Monday after breakfast I peeled the frozen towel off the windshield

and set off

for the High Road’s

96 miles to Winnemucca from SR 447,

an always [mostly anyway] great drive I’ve been making since the seventies although this time

found the town much changed – I came up to West Winnemucca Boulevard at the Griddle [now more than ever!], made a right and saw that the guys who used to work on my trucks were gone…just an empty building, empty sign. OK Tire, which had been there since at least when Rick got our flat from the Sheldon Range fixed in 1967, was shuttered, the old Ace Reliable Hardware and Ridley’s [formerly Raley’s] boarded up, closed…more Mexican restaurants scattered in among the franchises [a hopeful sign] but at the DMV where I’ve been doing business since they were part of the Assessor’s Office in the old City Hall the new [and completely confusing, given an hour’s anecdotal evidence] online system and its geographic restrictions now require a person from Gerlach to go to Fallon or Reno, advance appointments only. Winnemucca [appointments only as well though the website was confusing on that score] no mo’ even

though by the way I’d come it’s fifteen or twenty miles closer than either of the designated alternatives but fortunately – as has always been the case here – the supervisor was helpfully accommodating and, making a geographic exception, found me an available appointment only an hour out. She also told me the Ridley’s had moved  across from the Humboldt [now Great Basin] Sun [still there!] to the former Albertson’s location where back in the distant day they used to smoke their own bacon which we’d take up to Radar, yum…so off I went, finding Tylenol for the knee and the illegal-in-California de-icer windshield fluid as well as, back across the tracks at Love’s, gas nearly two dollars cheaper than Benicia before my appointment, albeit delayed due to the complexities of the new system and special needs of the several people ahead of me, most of whom seemed to be somehow connected. Mine was just a routine DL renewal, sweetly [bittersweetly as after forty years I won’t be able to come here again…if I’m even renewable at 88] and easily accomplished, putting me back on the Boulevard and east

to Ben’s Discount Liquors to find the elusive Dos Equis no one in Colorado or Cali seems to stock. By 12:34 I was over the river and RR bridges [those dots?]

and turned west onto the Sulphur Road, paved at first [but not for long though for the 56 miles

to Hycroft it’s a virtual interstate]. Crossing Desert Valley I caught up to a westbound freight

making 65 mph, so waited at Jungo to cross. As the train had to slow for the grade over

Antelope Summit I was past the Mine and had had lunch in Sulphur by the time

it highballed on through, never to be seen again as afterwards less good roads

deviate from the tracks for awhile before, 44 miles on, they reach the pavement

and, not so very long after, I was at Wall Spring with enough time left to fit in a studio visit.

A bittersweet day as not only have I loved that drive but so many touchstones of our early days up here seem to be slipping away…erased, aging out, gone.

But we’ll still have Bad Bunny and, posthumously, Denis Johnson; “I’ve gone from rags to riches and back again, and more than once. Whatever happens to you, you put it on a page, work it into shape, cast it in a light. It’s not much different, really, from filming a parade of clouds across the sky and calling it a movie—although it has to be admitted that the clouds can descend, take you up, carry you to all kinds of places, some of them terrible, and you don’t get back where you came from for years and years.”