detective’s work has merit, reading into words, deeds, potential lies and the motivations behind them, then God have mercy on my narcissistic soul.

We got hit by some monsoon rain at our property in Wikieup. It was a hundred seven degrees by two in the afternoon. We'd tried to get to the Warm Spring in Burro Creek, but just didn't feel good about the road. Ended up at Kaiser Springs, and the kids had a lot of fun splashing around in the water there. (An awful lot of cattle, with the brand of a diamond, its lower point resting on the left top of a ‘W’. Unlike the brands of another time, these brands are more like the length of the cow’s body, like they’re all walking billboards.) Got back to the RV. Lightening and thunder were flashing and rumbling off to the west and south. Robin wanted to cook steak over an open wood fire, I got the kettle out. The breeze that had been freshening our camp out of the north-east started building, so before I lit off the kindling underneath the avocado wood we use, I put a few things away. The breeze turned to a bluster. Robin got the Twins inside. The canopy cover started bouncing around. It was solidly staked, but the wind was working on tearing it apart. Alex The Eldest and I struggled to get it down. He'd never helped me with it before and it took a while. Now I was running around stuffing chairs and fold-up tables into cubbies or underneath the RV to keep the wind from blowing them away. I looked up and the sky was black and boiling with angry clouds. The smell of wet creosote filled my nostrils. I told Alex to get inside the RV. The lightening was still to the west, but I couldn’t hear the thunder over the bluster from the east. I turned into the wind, holding my hat on even with the chin strap on, and just then the biggest, fattest drops of rain I’d ever seen smacked into me. I thought they were going to knock me off my feet, from the surprise if nothing else. By the time I made it to the steps of the RV, I was soaked. I stepped up into the cabin, looked at my wife, and with water dripping off my sopping hat said, “Darling, I’m afraid I won’t be able to get that fire started anytime soon.”

The dirt road that goes through the eastern corner of our property had been recently graded, and a berm of dirt and rock at the exit drive acted like a dam that let the water build to a few inches deep before collapsing and sending a deluge down underneath the RV. I slipped out and checked the ‘anchors’, the hydraulic legs that level the RV when parked. Damned if the water flashed all around them, tearing up gravel and small stones in a creamy tan torrent, but never disturbing the shanks. It rained off and on for the whole night, but from the beginning of the wind to when I finally settled in to the RV, the temperature dropped from a hundred and seven to seventy-three degrees Fahrenheit, roughly thirty minutes. That was our Fourth of July.