The Drive East. Part 2: Of Saltbush, Merle Haggard, and a River to Nowhere

A river runs from the mountains to the sea. Always to the sea. Ask any grade school kid. So much water has got to go somewhere, doesn't it? It can't simply drop down a hole in the ground and vanish. That's just not natural. Who ever heard of riding down a river to nowhere, one that ends not in the ocean but in waves of sand? And yet, in the high desert of Nevada, there is such a river, trapped between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, its flow with no destination but down into the hardpan and up into the insatiably dry air. The Humboldt.

Hotel Subaru had successfully made the sudden 7,000 foot ascent from the Central Valley of California to the Euer Saddle of the Sierra Nevada. To my great relief, for I figured that if the car were going to blow up, it would be on this stretch, one of the longest and steepest climbs on the interstate highway system of the United States. By comparison, the Rockies and Appalachians would be a cakewalk for its four cylinders.

From this crest, the car descended through Reno, its high-rises floodlit in green, blue and magenta, making the city look like the interior décor of a Titan's gambling parlor. And then onward, for an hour east of Reno, until midnight and the blue-sign proclamation of an approaching rest area called a halt.

The sun rose on an expanse of flat, hard-packed dirt, featureless except for scattered clumps of saltbush, and lines of mountains that looked for all the world like the tips of icebergs sticking out from an ocean of sand. The signs of dryness were everywhere. Not least at the rest stop, where the toilets were long-drop pits and the only water was from an old-fashioned hand-cranked pump. Over which was a sign proclaiming that the water had been trucked in to this place from twenty miles away, please don't waste it. It took quite a bit of pumping to get a dribble to dampen the toothbrush; perhaps it had been awhile between trucks.

Another sign proclaimed this site to be the eastern edge of the Forty Mile Desert, the deadliest stretch of the 19th-century California Trail. The sign proclaimed that travelers usually crossed the desert at night, because of the heat, plus lack of water and shade, during the day. I believed it. As I wandered along the clumps of saltbush at the edge of this desert, in the hope of finding a few cactus plants (there were none), the 7 AM sun was already reflecting uncomfortably off the crack-surfaced soil. And the heat wave had been last week; I would be crossing this terrain during what the weather forecasters confidently proclaimed to be a cool spell, with high temperatures merely in the 90s Fahrenheit.

I retreated into the car, started up the engine and (thankfully) the air conditioning, and headed out onto the highway, a strip of black creasing the saltbush-dotted hardpan. But just a few minutes after starting out, on my right, suddenly, there is the shocking sight of water. A flat sheet of silver spread out on the desert, as incongruous as Robert E. Lee holding an AK-47. The Humboldt Sink – the whimper with which the world of the Humboldt River ends.

The highway follows the course of the river north and east into the heart of Nevada and on towards Utah. Though while the course of the freeway is straight, that of the Humboldt is not. The river bed is windy, playing tag with the road and then dodging away into the far reaches of the valley, only to swing back for another coy glimpse of Hotel Subaru doing 80 on I-80. Rarely is the water visible, for it is concealed by banks carved into the hardpan, perhaps as much as forty or fifty feet high. Some of the banks have no water in them at all – they are dry oxbows of the river. From space, one sees that the Humboldt snakes its way across Nevada, a Mississippi of the high desert. It doesn’t surprise me to learn later that the Humboldt hasn’t always stayed within those high banks, and that in some wet years it has even flooded the Interstate. Sometimes the world does end with a bang.

Only occasionally does a tree mark the course of the Humboldt. Where there are trees, there are usually people, the people carving a life out of the high desert with the Humboldt River as their lifeline. I stop for breakfast in the “city" of Lovelock, a place with no visible means of support for its 2300 or so people. It did not even have a casino, or at least none that I could find. I thought that the operation of a casino was mandatory under Nevada state law, I don’t know how Lovelock gets away with not having one. But it does have a McDonald’s. And a bunch of Chamber of Commerce posters all bearing some execrable pun on Love Lock. Maybe I should have been looking for a bordello. Though that’s hardly the kind of love I’m looking for. Not that there was room in Hotel Subaru for such shenanigans. Or funds.

Back on the highway, the car and its driver fueled and watered, I explore the radio, not so much out of need for distraction as in curiosity as to what folk in this region, between the broadcast envelopes of Reno and Salt Lake City, might have available. Not surprisingly, options are limited. One station held my attention. It was broadcasting a syndicated hour-long retrospective on the music of Merle Haggard, interspersed with its sole advertisement, for a one-night-only appearance of two nationally-known country music acts that Saturday night in the local grange hall.

Haggard’s working-man’s music seemed appropriate for this region, where life was scratched out of the mines and such dirt as could be irrigated from the Humboldt without fatally parching those downstream, where effete academics in aging Subarus would soon be lying with the ox bones along the old California Trail. I listened for as long as the low power of the station would let me, Haggard’s hits taking me back to when a much younger me was playing them at 3 AM on Lewiston, Maine’s one and only country music station. Back to when a much older, but not obviously wiser, me, actually penned a lyric for a country song. One that, so far as I know, has never been performed outside of my own head, unless somebody stole it from a poetry website I posted it on two years ago. It probably does not deserve to be performed. But whatever it may or may not be worth, it’s mine, and it rang in my head as Merle faded away and the only remaining accompaniment was the hum of Hotel Subaru’s four cylinders and air conditioning compressor.

I don’t do love songs

I’m playing standards on a fine weekend,
It’s easy money and a coming trend,
A couple spooning in a corner stall,
Their universe within my little hall.

The waitress comes and whispers in my ear
To tell me of the song that they’d like to hear,
My keyboard freezes and I’m ice inside,
I say I’m sorry but I cannot oblige.

     Please don’t ask me now to play this tune,
     Don’t you know that winter follows June?
     Don’t trust your memories to any song,
     Why should it haunt you when it all goes wrong?
     I don’t do love songs.

I play pretend for all the people out there;
There is no melody without your care!
I don’t do love songs …
     Please don’t ask me now to play this tune,
I don’t do love songs …
     Don’t you know that winter follows June?
I don’t do love songs …
     Don’t trust your memories to any song,
I don’t do love songs …
     Why should it haunt you when it all goes wrong?
     I don’t do love songs…

   - O Ceallaigh

Copyright © 2006 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.

All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

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