by Sarah Vowell
Another person tells me, “I don’t talk about politics. I can’t do anything about it anyway, and that pisses me off. And I don’t vote because they already know who’s gonna win.”
At one point I ask a room full of people, who’ve all been open and obliging so far, if I can talk to them about their political views. They bellow “No!” in unison, followed by rowdy laughter and clinking of beer bottles. One quietly mumbles that he likes Hillary Clinton, and his friend quickly interjects, “He doesn’t speak for us,” but declines to clarify her own political leanings.
Perhaps the people I’m speaking to consider political inquiry an invasion of privacy. Or maybe they really don’t care—maybe Tonopah is simply too far removed, geographically and in its unique local concerns, from the nation at large for people to feel invested in national politics. It’s possible that, just as America has neglected rural Nevada in elaborating its pantheon of cultural archetypes, so too have the people of rural Nevada turned a blind eye to the goings-on of the nation.
Maximum Sunlight
Like an island, Tonopah is strictly circumscribed. There are limitations on its latitude—because of the BLM, the town its prohibited from sprawling. The population remains steady and financial resources scarce, so Tonopah residents don’t build up, either. They just don’t build much at all.
Many live in timeworn houses or inventive structures made from repurposed parts of other edifices. Architecturally, the town speaks a junkyard vernacular. Every sliver of space is a profusion of materials and textures—corrugated tin, rusted steel, weathered wood, chipped paint, mortar, rebar, drywall, old cars and furniture put out to pasture. Whatever your vantage point, you can see a whole lot without turning your head.
Beyond the town limits, the nearest trees can be found in neighboring Goldfield. The natural landscape is characterized by stony crags and desolate flats meagerly populated with nondescript grasses and shrubs. Ninety percent of the earth’s surface is pale dirt so dry that it whips into dust at the slightest disturbance.
If you say the word plant to people in Tonopah, their minds first turn to the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project just west of town. The solar plant is a mystical arrangement—10,000 mirrors surround a 600-foot tower filled with molten salt. From the highway, in the afternoon when the sunset illuminates the tip of the tower, Crescent Dunes looks like a candle flickering in the desert. From overhead, with its mirrors arranged in a circle nearly two miles in diameter, it looks like a throng of pilgrims encircling the Grand Mosque of Mecca. All day long the mirrors swivel to capture maximum sunlight.
The rollout of Crescent Dunes has been mostly quiet and efficient. Only one occurrence betrayed the formidable, almost occult power of the machinery. For unspecified reasons, employees staging a test adjusted the mirrors so that they directed light at a focal point 1,200 feet above ground, twice as high as the tower. The suspended field of light attracted birds, which flew into the solar flux and were immediately incinerated. Scientists noted over a hundred “streamers”—trails of smoke and vapor—left behind by individual cremated birds.
The plant’s owners apologized for the “avian incidents” and redirected the mirrors back down at the tower. Since then, the plant has continued preparatory testing without drama, but locals regard it with more trepidation than they did before. Some say it’s badly built. They say if you look at it closely, you can see that it leans.
Between 2011 and 2013, over 4,000 people worked on the construction of Crescent Dunes. Many were Tonopah residents—particularly those hired to assemble the mirror panels—but the majority were specialists from elsewhere who left once construction was completed. A company called Cobra brought out a lot of Spaniards. There were hundreds of them during the preliminary stages, living in the Mizpah Hotel or Humbug Flats or even the Clown Motel. There are still a handful of Spaniards in town. They speak poor English, but drink and play pool with the locals.
Now only a few dozen people are employed to oversee daily operations on the site. Crescent Dunes mines sunlight, and like every mine in the history of the region, its peak employment window was astonishingly brief. This is the nature of industry here: residents wait for news of a new mine or plant or infrastructure project, strike while the iron’s hot, and know not to expect anything permanent.
