The Road To Caliente
by Custis Long

I drifted down into Winnemucca like a ghost in the wee hours, the silence of the desert all around me in the inky night. Time and time again jackrabbits commit suicide by racing out of the sagebrush and greasewood to meet my truck, coming together in brief explosions of metal and rended flesh. It is like they are freely sacrificing themselves to some unavoidable destiny, offering themselves willingly to the speeding altar of crushing steel. I worry lest one should hit my front tire head on. The jacks are rather large hares, large enough to possibly mess up my tire alignment or at worst, cause a wreck.

Behind me lays the darkness of the Oregon outback, a great blackness beneath twinkling stars.

At a Winnemucca brothel I stop long enough to satisfy a primitive urge with a fading red-haired beauty, aware of a silent desperation in her touch, an urgency beyond sex in the warmth of her lips. There is a distance in her green eyes that reaches into dark years and endless miles spread across a dim timescape between reality and fantasy. It is no accident that she is here in this place, at this time, an indelible part of this desert world with a heritage as old as the American West. The depths in her eyes invoke visions of prairies, vast, lonely and silver beneath the light of a cold moon.

I am once again in Nevada, strange land of talking shadows and lost souls who prefer to remain that way. Shadscale and greasewood dot a vast and daliesque landscape, mixed with golden sheaves of cheatgrass that wave in the gusts. Beyond range of my headlights, the mountains form lurking shadows in that seem to watch from the darkness as I speed westward on the interstate.

Caliente, Nevada is a town lost in time and space. It is a sleepy ghost of the past, almost every structure, every street, every sign, relics from long ago. The small town is nestled in the mountains along the Utah border, quiet and forgotten, just a place that travelers pass through on their way to Las Vegas or Arizona. The sidewalks glitter with tiny crystals in the streetlights and a train blows it's lonely whistle somewhere in the distant night. I love it.

I am only here because a flash flood wiped out the highway to the town of Mesquite. I am glad. This small accident of fate allowed me to wander the streets of Caliente after dark, experiencing the ambience of amber streetlights on the sparkling sidewalks, looking into the windows of empty buildings that date back into the nineteenth century.
As usual, everyone I meet is either from Oregon or has lived there at one time. A bartender who looks like Barney Miller once lived in Roseburg. Another bartender down the street once lived in Oakland, Oregon. Both places are within thirty miles of my home in the town of Riddle.

Caliente. The name means hot in Spanish. It is most assuredly an accurate description of this place at most times in the summer, but on this August night it is deliciously cool, as all of Nevada has been thus far on this journey. The state is blanketed in thunderstorms that have cooled the hot desert air with their cargo of rain. The year has been unusually wet and much of the desert is covered with grass, a surefire recipe for great prairie fires, some of which are already in progress.

To get here I have traveled over vast and dry oceans of desert, sectioned by small and rugged ranges of saw-toothed mountains that are liberally sprinkled across the Great Basin, that vast area of the western United States from which no water escapes to the oceans. Instead, it drains into interior basins where it evaporates away, often leaving blindingly white playas in its wake, sometimes referred to as dry lakes.

Custis Long 11/12/05                         

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