“Yes.”
“Absolutely nothing.”
Eventually, as I ate Donna’s specialty sandwich—fried, breaded frozen shrimp on toast with green pepper and a slice of cheese the color of a traffic cone—Jerry opined that the two things people do are what people do in every city in Nevada, which is drink and gamble.
I am not a particularly knowledgeable gambler, but I have an image of what a casino is, thanks to James Bond. Casinos contain tuxedoed cads and rotters with slender mustaches, and ladies in sequined gowns that hug their behinds. There are dice tables, and blackjack tables, and roulette wheels, and games so complex and exotic they can only be played by persons from Zurich.
In Battle Mountain, casinos are basically drunks at slot machines. They play with the intensity and excitement of people sorting socks at a Laundromat.
At the Nevada Hotel bar, there is a video poker machine at every bar stool. I was playing and losing, and drinking a beer. Beside me, mechanic Mel Langer was playing and losing, and drinking a beer. Mel is a mechanic. He said the people here are nice and friendly, but there isn’t much to do.
Bartender Helen Lumpkin agreed. It’s worst for the kids, she said, because they find excitement in the wrong places: “Fifteen-year-old girls with bellies out to here.” Mel looked around conspiratorially and lowered his voice.
“When I moved here seven years ago from California, the odd thing was, the thing I noticed, and I’m not being negative…”
He took a drink.
“. . . I am just saying, without being faultfinding, don’t get me wrong, what I noticed was the obesity of the women. Have you noticed that?”
Gallantly, I said I had not.
“Well, the men work in the mines day and night and there’s nothing to do for the women except eat.”
One thing to do is bird huntin’. There is nothing quite as delicious, or as beautiful, as ducks in the wild, with splendiferous iridescent greens and blues and broad chests of rich mahogany. Alas, there aren’t that many ducks around Battle Mountain. Battle Mountain bird hunters tend to settle for something called a chukar, a bird with the peculiar habit of running up hills and flying down. Chukars don’t make good eating, but locals are pretty proud of them just the same.
Helen has one in a glass showcase behind the bar. She showed it to me.
“So that’s the famous chukar I’ve been hearing about,” I said.
It’s a scrawny little flapdoodly thing with mottled feathers and a hooked beak.
“Yep, that’s the chukar.”
It looks like a cross between a chicken and a pigeon, with the least fortunate features of each. It is the color of dirt.
“So there it is, then.”
“There it is.”
As you enter Battle Mountain, a large billboard promises two things: FINE DINING AND A GOOD NIGHT’S REST. Having despaired of finding the first, I aspired to the second at the famous Owl Club, where rooms are only $29 because the place doesn’t go in for fancy big-city amenities like a coffeemaker in the room, or an iron, or a shoe-buffing cloth, or shampoo, or a clock, or a telephone, or spotless carpeting.
I sank into bed for my promised good night’s sleep, which I admit, in all candor, was delivered exactly as advertised, the solemn covenant between Battle Mountain and its guests remaining intact right up until 4:21 A.M. when the Union Pacific rumbled and roared and clanged and whistled its way through downtown, about 200 feet away.
Breakfast was pretty good flapjacks at the counter at the Nevada Hotel, where I had come to discover for myself the niceness and hospitality that I’d been hearing tell of.
I soon found myself surrounded by guys who plainly did not like who I was or what I was doing there. Hubert Sharp, a short, square man with a short, square haircut, has been living in Battle Mountain for twenty years, and he informed me he would not live in Washington, D.C., “if you gave me title to the whole place.” When I asked why, Hubert said something about the citizenry of Washington that was so offensive, it occurred to me he might have kin in Terre Haute.
Hubert and his pals Bill Elquist and Tom Beebe meet here some mornings, a sort of rump parliament of Battle Mountain. Tom used to be the sheriff. Bill, who owns a backhoe and does odd jobs, is one of three Lander County commissioners; the commissioners run the town, which has no mayor.
