George Rebane
We got home yesterday about noon. Leo the cat was released from solitary confinement in the garage 
and spent the first hour following us around registering grievances about being left in long and undeserved incarceration. This is a well-practiced routine perfected over a span of thirteen years. In this post I will conclude the reflections on this 17-day odyssey over the southwest quarter of our magnificent land, pointing out that some parts of it are more magnificent than others. As with previous editions of Road Ruminations, I will undoubtedly lapse into observations and commentary that will outrage and offend the politically sensitive – please be forewarned.
Last Monday (28 April) we drove the stretch of desert along I-10 from Las Cruces to Tucson. The country was unremarkable even though it presented itself in its annual attempt at spring greenery. Tucson puts its city limits signs out about a hundred miles from city center so as to make sure no one messes with the sphere that it intends to influence some day. We ran out of anticipation as we waited for something more prominent than isolated groups of houses to appear over the next rise.
After another episode of financial planning at the gas pump, we were ready to search for Larry and Barbie Wirth’s house located somewhere in the Sonora Desert towards Kitt Peak. Thank the Lord for 
Google Earth, for through that medium we had ‘flown’ over the desert and peeked at their well-kept hideaway from above. Driving out from Tucson in the southwest direction we started noticing Border Patrol activity. Their SUVs began at first appearing in ones and twos along and besides the roads. Then they began appearing in groups parked at every desert road junction. Now we also saw BP vans and buses waiting to transport their nightly cargoes. Most of the BP officers appeared to be Hispanic.
After a very warm welcome from our longtime 
friends – we were neighbors for years in Topanga, and Larry and I are also fraternity brothers overlapping our undergraduate terms at UCLA – we sat down to enjoy some excellent margaritas and discuss what we had seen on the road. It turns out that the high desert valley where our friends live is one of the prime conduits for illegal aliens crossing the border 30 miles to the south. By night they follow the dry wash from the border to Tucson. Those caught by the BP are brought to intersections with waiting buses and vans. They are then taken down to Nogales and turned over to their own authorities who immediately release them for another try as soon as they rest up.
Actually, there are two kinds of illegals – those who want to come here to work and the drug mules. Our friends told us tales, common to all who live in their valley, of illegals knocking on their doors after sunset wanting a drink of water. After getting their thirst slaked, the would-be workers disappear into the night. The mules just hang around waiting for the BP to show up, knowing that the homeowner will call them sooner than later. These mules have already dropped off their drugs and gotten paid for their run; now they want a free ride back to Nogales courtesy of the US taxpayer. This goes on every night, 365 per year.
Barbie is a superb gardener and the ladies spent a lot of time inspecting the horticultural display that surrounds the Wirth house. Larry is, among other things, an amateur astronomer with his private observatory dome adorning the roof of his house. After inspecting the equipment and talking about things cosmological, Larry pointed to the top of the highest mountain some eight miles to the west. It was Kitt Peak with its major telescopes clearly visible at a height of 6,875 feet above sea level. The next day we planned a little expedition to inspect them at closer quarters.
Kitt Peak National Observatory is a mountain top campus of domes and buildings where some of the world’s leading edge astronomy is done. It is “home to the largest collection of astronomical telescopes in the world” comprising of 26 separate instruments that include the 4-meter Mayall telescope and the 2-meter McMath-Pierce solar observatory that has a slant length of over 500 feet, most of it underground. The observatory gives guided tours by trained docents one of whom spent some time with us before his scheduled tour started. We had a great time spending money in the Visitor Center’s gift shop.
Back home Larry, a sometime gourmet chef and former designer/builder of some of the west’s finest restaurant kitchens, prepared a ‘Chinese dinner’ par excellence – we never had it this good during our visit to China. After dinner, as tradition would dictate, the men and women again separated to pursue their own interests. Actually Larry and I were perfectly willing to welcome the ladies into a discussion of some of the finer points of large caliber ‘fleet rifles’ (actually the big guns) employed on the capital ships of the first world war. We can never understand why the distaff component always chooses other diversions when such opportunities are theirs for the taking.