Thunderhead
I’m standing on Main Street looking for people to interview, feeling graceless and unprepared. Finally I get up the nerve to approach an older man in Carhartt overalls, a bucket hat, and dark sunglasses. He’s sitting on a bench with an ancient laptop balanced on his knees. “Hi,” I say too eagerly, surprising him. I scale it back. “I’m writing about the town. Can I talk to you about living here?”
He takes off his sunglasses and sizes me up. “Well, I’m not from here originally,” he answers, then pauses, searching for the most concise way to let me down.
“Ma’am,” he finally decides, “I’m a Baptist minister, and my opinion of Tonopah is not high. There are behaviors in this town to which I’m not accustomed.” He smiles, pleased with his pithy assessment. “So I’d better pass.”
The first person to accept my invitation is the town bookseller. He leads me through his store, its shelves abundant with volumes crammed in at strange angles, to a dim kitchen lined with dark green floral wallpaper. We sit in folding chairs with our elbows propped on a red-and-white checkered plastic tablecloth. “So,” he begins, but says nothing else, evidently waiting for me to speak first.
I ask his name. Joe. I ask his age. Seventy-three. I ask if he’s from here. He shakes his head. “So what brought you to Tonopah?”
“Well first,” he says, “what brings you here? You writing a travel piece?”
“Sort of,” I say, “but I’m less interested in tourism and more interested in daily life. I used to drive through here sometimes and it always gave me a strange feeling. It’s like its own planet, so far away from everything else. And I did some research and learned about the mines, and the wild horses, and the nuclear testing, and the military planes and everything.” My face flushes. “So I’m just curious, I guess.”
This is good enough for Joe. He leans back and folds his arms across his chest. “I was living out in California before this,” he begins. “I moved here in 2008, after I retired. I’m a sober alcoholic, been sober for over twenty-four years. My sponsor in AA was dying, and I hadn’t quite figured out what I wanted to do yet in my retirement. He said he wanted me to take Alcoholics Anonymous to the wilderness.”
Having already decided on Nevada, Joe conducted an Internet search for the town that had the most drug and alcohol arrests and the paltriest recovery resources. “Winnemucca and Tonopah tied as far as the most arrests, but Winnemucca already had meetings,” he says.
Joe lives off his pension and savings, and opened the store for essentially the sole purpose of establishing a space for Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous meetings. In the back of the store is a meeting room with inspirational posters on the wall, pamphlets for the taking, and folding chairs assembled around a white folding table. The shop barely makes any money, he admits. And he’s not particularly bookish himself—he tells me he’s read only two books since he opened the place seven years ago. The first was a mystery novel, and the second was “more scientific,” though he can’t remember the subject matter.
I ask him what the impact of the meetings has been so far. “It’s given some people their life back,” he says. “It’s given some people life who never even had a life. I started drinking at ten years old,” he confides easily. Like many sober alcoholics, he has his story down pat, each phase measured in years and each turning point attached to a precise age, a highlight reel from a life of internal struggle. “There’s a lady in town who started drinking at nine years old. She comes to the meetings. Until you learn to live a different way, you don’t know any better.”
“We just had a man named Chuck die at the end of June,” he continues. “He was six years sober. He used to be a fall-
down drunk and he used drugs intravenously. He had just lost his job shortly before he came to AA, and was several months behind on his rent. He was ready to commit suicide.” Chuck heard about the meetings at Joe’s bookstore through a friend, and Joe helped him get back on his feet, putting him to work shelving books.
“Chuck died right here in this store of a heart attack,” Joe tells me, nodding toward the entrance where a sagging couch greets visitors, be they customers or addicts. On the coffee table in front of the couch is a jigsaw puzzle, only the perimeter completed. Joe’s balding Chihuahua shivers in its tiny dog bed. The carpet is brown and flecked with lint. The shelves in the back are draped in clear tarps for a repair job that’s been put on indefinite hold.
Despite Chuck’s early death, his body battered by decades of substance abuse, Joe considers his story a success. He shows me a framed picture of a man grinning through a biker beard that’s as gray and dense as a thunderhead. “Chuck was a good friend,” he says with soft eyes.
I ask him why people drink so much here. “That’s what there is to do,” he replies.
