Crossing Nevada

Thirty-five years ago, almost to the day, I made the same drive I’m now making, rising up out of California and crossing Nevada on my way east. I was leaving home for graduate school and a future whose shape I couldn’t begin to guess.

My dad chose the 1967 Plymouth Valiant I was driving. It had a shimmy at about 62 miles per hour, and I had no faith in its radiator for radiators had often failed our family. Climbing the Golconda Summit, I remember watching the needle in the temperature gauge climb, too. We crested the summit — the Valiant and I — just below boiling point.

It’s hard to imagine the world in which that car was new. I think now of all the things I traveled without — credit card, cellphone, iPod, audio books — and the experience seems almost Conestogal, though it was anything but. The temptation is to jump to the end of the story — safe arrival in Princeton and the 35 years since. But, as always, it’s the passage that matters.

What I think about now is what I couldn’t have felt then about the landscape I was crossing. I was just back from a year in London, and my head was stuffed with Dante and Virgil. It would not have occurred to me that if America is a kid bound across country for graduate school, it is also a pair of horses and a pipe corral in an indigo valley with a dust-devil whirling up in the Nevada distance.

Now I wonder why, in 1975, I didn’t turn off in the Starr Valley or make my way down into the Ruby Mountains and settle under the stars for a few nights, or perhaps for a lifetime. I wonder that even as I pass up the opportunity again. Turning north at Wells, I realize that I’m retracing an older route — the road my family took when we moved to California from Iowa in 1966. As I bask in the late light on Route 93, heading toward Twin Falls, Idaho, I imagine passing a 1963 Ford Galaxie with two adults and four kids heading the opposite direction. Another hour, and I’m in Idaho, dropping down into well-watered valleys where the hay has just been cut and baled, hay of an almost theological quality standing in perfect, square bales, waiting to be stacked for winter.