That evening we pored over maps. There was no route across the desert that was good—only some were worse than others. Everyone advised us to take the “Pike’s Peak Ocean-to-Ocean Highway,” which follows the Southern Pacific Railroad (at intervals), and is considered a “safety-first” way.
I never see that word “highway” that I don’t want to laugh! A “cow-path” would more nearly describe any that we traveled in Idaho or Nevada (not to mention a few others).
XIII
NEVADA AND THE DESERT
We did not look forward with an atom of pleasure to this part of the trip. We dreaded it. It simply had to be done. The officials told us that nearly all the tourists shipped their cars to Reno. That was valuable information to give us, when not a train was running west. The clerk pointed out a dried-up little woman of seventy, and said, with a withering glance at me: “See that old lady? She has driven her own car across the desert twice this summer!” Well, you know how such remarks make you feel. Not that you care a—bit what that clerk thought of you, but you don’t like to realize that you are a molly-coddle or a coward. Besides, my husband had laughed at my apprehensions, and that wouldn’t do either. So I thought of our good fortune so far, of our slogan, and of the old party of seventy, and I gave my pride a hitch and said, “Let’s start”—and we did.
Our route lay over the same road back through Brigham, a beautiful drive that far, then it turned northwest, over the northern part of the Great Salt Lake desert, ninety miles to Snowville. The sand was so deep that we crawled most of the way. The sun scorched our skin and eyes until they felt dry as ashes. We had left the railroad and telegraph poles and had but a single-file path through the sand, with chuck-holes every few feet. When the wind blew it felt as if an oven-door had been opened in your face, and the snow-white sand covered everything, including the tracks in the road, which was not pleasant. Nothing was to be seen except the endless sand, dry sagebrush, cactus, and an occasional prairie-dog. We met but two cars that day. I can conceive of nothing more utterly desolate and God-forsaken than the desert. There is a silence of deathlike stillness that gets on the nerves, and the sameness is wearisome.
We were glad to see Snowville, although Snowville was not much to see. It consisted of one street, with possibly twenty houses, a garage, two stores, and a few trees. The people who owned the grocery-store rented rooms. They were kind and hospitable, and made us comfortable as they could. One cannot pick and choose in the desert. You are glad and thankful to find anything that looks like a bed and water. The woman told us that the two stalwart young men were her sons, just returned from service; one was a major. They were running the garage and helping in the store. The whole family were educated, intelligent people, except the old man, whose vocabulary was limited to “You bet!” and “By heck!” What they could find in life in such surroundings, with nothing, absolutely nothing, to commend the place, was hard to conceive. And yet the mother told me that the women in the village had done more Red Cross work during the war than those of any town of its size in the state, and they had oversubscribed their quota in the Liberty Loans! “The war did not seem very real to us ’way out here,” she said. “What we read in the papers seemed like a novel. But when my boys went it brought it nearer home to me. We were so far from the busy world our lives were too limited to realize what was going on across the seas.” I could understand that, for one day of the desert made me feel an isolation that I never had felt in the middle of the Atlantic.
They had a bathroom; but if the water was being used in the garage or kitchen, it would not run upstairs. Someone had driven miles away to get some meat for supper; so it was quite late before we had anything to eat. Fried meat, fried eggs, fried potatoes—all soaked in grease; no milk or butter, and the coffee and tea we could not drink.
Across the street was a little patch of green corn. I went to the house and asked the woman if she would sell me a few ears. She told me that they were leaving the next morning—moving away—as her husband could not make a living. He was a professor of languages from Massachusetts, a cultivated gentleman! When he rode up on horseback I went out and shook hands with him, and laughingly said:
“I am your long-lost sister from Massachusetts.”
He was off his horse and bowing in a Chesterfieldian manner. “You are most welcome, madam; but, alas! we have nothing to offer you.”