30 April
The next morning (Wednesday) we bid our goodbyes and headed north toward Henderson, Nevada. This took us through some remarkably beautiful high desert country once we were able to successfully bypass the mess called Phoenix. We were on US60 until Wickenburg where we stopped for lunch. Jo Ann did her usual research of the community and we were able to see that a prosperous tourist and commercial center had developed from a former mining town. From there on we were on US90 (‘The Joshua Tree Parkway’) with nary a settlement in sight until Wikiup appeared some seventy miles later.
We never could determine the purpose of Wikiup. Along the road, the community appeared as if two outskirts had been shoved together without bothering to put a town in the middle. Take away a couple of abandoned buildings and a welding shop, and the whole thing could have been renamed Resume Speed, Arizona.
Finally, US93 shared the roadbed with I-40 and we were on familiar territory having driven this stretch a week or so ago from Kingman going the other way. In Kingman we swallowed hard again at a local gas station and filled her up. We had a chance to talk with some of the local gentry in the convenience store to kind of get the mood of the place. Then back on US93 that turned into a very long and straight stretch of high desert highway until it finally dove down the scenic canyons that promised the resumption of the Colorado River as it issued through the Hoover Dam from Lake Mead.
Before gaining the dam proper, we were stopped at a checkpoint to assure the authorities that we had neither sinister motives nor the means to carry them out. Nothing you can hide a big bomb in is allowed to cross on the dam itself. All we were transporting was some leftover gut-rumbling bean dip, and since chemical warfare was not on their ‘no-no’ list, we were waved through. The dam itself is a spectacular site as is the low water level (about 60ft below normal) in Lake Mead. Equally spectacular is the new bridge being built across the gorge below the dam that is significantly higher than the dam itself. This will protect the dam and provide fast access to the gambling tables and gamboling pleasures of Nevada to the impatient folks from the east.
After checking in at the local Marriott Suites in Henderson, we were on our way to dinner with Wayne, a longtime friend and colleague from California, who now makes that tax-friendly state his home. Everywhere the eye landed were new buildings and developments going up. The place had a dynamic that was hard to miss, and hard to ascribe all of it to ‘what happens in Las Vegas, stays in Las Vegas’. Maybe California should take note.
1 May
The next day (Thursday) we were on the road before 8am on a chilly and breezy morning. Our destination was Reno and we were planning on going most of the way on US95 – first stop Tonopah. The highway is mostly straight and clean, and skirts the Nellis Air Force Range lying to the east. This is the historic test range where in the fifties nuclear weapons were detonated both on the surface and underground. It is also the target area for fighter bombers based mostly in California. To get to their targets, these fully-laden airplanes cross multiple mountain ranges flying nap-of-the-earth altitudes that avoid radar detection.
As a backpacker in the Sierras it was always a surprise and a thrill to see two such jets inverted in tight formation suddenly appear over the western peaks, roll to normal, then roar deep into the alpine valley trying to collect pine cones in their bomb racks, then invert again as they climbed up the steep cliff walls to the east to repeat the process through the next mountain valley. Why invert? Because, the airplane can pull more controlled g’s and thereby fly a tighter curve when it pulls ‘up’. Therefore to hug the mountain peaks (at the same time trying not to scratch your canopy), you invert to make your ‘up’ be the down direction. This is some of the best flying in world that only a very few nations (US, Israel, the former USSR) can afford to teach their pilots. Expert pilots cost a lot of money to train and maintain.
We arrived in a very chilly Tonopah that has definitely seen better days. It was clear from the dead look of the town that no one really wants to live there, and those who could move away had already done so a long time ago. Lunch at the community’s prime casino punctuated the general poor/marginal quality of restaurant foods that we had consumed on our trip. Perhaps we Californians have become culinary dilettantes, but damn it, so be it. It doesn’t cost a penny more to add taste to a lame sandwich or salad. It seems that no one cares, else we have to claim that the locals in these middle-of-nowhere hard towns have had their taste buds scoured off by the wind-blown grit that is their daily constant.
The highway north from Tonopah toward Fallon is truly remarkable. Long (10-15 mile) stretches of absolute straight pavement divide pool-table alluvial plains between dry mountain ranges. These are interrupted only by going through the next mountain pass that requires a few sweeping curves before repeating the experience in the next broad valley. Talk about low population density and room to grow. To negotiate such a track one is advised to take a recorded thriller or some favorite music. Our travelling CD collection included the jazz piano of Ray Bryant, Bill Evans, the languorous Peggy Lee to which was added the contemplative choral music of John Rutter and the complete piano works of Debussy. The hours became a joy ride.
