Tour Journal: Day One

Synthesis Editorial Director Daniel Taylor is out on the road as part of the Tooth and Nail Acoustic Tour, and will be blogging about his travels

The thing I love about Nevada is, not only are there slot machines basically anywhere people congregate (airports, bars, gas stations) but that there are inevitably people playing them, no matter the time of day. I just watched a trucker pull 60 quarters out of a slot machine at The Flying J while we were gassing up the van in Winnemucca, at 5 AM on a Wednesday. Cheap thrills in sage brush country. Out here the speed limit is 75, probably because they got tired of caring too much about people. Wanna drive fast? Go ahead. Wanna waste your money gambling in a gas station at dawn on a weekday? Have at it, chief. Nevada people are like those kids in grade school whose parents would let them rent all the R-rated movies and ride dirt bikes and do whatever crazy shit they wanted. You envied them, sure. But you had a sorta bad feeling about them too, like they weren't really going to ever turn out to be worth a shit. And mostly you were right.

The towns out here seem to have a strange need to etch their monograms into the lumpy foothills surrounding their respective valleys, carving out their town's initials in big blue or white block letters. BM for Battle Mountain, a bizarre enough name being as the town itself sits flatly in a valley so craterous that it would seem to be almost below sea level. A mere triviality! The townsfolk themselves seem proud enough of the name, being as it is, carved into the westward hillside (perhaps the battle mountain?) in giant blue letters, marking for posterity the christening of this particular patch of scrub brush and ancient dirt as Battle Mountain, Nevada.

At the Flying J in Wells, a few hours east, a big sign above the doorway lets you know that day's Homeland Security Threat Level. On this particular day it was yellow. Exactly what level of threat that represents in unknown to me, as there was no primer, no key explaining exactly how threatened one should feel about each color. I guess the people of Wells know their threat levels by heart. After all, there's an awful lot in Wells just ripe for the threatening. For example, the Flying J in wells has probably triple the amount of slot machine as the Flying J in Winnemucca. Wells, Nevada represents freedom. It represents America. And that's what the terrorists hate. Freedom. America. They had Fox News playing in the lobby. I bought some Powerade.

By the time you make your way over Pequod Pass you might as well be on the moon. From horizon to horizon is nothing but an ancient desolateness that seems so foreboding, so ill suited to any form of humanity that you wonder what could have ever inspired anybody to ever bother crossing it, let along stay. In a late-eighties Dodge van, the bleakness has an almost zen appeal, with its stark, unapologetic simplicity. But from the seat of a horse-drawn wagon I'm sure there were many, less complimentary ways to describe. A historical monument at a roadside rest stop describes Gravely Ford, a popular crossing point for those heading west back in the days when West was the new East. It describes how two members of the ill-fated Donner Party got into a spat at Gravely Ford, with one man slapping another man's wife, and getting killed for the misdeed. The murdered was banished, only to later lead the rescue team that eventually saved the party from their cannibal valley in the Sierra Nevadas. It also describes a wagon trail who was slaughtered by Indians on the spot. One of the Indian women attempted to rescue a settler child but she was (chased for two days and killed.� The dedication on the plaque read (June 6008� which would seem like a typo until you also read the inscription at the bottom: E Clampus Vitus, that wily brethren of ersatz drunken freemasons, with their Chinese Calendar and gold miner oaths. There is hope for Nevada yet!

If Eastern Nevada is the moon, then when you reach the Utah border at Wendover you're on Venus, man. No wonder the Donner Party were killing each other by the time they got to Gravely Ford. I've never really understood what people meant when they said a certain so-and-so was (the salt of the earth.� Maybe they're talking about Wendover. The earth here seems to be made of salt, and that's about it. Some miles in the distance, some craggy promontories jut from the whiteness, but never actually meet the ground, as the heat and the nothingness of the air create a peculiar visual effect, making the mountains appear to be floating over the great expanse of salt. If I was a mountain, I wouldn't want to touch that shit either.

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