Pretty soon the door opened and a big guy named Max walked in and occupied a stool. Max is a pooh-bah. As the town’s justice of the peace, he presides over all criminal and civil matters. I told him who I was and why I was there, and he grunted noncommittally and picked up a fly swatter.
“Max, what’s your last name?” I asked, pen in hand.
A fly alighted on the counter.
“I’m not going to tell you.”
“But you’re the judge. You’re a public official. You have to tell me.”
Whap! The fly escaped.
“No, I don’t,” said Judge Max.
His name is Max Bunch. I learned that from Lorrie Baumann, the editor of the Battle Mountain Bugle. Lorrie knows everything. She does everything: Takes pictures, writes stories, edits stories. With her knowledge of the town, she has few illusions.
Nevada, she said, attracts people who have trouble fitting in anywhere else, and of those misfits, the ones who have trouble fitting in in Nevada go to small towns like Battle Mountain.
“For the folks who like it here,” she said, “it’s mostly a matter of not being able to imagine anything else.”
When I’d asked Battle Mountaineers what they most wish they had, a startling number mentioned a Wal-Mart. The closest one is in Winnemucca, fifty-two miles away. No one mentioned what I would have mentioned, which is anything bespeaking age, history, or architecture. The town once had a nice old train station. They tore it down.
In Battle Mountain, entropy reigns; architectural context is nonexistent. One of the prettier wooden houses, with two levels and a porch, is 40 feet from the twenty-four-hour car wash, serve-yourself, $1. Corrugated aluminum and aluminum siding seem to be the building material of choice. There are a lot of trailers. One had a smaller trailer in the back yard.
“When I first came here a couple of years ago,” Lorrie said, “Battle Mountain was in the middle of constructing a new jail. Well, when it opened, one of the county officials was speaking, and he said it’s great we have a wonderful new jail but it’s a pity that it is the nicest building in town.”
I had one more question, and I was almost embarrassed to ask it: How could she bring herself to live here?
“I don’t.”
Lorrie Baumann lives in Winnemucca. That was the deal under which she took the job editing the Battle Mountain Bugle: that they didn’t make her live in Battle Mountain.
SHAR PETERSON IS a slim, attractive, intense woman with striking hair that appears to have been styled by a Van de Graaff generator. The executive director of the Battle Mountain Chamber of Commerce is always smiling, and she was smiling at this very moment, but I knew she wasn’t glad to see me. After our first phone conversation, Shar had talked to some of the town mothers and fathers, who apparently had not shared her vision about the terrific publicity potential of this armpit thing. As Shar put it, “Some people are taking it as a negative.”
Shar had apparently been strongly encouraged to dissuade me from my mission, to argue the case against the armpit. Once enthusiastic collaborators, we were, at the moment, potential antagonists.
I sat down. Laid my cards on the table.
“Shar,” I said, “this is not a handsome town.”
“We understand that,” she said, her smile defiantly unbroken.
Shar was doing her level best to show me the highlights of Battle Mountain. It was not easy. It was, in fact, a grim little exercise in desperation salesmanship.
Heading out on Route 305, Shar pointed out several distant hills in the Shoshone mountain range.
“That looked better before the fires.”
And:
“Usually, in di
fferent weather, that’s a nice view of the valley.”
And:
“The people aren’t exactly xenophobic. You just have to earn their trust.”
We saw several distant peaks with bald smears caused by mining. “They’ll look normal afterwards. They’ll just be a little less high.”
Shar wanted to show me some of the nicer houses, but they were scattered around, so to get to them we had to pass homes that looked like the sort of place Snuffy Smith’s wife, Loweezy, is forever brooming out.
Shar came here many years ago, when her husband got a good job in a local mine. He still has it, and so she is still here. She loves it, she said. She said it three times.
I said nothing. We passed one of the more expensive homes. It features a rather startling facade of faux boulders that sort of look like stone, the way cardboard sort of looks like oak.
“I have two choices,” Shar said at last. “To make myself miserable or to learn to love where I am. Do you know what I mean?”
I did.
