We’re at the Silver Dollar Club in Elko, Nevada. Neon gleams against the old mahogany walls, and the air is thick with cigarette smoke. Heavy metal plays on the speakers, and gangs of burly, bearded gold miners do shots of whiskey. A rowdy drunk guy had just gotten thrown out; for one long second he flew through the door frame, red-eyed, sleepy, only half-conscious of what would happen next. Then all at once, he tasted the pavement.
“Sorry you had to see that, folks,” a haggard man in a leather coat said as he came back inside and sidled up to the bar.
Where once every town in states like Montana and Arizona had rough old bars like the Silver Dollar, these days many of them have been replaced. The tough old downtowns have metastasized into giant strip malls, and the local ruffians have all been priced out. As one walks through Bozeman, Montana, or Jackson, Wyoming, or Marfa, Texas, it can be tempting to imagine that the original spirit of the West is now only a memory. For though the West may be king-size—a region of our country that is by itself far larger than many nations on Earth—there seem to be precious few parts of it still imbued with the old spirit of what the West was.
But Nevada is a different sort of place, even set apart from the other Western states. A friend of mine who grew up in Nevada’s Great Basin Desert put it this way: "It’s better to think about Nevada as a territory, only tethered to America by historic happenstance.” The extreme desolation of Nevada, even compared with the landscapes of some of the other Western states, sets it apart. Its very geography and nature will always be a long sight “wilder” than the others, owing to unique levels of isolation, aridity, and almost impossibly low population density.
I took a swig of my beer and thought about the phrase “Go west, young man.” Go west—to fortune, to gold, to oil, to fame and money. How going west actually pans out is another question. A young buck could find himself in old Elko cashing in on a six-figure salary to poke holes in the dry desert dirt in search of gold. He could find himself driving a brand-new F-350 truck and sporting a shiny gold belt buckle under a crisp white cowboy shirt—but he could just as easily find himself strung out on meth and liquor, getting his ass beat in front of the Silver Dollar Club in downtown Elko.
Or if a young man from the Eastern states should wish to hitchhike out into the deep West, he may find himself stuck at the intersection of highways US-95 and NV-360, 50 miles from any sort of town—rationing his last few mouthfuls of water. This is where I found myself about 10 years ago, and this was my own introduction to the harrowing desolation of the Nevadan deserts. Heart sinking and petrified at my own thirst, I was rescued after many hours by a young rancher hauling bulls to Fallon. Thankfully, he had plenty of water. But had he failed to pick me up when he did, I was in for one long, cold, thirsty night.
As with most things in Nevada, it’s all a gamble.
