The road less travelled

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/06/2024 (484 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The road through Austin, Nev., is slick with the blood and guts of thousands of dead and crushed Mormon crickets, so many of them, so very many of them, that the asphalt is coloured reddish-brown, even through the light tint of the windshield.

Add a little rain — and there’s often rain at Austin, an old silver-mining town 6,500 feet or so up in the Toiyabe Range — and it’s going to be slippery. Especially heading through the bends and twists of Nevada’s Highway 50, America’s loneliest highway, as it winds through the top edge of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest.

They’re not really crickets at all, those hordes of thumb-sized copper-coloured eating machines. They’re katydids, and they are dumber than cardboard: they fall on their sides or on their backs as they stumble away from your feet, helpless — but there are just so many they are bound to survive and thrive and spawn, clinging to and eating almost any plant in reach.

And why am I telling you this, and what does it have to do with Winnipeg?

Not Winnipeg in particular, but wait.

We curve down the 50, a highway edged with huge drop-offs, the kind of curves that make you feel like you’re fighting gravity — and also fighting a sort of fatalistic inevitability about needing-to-fall that’s lodged in the core of you — every time you bring the car back into your lane.

The kind of feeling that both makes you want to get back from a cliff’s edge to stop your insides from twisting, and also stay there, too.

And then straight onto Monitor Valley Road and the pavement’s immediately gone. We’re in a small SUV with good ground clearance but painfully unsuitable all-season tires, and the map says we’ve got something like 100 miles ahead of us before the pavement’s back.

A lone steer stands on the edge of the gravel road, staring as we pass, and we’re heading for the mountains on a die-straight road, trailing a great rooster tail of dust. Both sides of the road are great plains of sage and late-season wildflowers marking the end of spring damp, banks of yellows and oranges that will seem more like desert in just weeks.

And then there’s a yellow, shot-up sign that marks the line where all road maintenance ends, the hills begin, and it’s time to play mountain route hide-and-seek. That’s when the road ahead of you looks like it’s going to simply up and end, but instead there’s a crease in the hillside and the road vanishes into it, hair-pinning up and up and up, your ears registering the change in altitude. And repeat.

Mountains catch rainwater on their sides, and the hills green up, but only so much: the woods all around the road smell of warming pine and turpentine plants and the already-dry ground drying even more. Small rocks and big rocks chatter and ding against the bottom of the car. The pines are a blue-green, brooks or dry creek beds parallel the road, but there’s not enough moisture for the ground to be anything but dirt.

We had crossed, by then, the point of giving up, turning around and heading back, even though the idea still seemed seductive. Oh, and smart. This time, we were quite unprepared for desert and mountains alike.

Then, shooting out of the other side of the range and into the Monitor Valley itself, searching for the pit-and-pool of an extinct geyser known as Diana’s Punchbowl in all that space (but never finding it), before taking a side road off a side road to a long salt lake.

A light wind coming in off of the salt, a briny, almost sulphurous edge to it, next to a tall hill with a sharp point that had to be climbed, and there were rayless daisies (a fleabane) and hairspine cactus, and always sage. A high-up hawk, flying on updrafts without moving its wings.

All four tires still safely holding their collective breaths.

We stayed for ages, buoyed, and there was no sound of humans and little in the way of their sign.

Watched for snakes, sat on a sun-heated rock, and I felt the great upwelling. The “this-is-what-matters,” the deep belonging, the reason for being. The shedding of the day-to-day.

I’m telling you this because everyone should feel this way, everyone should find a place, even for a few days, where they want to throw their arms wide and then wrap them around the world and pull it in tight.

We should all get to feel — regularly — as if a sheer joy of living is shooting from our fingertips.

You know it when you feel it.

I don’t get to feel it often enough, I think, but when I do, it is as familiar as when you get to see the Rockies again after years away, and realize how memory and photographs have deleted their majesty. Or return to the unique sensory envelope of the desert, where everything seems to exist in primary colours and rules.

Life’s own private religious experience.

Amen.

Russell Wangersky is the Comment Editor at the Free Press. He seeks wonder everywhere, finds it sometimes, and can be reached at russell.wangersky@freepress.mb.ca