Trips ‘05: North

Trip: v., to move from one place to another; a journey

If you were an investor, and I were a stock, you could have bought low in the summer of 2004. A decade-long run of bad decisions and poor timing had resulted in spotty financial performance and generally poor emotional indicators, with properties including a willfully stalled journalistic career, an in-progress novel collapsing under its own weight and an unwisely discarded position in the academic futures market. Nonetheless, some analysts believed the fundamentals still looked good, with the combination of a steady-handed wife and a dynamic son sure to force swift improvements in overall performance.

By August, I had studied this data, and studied again, and it became clear to me, precisely clear, what was needed: a vacation. Not just any vacation, but a vacation that would accomplish everything, contributing to my professional advancement, artistic glory, regional rootedness, fatherly pride and wedded bliss. We set out for a writer's conference in Squaw Valley and decided, along the way there and back, to Discover Nevada, my home state, whose northern eight-tenths were represented on my mental map by a picture of a tiny, frightened reptile and the words "Here be lizards." The unexplored road, because it was unexplored, was paved with hope, the very American hope that getting away can change the equation, and that if you just take your eyes off the numbers for a moment, they'll be better by the time you look down.

We arrive in Tonopah on August 6, 2004, and park behind the Hotel Mizpah, which is padlocked, and, by all appearances, not serving lunch. One can buy it, says the sign, for $1.65 million. I will later learn that Howard Hughes got married here. The building is massive in the way that buildings are never massive anymore—that is, it gives the clear impression of mass, walls thick with great gray bricks, rough-finished, quarry-fresh. It seems like a good buy. But the Hotel Mizpah is not serving lunch. We head to the street. Nobody is serving lunch. One block, two. Here is a restaurant that serves Mexican food, but the restaurant doesn't look quite right. Here is a McDonald's. Can one really go to McDonald's in Tonopah? What is it we're looking for? The Hotel Mizpah would have been perfect.

It is hot.

"Let's go home," says my 3-year-old. He has maintained a monastic calm the first 200 miles from Vegas. He is a drummer. He hears music, I am certain, in his head. He sees it in the passing mountaintops. He is not one to complain unless he sees that he must take matters in hand. "Let's go home," he says again.

The buildings, the mass, the age of it all. I am in awe that people came to live here, built a town here, dug into mountainsides and quarried brick, dug into other mountainsides and found gold. I am in awe that metal can be precious, that it can drive men to sweat and dig and build a thousand Tonopahs. If I were more open to such thirsts, what might I have become? The heirs of these men build my city even today, and I build nothing. Civilization owes everything to the rapacious. They dig and build and, just before they consume each other, they make laws. Given a cookie, my son would break it in four and distribute it to four friends. I worry about him.

For the third time he asks to go home.

"Listen," I say. "We brought you on vacation. We came all the way to this—"

"We came," he says, "to nuffing."

Beneath the sand, a thousand miners roll, and roll again, and sigh—"True enough," they sigh—and fall silent and still. They know their business, after all; you lose more than you win. Some dig glory holes; others, their own graves. Some die not knowing what they've done, and some don't really care. Perhaps they came here not to build, but to survive. My son has spoken, and all around me, Tonopah, a ghost, can do nothing but agree.

In Carson City, there is a train museum. There is a bar called Mo & Sluggo's. There is a coffeehouse called the Comma Café, where we eat turkey sandwiches on open-mic night. My son watches the singers, rapt; he taps out rhythms with straws on the rim of his Sprite. He catches a singer's eye. Afterward, the singer stops by, says hi, gives my son a high five. "That guy was nice to me," says my son. A night later, we return. The Comma Café is packed. Amplifiers are being plugged in. Electric guitars are being tuned. A young woman is selling CDs and passing out earplugs. We tell our son that perhaps we ought to leave, but there are drums on the stage, and he has no intention of leaving. He does not put his earplugs in. He drums ferociously. He does not drink his Sprite. The band is called Out of Mouth—Christian rock, as it turns out, but to us it just sounds like rock, good rock, really. The front man is charismatic, funny, fierce in his devotion to the songs he's singing. There is a long-haired, snake-slim fellow who alternates on the bongos and the trumpet and who spends the concert in that place athletes call the Zone, possessed by the flow of the music, consumed by the pleasure of making it and making it well. I think, at the moment, this is where my son is, too.

In Squaw Valley, we stay in the Olympic Village. In the center of the village is a large campfire. Each night we go sit by the fire. My son is courting a 9-year-old girl. He follows her everywhere. "Are you Shelby?" he asks. He has a 9-year-old cousin named Shelby, and she is his favorite person. The girl says no, she is not Shelby, but she seems to find the question charming. The girl's friend is having a birthday party, and my son winds up with a bowl of ice cream. He is saying hello to everyone. We apologize for him; in our family we do not advocate party crashing or educate our young to crash parties. The couple hosting the party does not mind. They offer us ice cream, too. Our son is now sitting in the 9-year-old girl's lap. Two teenage boys sit across the fire from him and chuckle. "This kid is so cool," they say.

The other parents around the fire have several children each. They know things, these people. We are told that our son would make a great candidate. We are told, and I quote: "The very traits that drive you crazy today are the traits that will make him special." Our son tries to leave with the 9-year-old girl's family. I pry him loose and carry him home on my shoulders.