“How many bars are there in town?”
“There’s the Mizpah, the Tonopah Liquor Company,” he counts on his fingers, “the Station House, the Bug Bar, the Bank Club, the Tonopah Brewery. And there used to be the Club House. That was a hard-drinking dive bar. A miserable place. Bar fights every night. Closed earlier this year, but the drunks still sit right out front on the sidewalk there.”
Then he says, with sudden urgency, “I got out before I killed anyone. I had blackouts all the time. I could’ve killed someone in a bar fight or car accident and not even known why I was in jail when I came to. I said I couldn’t do that.”
He shakes his head vigorously. “And people in this town, they’re suffering. So you see? That’s why I’m here.”
Sensitives
“The people are still living on the history,” says Wilma, who works in the office of the Clown Motel. “Many of them are descendents of the original miners. And many are miners themselves. Out in Round Mountain or Silver Peak, mostly. There are generations of them who’ve lived here since the 1900s, and their attitude is pretty much still the same. Wild West.”
“What do you mean by that?” I ask her. She’s probably in her early fifties but has a girlish face and round, earnest eyes. Her waist-length red hair is bound by a scrunchy at the nape of her neck. When she speaks, each r sound shades slightly into a w.
“The miners used to drink a lot,” Wilma replies. “That was their only other thing besides mining. They would sleep in the mines for like seven days, and they would come out and they didn’t have family to go to because they were single guys or their family was way back somewhere else, so the only thing they had was the alcohol. That’s staying, that kind of attitude.”
I tell her that she’s not the first person to bring up booze when explaining the town to me, and her laugh betrays a bit of concern. “Alcohol use in this town is tremendous,” she says. “I mean, wow. It’s a huge situation.” Her affect is now serious, a bit stunned. “I don’t know much about the drugs. Meth is pretty prevalent here, I know that. But the alcohol, yikes, it’s way out there. You can see it at night in the town. It keeps ’em low, keeps ’em icky.”
Wilma pauses to take a phone call, and my eyes scan the room. To my left are several shelves of clown figurines, over five hundred of them. A sign hanging in the middle reads:
SPECIAL CLOWNS FROM
AROUND THE WORLD NOT FOR SALE
Behind me are two life-size clown dummies. One is an early iteration of Ronald McDonald, while the other is more of a Barnum & Bailey type.
“Don’t look into that one’s eyes,” says Wilma, placing the phone back on the receiver. She gestures toward the old-timey one clad in a rainbow jumpsuit. Several fingers are missing from its life-size hands. Wilma was afraid of clowns when she first came to work here, she tells me. She’s mostly gotten over it, but that one still strikes her as “a little off.”
The Clown Motel sits at the western edge of town. For the phobic, there’s no skirting the issue—there’s a clown on every door and clown paintings above every bed. Adding to the potential fear factor is the cemetery right next to the motel, visible from nearly every vantage point.
“Are people freaked out by this place?” I ask. The smaller clown figurines are cheerful portrayals with oversized shoes, accordions, and juggling pins—vestiges of a time when clowns enjoyed more favor in the hearts of the masses. The whole history of clowns is on display: There are porcelain harlequins with cherubic faces and rosy cheeks, hobo clowns with patches on their pants and sympathetic frowns, and polka-dotted buffoons with frizzy orange hair poking out above their ears. One, however, is obviously a later creation, fabricated after John Wayne Gacy Jr. and the movie It transformed the clown into a popular object of dread. Teeth bared and eyes crazed, it’s perched in a metal cage like a lethal zoo animal. This figurine is prominently displayed near the front desk, demonstrating a wry selfawareness on the part of the Clown Motel’s management.
“Oh sure, people are scared,” she answers. “But we still get a lot of business. Some people actually come here to face their fear. I’ve seen ’em faint and I’ve seen ’em scream. It’s not uncommon to see somebody walk in and their face turn pure white.” She tells me she’s even met people who were sent here on the advice of their therapists.
