The Lonliest Road

by Alexander Cockburn

She imparted this info without self-pity as she took my $29.50, saying that business in Austin, Nevada, last fall had been brisk and the 57 motel beds available in the old mining town had been filled with crews laying fiber-optic cable along the side of the road, which, in the case of Austin, meant putting 20 feet under the graveyard that skirts the road just west of town.

Earlier that day, driving from Utah through the Great Basin along U.S.-50, billed as "the loneliest road," I'd seen these cables, blue and green and maybe two inches in diameter, sticking out of the ground on the outskirts of Ely, Nev., as if despairing at the prospect of the Great Salt Lake desert stretching ahead, through league after league of sagebrush.

So we can run fiber optic cable through the western deserts but not put enough money in the hands of 81-year-olds so they don't have to pull all-night shifts clerking in motels? What else is new? At least the lady in Austin, Nevada, was spry and interested in life, refreshed by her intermittent naps on the couch in the sitting room of the reception office, dipping into her book, with the motel cat to keep her company, across the road from the International Cafe, which serves good breakfasts and decent drinks from a magnificent wooden bar that came round the Horn from Europe back in Austin's mining heyday in the 1870s.

People who drive or lecture their way through the American interior usually notice the same thing, which is that you can have rational conversations with people about the Middle East, George W. Bush and other topics certain to arouse unreasoning passion among sophisticates on either coast. Robert Fisk describes exactly this experience in a recent piece for The Independent, for which he works as a renowned reporter and commentator on mostly Middle Eastern affairs.

Fisk claims on the basis of a sympathetic hearing for his analysis -- unsparing of Sharon's current rampages -- on campuses in Iowa and elsewhere in the Midwest, that things are changing in Middle America. After 25 years of zig-zagging my way across the states, I can't say I agree. It's always been like that, and even though polls purport to establish that 90 percent of all Middle Americans claim to have had personal exchanges with Jesus and reckon George W. to be the reincarnation of Abe Lincoln, the reality is otherwise. Twenty years ago, Fisk would have met with lucid views in Iowa on the Palestinian question, plus objective assessments of the man billed at that time as Lincoln's reincarnation, Ronald Reagan.

Some attitudes do change. White people are more afraid of cops than they used to be. A good old boy in South Carolina I've bought classic cars from for a quarter of a century was a proud special constable back in the early '80s. These days, if a police cruiser passes him on the highway, he'll turn off at the next intersection and take another road. Reason: A few years ago, a couple of state cops stopped him late at night, frisked him and accused him of being drunk. This profoundly religious Baptist told them truthfully he'd never consumed alcohol in his life. Then they said he must be a drug dealer. He reckons the only reason they didn't plant some cocaine in his car was that he told them to check him out with the local police chief, an old friend.

I know from the stats that a lot of Americans are poor, so how come I'm often the only fellow on the road, or in town, in an old car, aside from some of the Mexican field workers in California for whom such cars are home? Most everyone seems to be in a late-model pick-up or at least a nice, new Honda Civic. I know, I know. The poor are out there, lots of them, but the whole place just doesn't seem to feel as poor as it often did in the early '80s, in the Bush recession. Then, day after day you could drive through towns that felt like graveyards, with no prospect of fiber optic cable running under them.

Take Grants, on 1-40 in New Mexico, west of Albuquerque, N.M., which became the nation's self-proclaimed "uranium capital" in the '50s after Paddy Martinez heard descriptions of what uranium ore looked like and led the mining prospectors to the yellow rocks he'd been looking at down the years. The mines closed, and I recall from the early 1980s, Grants, N.M., looked sadly becalmed, with its Uranium Cafe and souvenirs and motels from the great days of Route 66. The audio in the Mining Museum still speaks plaintively about radiation's bad rep, despite the fact that in modest amounts it's good for you, and there was much more of it around when the world was young.

Well, 66 nostalgia is still strong in Grants, N.M., but aside from the Lee Ranch coal mine, the juice in Grants's economy now comes in large part from three prisons, one fed, one state and one private.

No wonder people are nervous of cops. There are so many prisons for the cops to send you to. So many roads where a sign suddenly comes into view, advertising Correctional Facility and warning against hitchhikers. I was driving through Lake Valley in eastern Nevada along highway 93, with Mount Wheeler looking to the east. Listening to the radio and Powell's grotesque meanderings, I was thinking, why not just relocate the whole West Bank to this bit of Nevada where the Palestinians could have their state at last, financed by a modest tax on the gambling industry? The spaces are so vast, you wouldn't even need a fence. Then reality returned in the form of the usual sign heralding a prison around the next bend.

Heading west along U.S.-50 from Austin, Nevada, I came to Graves' Point, the site of fine petroglyphs. A sign informed me that "The act of making a petroglyph was a ritual performed by a group leader. Evidence suggests that there existed a powerful taboo against doodling." The graffiti problem: Some things never change. On the other hand, they do. Ten thousand years ago, those hunters chiseling the rocks were in the age of a vast sea. Maybe 700 feet deep south from the petroglyph ridge was once beachfront property. The world was warmer then, and we're heading that way once more, from natural causes. To leave you on an upbeat note: At least the natural radiation is on the wane.