On the Back Roads by Bill Graves Read Free Book Online Page A

on his terms.
    He flies his own airplane and keeps a helicopter tied down just outside the back door of his casino. He works all the time but relaxes by walking through his spacious calino, usually eating a bag of popcorn. He is not a big guy. He blends in easily with his customers. Though few people notice him, he is under the constant surveillance of the casino security cameras. They track his every move. After all, he’s the guy who can open the safe.

12
Highway 95: 450 Miles and One Traffic Light
Beatty, Nevada
    B uilt originally of rock, layered with wood ties and steel rails, today it’s asphalt. U.S. 95 through the Amargosa Desert lies on the roadbed of the old Las Vegas & Tonopah Railroad. Between 1906 and 1918, it carried trains of gold and silver and the equipment to mine them. Now it’s cars, trucks, and tour buses filled with a geriatric crowd on a free ride to a Las Vegas casino.
    There must be fifty small towns between here and Canada where this highway is Main Street. Goldfield in Nevada. Jordan Valley in Oregon. Craigmont in Idaho. It’s the lifeline for many small towns of the West. U.S. 95 continues into British Columbia, where it becomes the Crowsnest Highway.
    Open Range signs along here are not the common black-on-yellow profiles of startled cows. They are the silhouettes of horses or burros, both of which run wild in the Nevada outback and number in the thousands.
    Over the Funeral Mountains to the west and down some 3,500 feet is the immense, scorching floor of Death Valley. Ahead is a dump for low-level hazardous waste that is truckedfrom as far away as Texas. The dump once took in radioactive leftovers, but not anymore.
    In the mountains to the east and north is the Nellis Air Force Range, so my new map says. The old one, which I just threw away, included the words
Bombing
and
Gunnery
in the name of this 3-million-acre facility. I question motives when a government changes place-names for no apparent reason. Obviously, bombing and gunnery is still what goes on there, because that’s what the Air Force does.
    The Nevada Test Site begs the same skepticism. The word
Nuclear
was in that name originally, back in the testing heyday of the cold war. Between 1951 and 1958, the Atomic Energy Commission detonated 100 nuclear weapons in the air over those mountains. Later it tested even more in the ground under them.
    They do not test there anymore, so why not drop
Test
from its name? Perhaps
Nevada Site
would mean nothing, and
Nevada Nuclear Site
would mean too much. Whatever they call it, the tunnel-ridden site is closer to the highway than the gunnery and bombing range.
    All this map-and-sign trivia has put me on notice that I could be zapped, bombed, or neutralized at any time. Or, more realistically, I could run into the descendant of some gold prospector’s burro, turned lose hereabouts long before I was born.
    Just south of Beatty, the highway makes an abrupt turn. Were I seeing this on the Travel Channel, pretentious music would swell up to reveal the dramatic change of scenery. The brown desert suddenly disappears. Green and tan bulrushes take over. Above, the leaves of spreading cottonwood trees spin in the wind. Squatting low in the bulrushes is a sign, the hand-painted silhouette of a frog. It reads Frog Crossing. I like Beatty already.
    The mountains that earlier were away from the highway, now rise 1,500 feet beside it, creating an instant, inviting rock-rimmed hollow. It soon becomes as pleasant a green valley as exists anywhere in this otherwise arid state.
    Fresh water from an underground river founded this town. Two nearby mining camps, which later became significant towns—albeit short-lived—had a shortage of drinking water. For a time, water from Beatty was hauled to the miners in whiskey barrels. There was no shortage of those.
    I made a slow “windshield” tour of town. Spread over a square mile, Beatty’s 1,900 residents live in mobile homes,