“If you ask me, the Clown is not nearly as scary as the cemetery next door,” she says. “There’s a lot of paranormal activity there. We get tons of researchers. Psychic people, sensitives, ghost hunters. They always find something.”
“What’s a sensitive?” I ask.
“People that are so sensitive they can feel the entities around them,” she explains. “Ghost hunters bring sensitives with them, and if the sensitives feel like something’s going on, that’s when they start their cameras. And sure enough, bam. There’s a lot of activity in this town, because there was a lot of death here. The mines were so dangerous. A lot of death.”
I ask her why she came to work in the Clown Motel if she was afraid of clowns. “My husband and I were really down on our luck when we first arrived here,” she answers. “We had a car that was acting like a real idiot.” She explains that she was on her way from Texas to California when her car started to falter, just past Las Vegas. By the time they got to Tonopah, “the car decided that it didn’t want to go any further,” she laughs. “Piece of work is what it was.”
She and her husband slept in their busted car in the parking lot of the Bank Club, a local small-time casino with an adjoining Chinese restaurant, for about three days. “Then one of the nice people at the grocery store told us, ‘Hey, go talk to Hank P., he can help you out.’ So we did and he offered us a job.”
Hank P. owns the Clown Motel, along with a large share of the retail space on Main Street. I tell her I’ve already heard stories about Hank P., that he employs people who have no money, people who have substance abuse problems, homeless people, out-of-town drifters. I’ve heard that he gives them work at the Clown, or the pawnshop, or the Economy Inn, and that he often hooks these people up with places to stay. She nods her head in agreement with everything I’m saying. “He just cares,” she says finally. “He cares about the people and the town. He’s descended from one of the original families. He wants to rise the place up.”
I don’t tell her that in the few interviews I’ve conducted thus far I’ve also heard him called a loan shark and a slumlord, that I’ve heard him accused of exploiting the desperation of the local down-and-out. People seem either bitterly resentful of Hank P. or eternally grateful to him.
“He helps you get on your feet,” Wilma continues. “Like Jeff. He’s one of the hard-ups. He has a real problem with alcohol, major. And he comes off of it and he’s a sane person, and then he leaves for a while. He does it in waves. It’s a cycle. And Hank always hires him back.”
I ask her if Hank ever has problems with the people he
helps out. “Yeah, I mean sometimes he has to forcibly get the money from them because folks like to use and abuse. And he’s a strong person.” She emphasizes this by leaning forward across the counter. “You don’t mess with Hank P.”
“Is this a violent place?” I ask. Night is falling and my car is parked closer to the center of town, so I’ll need to walk.
“Well there are bar fights,” she says laughing, “so try not to get into one of those. We used to have a place called the Club House. That was a hang spot, but it just got closed down. It was a fighting, brawling kind of place. It was a really cool place though, with a beautiful old bar and a lot of history. People would go just to hang and let loose. It was the spot.”
I tell her I’ll avoid bar fights and thank her for her time. “Hey if you go to the cemetery,” she adds, “just watch your phone battery. The cemetery always drains phone batteries.”
Tiny
Outside the pawnshop is a sign that reads, “Free Lifetime Parking reserved for Hank P.” He owns this building, and I’ve heard that Jeff works here. But even though it’s the middle of the day, The Hock Shop is locked up and there’s no one in sight. On the door is a hand-scrawled sign announcing three open beds in a mobile home, available immediately for solar or construction workers. The sign says to call Hank P. if interested, and that rooms at the Clown Motel are also available weekly or daily.
I keep walking down the block, past the Tonopah Liquor Company and the shuttered Club House. A middle-aged man sits on the sidewalk with an open beer in hand. I pass within two feet of him, but he doesn’t lift his head.
On the other side of the Club House is a small storefront whose handwritten sign says The Hock Shop 2. A guy out front is holding a pair of dancing Native American dolls. He looks to be in his early forties, with unkempt blonde facial hair, sunburnt skin, and a jumble of improvised tattoos. I tell him I’m a writer working on a story about the town and ask him if he’d be up for an interview.