The small (pop about 3,000) town of Hawthorne presented us a pleasant surprise. The town is located a stone’s throw from Walker Lake (second biggest in Nevada) and is almost surrounded by the Army Ammunition Plant which promises it a minimum yearly revenue from the feds. But the surprise was that while doing the obligatory scan of local stations between CDs, we found (‘the hush descends’) a classical music station. Not only that, but that it was sponsored entirely by local businesses and families who had their brief tag lines read between the fine musical fare. Throughout the west, the radio had been populated by the music from the so-called country genre and, of course, the blaring trumpets of the local tortilla flats in Spanish. There were enough folks in Hawthorne to put up the money to fund a low-powered FM classical station. Maybe there is hope yet for the survival of western culture.
An hour or so later things get very green and my on-board research assistant informs me that we are in the environs of Fallon, known for its fighters, fodder, and flood (their dam broke last year). This scrappy and dynamic town was refreshing to see. Did I say ‘scrappy’? Well, in passing we did see a bunch of kids frolicking in a parking lot near the high school, during which frolic and to the delight of all, one over-hormoned young man pulled a girl’s pants down. The incident didn’t seem to warrant more than a moment of glee. It then occurred to us that in these times, this could have become a serious and life-changing milestone in the life of the young man if someone of a more progressive outlook had been a witness. For all we know, it may still blow into something big. However, we continued on with the fond hope that it would only go down as a rare incident of innocent youth that would not dent the future of either puller or pullee.
Finally, we drove into the driveway of our pals Tony and Paula – former Nevada County residents who now live on the mountainside overlooking Reno. Tony is smarter than I am, and holds the positions of George’s Poker Guru and Curmudgeon Mentor-in-Residence. Our trip was now, for all intents and purposes, completed; we were within a short drive from home and in sight were snow-covered mountains with actual pine trees on them. The pine trees really made an impact on us, we really missed them. Our friends had just returned from New Zealand where they like to spend some of the northern winters. Paula put together a tasty meal of chops and steaks, and we discussed the elections and the direction our republic seems to be drifting faster and faster.
One of the take-aways from the trip for me was the corroboration of the proxy for an economically and socially sound community – count the people who live there because they want to. One easy way to tell is drive around the back streets and look at how the houses are kept. You don’t have to be rich to make your home look like humans lived in it voluntarily. I know what this feeling is since very few people in this world grew up with less material wealth than I and my peers from war-torn Europe. Towns like Grants, Gallup, Tonopah, Wikiup, … are populated by people who have mostly given up, they are stuck and getting stucker.
By a natural selection process such towns also get more stupid and ignorant as time goes on. The occasional bright or self-actuating person will not stay in these communities. If nothing else, they’ll ride their thumb out of town. Them that can, go - which leaves a sad residue behind to fend for themselves with the help of distant government bureaucrats – all of them mostly of a progressive persuasion. These people are taught to believe such bulwarks of liberalism as ‘the more we tax it, the more of it there’ll be’. They’ll vote for any slogan that promises to take from the ‘undeserving rich’ and trickle some of it their way. And as time goes on these places literally become irredeemable intellectual ghettos.
There are signs that such evolutionary processes are beginning to get traction here in Nevada County. Almost every day we read of another family who is pulling up stakes, and upon deeper inspection we find that these are people who have and can do – their departure is a true loss to all who stay behind. So we ask ourselves, is our fate to become the Grants of California? We now have a significant fraction of people right here in Nevada County who celebrate the ongoing stagnation in the sincere belief that it will take us back to the days of Mayberry when Andy Griffith was sheriff. And every day it is harder to find people who will oppose obvious disasters like the now pending Managed Growth Initiative. Let’s keep our eye on the fraction of people who can leave and still want to stay.
2 May
After breakfast and hugs with Tony and Paula, we drive over the ever spectacular Sierra Nevadas, turn-off onto Hwy 20 – Nevada County’s private scenic highway – and soon arrive back at our beautiful home with its own patch of forest. It’s good to get away for a bit and get a better picture of what is happening around here.
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