“Okay, maybe we’re an armpit,” Shar said. “If so, we’re shaven, and clean, and sweet-smelling because out here in the desert, we’re arid, extra dry.”
The woman is very good.
DOUG MILLS OWNS Battle Mountain’s Mills Pharmacy, which was the only place in town I could find a “Battle Mountain” T-shirt for sale. It had a cartoon of a mining car filled with nuggets of something oddly brown that are either shining or stinking, depending on how you interpret the lines radiating from it. Doug is a major civic booster; he has a pet project he thinks can help turn the town’s fortunes around.
Out at the airstrip are a few vintage airplanes. They just need a little restoration, Doug figures, and they could become the centerpiece of a Battle Mountain museum. His concept is something called “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles,” celebrating Battle Mountain’s storied history involving all three transportation modes.
Trains, I understood. Battle Mountain was built by the railroads. What about planes?
Amelia Earhart, he said, once stopped here to refuel during a solo transcontinental autogiro flight.
Okaaaay. And automobiles?
Doug studied his shoes.
The town of Carlin, he said, which is real nearby, “was the home of the first Datsun dealership in Nevada.”
I let this marinate in the silence.
“Well,” Doug said, “you got to go with what you got.”
HANG A LEFT at Battle Mountain’s only sort-of traffic light (it blinks red twenty-four hours a day), cross the railroad tracks, follow the big red arrows, and you’re at Donna’s Battle Mountain Ranch. An enormous parking lot accommodates eighteen-wheelers, which tend to park outside for about twenty minutes at a time with the engines running. Donna’s Battle Mountain Ranch, open twenty-four hours a day, Visa and MasterCard accepted, ATM on the premises, is probably the most successful retail business in town.
One hundred dollars an hour, three girls on call, take your pick: the one who is a little skinny, the one who is a little big, or the one who is a little old. They all seem nice and friendly and accommodating. It’s all perfectly legal.
I was here only because I was ordered to come. When I asked Gene Sullivan, one of the three county commissioners, where I should go in town, he’d nodded solemnly in the direction of the railroad tracks. “Whorehouse,” he said.
I figured he must have had his reasons. Probably he knew that the management would express its gratitude to the town that sustains it, and respect for the locals who are open enough to expose their vulnerability in the timeless transaction of the hungry heart.
The locals are louts and creeps, said Paula Navar, day manager, who tends bar beneath a painting of a voluptuous nude.
“They raise hell,” she said. Most of the clients at Donna’s Ranch are transients, drivers en route from one place to another. Paula said they’re swell.
“They’re gentlemen. It’s the locals, when they come in, who cause the most trouble. They just don’t know any better. With them it’s ‘whore’ this and ‘whore’ that. Listen, I know whores. I’ve worked with whores. These ladies are not whores.”
A middle-aged redhead with big glasses, Paula said she loves her job and loves and respects her bosses, if not the town.
Paula considers herself an outcast in Battle Mountain—an attractive single mother, perennially under suspicion by Battle Mountain wives as a potential home wrecker. She finds this funny.
“I don’t want their husbands. I don’t want to be married to Billy Bob.”
Evening was approaching and it was almost time to leave, but I had one more place to visit. The literature about Battle Mountain said the sunsets are spectacular, if viewed from the prime sunset-viewing spot. So I went. I was alone, at the top of a hill, Battle Mountain behind me, squinting westward as the Earth wheeled and the sun began to sink behind the Shoshones.
The clouds were like shredded gauze, and slowly they glowed a resplendent, fiery orange against the baby-blue sky, outlined like the beard of a disapproving Celtic god. It all seemed beautiful and humbling, out there at the famous sunset-viewing site, above the no dumping sign riddled with buckshot, beside the placard authorizing acceptance of “municipal solid waste,” “construction and demolition debris,” “tires,” “dead animals,” “medical waste,” and “non-friable asbestos,” out there alone with nothing but my thoughts and a disquieting fragrance carried on the west wind, out there at the dump.
