Learning took time; four years in medical school, and another four in training at a hospital. Oh, they let us out now and then, blinking and coughing in the LA sun. And every free day (what few there were), I’d run away, to find some ice or snow, to ski. I remember a day in January, my first year there: 95F outside, just finished with a six-hour exam covering three weeks of intensive lecturing on Cardiology. I raced home, and began to work on my roommate, who’d never been skiing, who thought snow was something you packed around your antenna to show the neighbors you’d been to the mountains (a great LA tradition).
“Look, it’s only 900 miles; we can be there in 13-14 hours”
“Where is this place?”
“Sun Valley.”
Sun Valley … I thought that was out by Tujunga!”
“No, no, no! It’s up in Idaho. World famous ski area – remember Sonje Henie?”
“I thought she was an ice skater.”
“Whatever. My sister lives there. We can drive all night and be up there ready to hit Baldy by the time the lifts open!” Come on; it’ll take your mind off all this studying.”
This was 1971, when Nevada had no speed limit, and gas was 25 cents a gallon. Put those two facts into my 483 cubic inch ’66 Dodge Charger with a fold down rear seat, and LA to Ketchum really was an overnight trip.
“But I don’t know how to ski!” Dave whined.
“Relax,” I said. “They’ve got 200 of the finest instructors in the world there” I neglected to tell him, of course, that unless he was fluent in Austrian, all their ministrations would be worthless. I also didn’t tell him about the great dearth of all night gas stations between Las Vegas and Ely. No matter. I needed someone to spell me at the wheel for this five-day, 2000 mile road trip.
We took off at three in the afternoon – just early enough to get past San Bernardino before the afternoon LA rush home began. Cruising past Barstow, we hit the headlights and started searching the AM radio for something other than static. We didn’t find anything, but that didn’t matter; we were free, with no cadaver to dissect and nothing to memorize for five whole days. Rolling into Vegas at eight pm, Dave tried to talk me into playing the tables. I said no, not because I had no money to lose (which was true), but because we had no time to waste. I did compromise by agreeing to sit in at a cheap buffet – an inch thick slab of roast beef with all the extras – a bargain at $2.95.
Turning off the Interstate a half-hour out of town, we headed north on US 93. I’d never been through this section of Nevada before. I had assumed it would be like all the other roads throughout the West, where you usually see a town, a ranch, a mobile home, something at least every 30-40 miles. But here – it was 120 miles from Vegas to Alamo through complete desolation. Even the sage brush looked lonely, individually highlighted in the endless high beam from my Dodge. Dave had spent his whole life in Long Island and Los Angeles, and he was totally wired by the emptiness.
We had gassed up in Baker, but the neon nightmare of the Vegas Stripe numbed us into forgetting to check the fuel gauge as we drove through North Las Vegas past Jerry’s Silver Nugget. On into the night we sped, slurping the Persian Gulf prime at 15 miles per. As we turned off I-15 onto old 93, Dave stirred enough out of his reverie (induced by a combination of the blank panorama and Brook Benton’s “Rainy Night in Georgia” sputtering in from KTWO in Casper, Wyoming) to rustle the Rand McNally from under his seat.
Flicking on the under-dash light, he mumbled, “Does Nevada come before or after New Jersey? Hmm, I though Nebraska was a town, not a state!” I was all set to berate his bicoastal provincialism, accuse him of confusing Idaho with Iowa, when he sat bolt upright and said, quite loudly for the compact space we sat in, “Jesus!”
At his outburst, my elbows locked the steering wheel; I started to see lights flashing, and dropped our speed a bit to just under 80 mph.
“Sorry. Did I wake you?” he said. “Look – there aren’t any towns on this map until Alamo!”
“So?”
“Well, that’s about 80 miles from here. How much gas we got left?”
The tank was a quarter full.
In our sleepless state, it took us forty miles to argue out the merits of slowing down to 60 to conserve fuel, versus trying to hit Alamo before midnight, when, theoretically, a gas station might close. Finally, we decided that with two more towns, Caliente and Pioche, 10 and 20 miles beyond, we should slow down, enjoy the countryside, and hope the road went downhill.
Alamo proved a bust. The one station there closed at eight pm.
“How much gas now?!”
“We just hit the bottom line – maybe a gallon or two left.”
“Think there’s a station in Caliente?”
“Well, we either park here all night until this one opens, or see what’s up ahead, right?”
“Sounds good to me!”
Caliente sits at the bottom of an arroyo, a one-horse town bracketed by railroad crossings. In the middle was a blazing Chevron sign, giving enough light for the whole town.
“Looks like it’s open!”
“Ah, you saw Vegas. These bastards here burn lights just to keep the juice flowing out of Lake Mead. It’s their patriotic duty to keep the Colorado River rolling.”
But praise the Lord and pass the petrol, they were busy pumping gas – the only place open between Vegas and Ely, 120 miles to the north.
[To Be Cont’d]