ALAS, THE EARTH kept wheeling. September 11 came and went, and everything you have just read became impossible to publish. Which is why I have returned, with a new mission. A rescue mission.
Seattle photographer Brian Smale arrived the day before me and began shooting on his own. He knew this was about the Armpit of America, but no one had told him about the new mission. So, when we finally meet up, Brian Smale is all smiles.
“This is easy!” he says. “This is like fishing with poison!”
Oh, man.
Karen Davis is the owner and chief hairstylist of Stewart’s Styling Salon, a full-service beauty parlor that also sells china figurines, candles, clocks, leather jackets, celebrity posters, and underpants.
“It’s a small town,” says Karen, “so you have to diversify or you’ll never make it.” She is forty-two, a Kate Winslet type, and she grew up in Battle Mountain and raised her children here. She is smart, sophisticated, the kind of woman who could succeed anywhere, but who has chosen to succeed here. I have decided she is to be my first triumphal interview in the Battle Mountain Reclamation Project.
So, it’s a pretty okay place, then?
“There a lot of good people here,” she says, measuredly. “There’s a lot to be said for living in the wide-open desert. People who can’t see the beauty here are lacking something in themselves.”
So, it’s a great place, then?
Karen says it can be a little difficult for people like her and her husband, who don’t drink or gamble and who like culture and fine dining and nice clothes. But, she quickly adds, there’s plenty to do when you’re raising kids, because you are involved in their school activities.
Her kids are almost grown up, now?
“Yes.”
And?
“And I want out of here so bad I could scream.”
IT IS NOT coincidence that I have returned to this place during the week of October 1–6. This is to be Battle Mountain’s finest hour. The town has been chosen to host an international event, the world championship human-powered vehicle race, in which competitors attempt to set a land-speed record on recumbent bicycles. The trials take place every night near dusk, out on Highway 305, just outside of town.
There are only a few dozen spectators, but it’s a spectacular sight. The bikes are sleek. They look like bullets, encased in plastic aerodynamic shells, and they reach speeds of almost 80 mph, whizzing nearly soundlessly across the finish line, faster than you could ever imagine an engineless vehicle moving.
Afterward, I
collar Matt Weaver, the bike racer surfer dude from California who started the event several years ago, and asked him what factor, or combination of factors, led him to choose, of all places on Earth, Battle Mountain.
Basically, Weaver explains, building up enormous speed on a bike requires a very long stretch of straight road, almost six miles. But it has to be more than straight. It has to be straight and flat, with virtually no gradient. So he got in his car, with sophisticated measuring instruments on the seat beside him, driving thousands of miles looking for a high enough level of flatness, on a flatness meter.
“So, I’m, like, wow, I’m never gonna find this, six miles of road flat enough,” he says, “and then suddenly, I am on this stretch, and it says it’s level one, and then level two, and then level three, and I’d never seen a level three, and then four, and five, and ding ding ding!”
So he chose Battle Mountain because it had a boring road?
“Very, very, very boring!” Matt corrects. But that’s not all, he says. It had to be a road that could be closed down easily for the races, he says, so it couldn’t be in a place that’s used a lot.
So it had to be a very, very, very boring road in a very, very, very boring place?
“Exactly!”
The reclamation project is not going well at all. In a funk, I find myself shambling over to the most depressing place in town, the cemetery, where I notice something odd. The most recent headstone I can find is from 1988. Have Battle Mountaineers stopped dying? Is boredom some sort of elixir?
It makes no sense. I begin to explore, and finally, I literally stumble over the truth. It’s a stone marker level with the ground. All the newer graves have no tombstones. They’re easy to miss from a distance.
Here’s one with two festive helium balloons tethered to it, dancing in the wind. It’s the final resting place of Robert Nevarez, died 1999. There’s a handwritten note tucked into his bucket of plastic flowers, and I consider reading it, but I haven’t the heart.
The balloons say happy 18th birthday!
Which is when I realize I’ve been going about this all wrong. This isn’t about architecture, roads, weather, cultural opportunities, or ugly little birds.
The Fiddler in the Subway Page 9