My son is not listening to me. He is not listening to his mother. He will, however, listen to D.J. There is a band in Las Vegas called Island Tyme, a reggae band, and D.J. is the drummer. On Friday and Saturday evenings all summer long, my son has been watching D.J. drum at the edge of the little grass amphitheater at the District in Henderson. My son does not run around on the lawn with all the other kids; he sits down on the cement near the back of the bandstand, where he's got a perfect view of the drums. He sets up a few soda cups, grabs his straws, studies D.J.'s moves, catches the rhythm, plays. D.J. always notices my son; sometimes he smiles to him in the middle of a song. Between sets, he offers a high five. At the end of evenings, he offers his sticks. Now, 400 miles north of the District, my son is sprinting away from me, across the old Olympic Village. I call him once, I call him twice. I take out my cell phone. "I'm gonna call D.J.," I say, "and tell him you're not listening." My son stops in his tracks, turns, and comes back to me.

Richard Ford is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sportswriter and Independence Day. He was in Squaw Valley when I was in Squaw Valley, both of us in town for the writer's conference. I had really been looking forward to meeting Richard Ford. Here is my conversation with him.

Me: "I liked your story in The New Yorker."

Richard Ford: "Well, thank you. What's your name?"

Me: "Greg Miller."

Richard Ford: "Richard Ford."

Me: "You having a good week out here?"

Richard Ford: "Yeah, but I've got to go back to Maine. Things to do."

Me: "Back to business."

Richard Ford: "That's about what it is these days."

Me: "Must have been good to get away from it for a while."

Richard Ford: "Well, Maine's a pretty nice place."

Adam is the drummer for a Tahoe band called Blue Turtle Seduction, which, at the moment, is playing on a large stone outdoor stage at the Olympic Village. The Turtles play what one might call, if one felt the need to label such things, bluegrass-rock. The fiddlers and guitarists play in bare feet, and they play extraordinarily well, and as a listener you go back and forth between believing they are real hillbillies and deciding they are supremely well-educated musicians pretending to be hillbillies. Much of the music they play is, appropriately enough, about finding the time to get away: Make time move slow/ When it's all said and done/ There is still so much to do/ Under the sun. My son climbs a small wall behind the stage and stands behind Adam, studying his movements, absorbing the rhythm. I take my son off the wall. He climbs back on. I take him down. I tell him that Adam probably does not appreciate him being there. He climbs back up. At the break, Adam undermines my stern parenting by inviting my boy down from the wall, handing him a pair of sticks, and inviting him to drum. All the Turtles gather around, smiling at my son, chatting with him, welcoming him to a fraternity I can never hope to join.

Stephen Koch is the author of The Modern Library Writer's Workshop, the former chairman of the Columbia University graduate creative writing program and one of the nation's most respected authorities on the art of writing. He is also fascinated with the study of Russia, which for years was my field (and, I thought, my future). He has written a book, Double Lives, about Stalin's seduction of intellectual Europe. One of his heroes is my hero, too: the great American diplomat and thinker, George Kennan. Stephen Koch is in Squaw Valley as we speak, and it is only understandable—isn't it?—that I entertain the notion that getting to know such a person will change everything for me.

My son and I are playing football catch on the stone courtyard outside the Squaw Valley cable car when Stephen Koch passes by. He waves hello, I wave hello back. He watches as he walks. My son chases down a pass, laughing all the way, scoops the ball up off the stone, flings it back to me. It is just past five, the sun hangs low behind me, my shadow is long, my boy is golden. Tomorrow Stephen Koch will catch me as I leave a lecture. He will smile. "That's a great kid you've got," he will say.

My wife has met a woman named Olga Andreyev Carlisle. Olga Carlisle is the granddaughter, on her father's side, of the great pre-revolutionary Russian writer Leonid Andreyev. On her mother's side, she is the granddaughter of Victor Chernov, who was the leader of the Socialist Revolutionaries and a chief rival to Vladimir Lenin. Now in her mid-70s, Olga Carlisle is a renowned literary journalist and the author of an extraordinary memoir, Far from Russia. She was the primary force behind the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago in the West. Olga Carlisle is an artist, a translator, a Russian woman who married an aspiring American writer. My wife, who is an artist, a translator, and a Russian woman who married an aspiring American writer, is quite delighted to have met Olga Carlisle.

Olga Carlisle invites us to the house where she and her husband are staying, a chalet-style place amid towering pines with a view of a green-gold meadow, and we sit down on the deck to cookies and tea. My son is offered a cluster of grapes, a slice of melon, but he quietly declines. The whole trip he has eaten little but steamed white sticky rice at a place called Mamasake, which he loves for its drummer-friendly chopsticks. Olga Carlisle tells us of her adventures with Solzhenitsyn, whose hard head made him as impossible for his friends as for his enemies. She tells of her uncle, Daniil Andreyev, a poet who was imprisoned by Stalin and became one of Russia's great mystic writers. She tells of her Parisian childhood in a family of exiles, listening to kitchen poetry recitations from the great Marina Tsvetaeva, who happens to be my wife's favorite poet. My son hops down from the deck, wanders into the side yard, finds a basketball, a brook, a shallow pond. He bounces the basketball, wets his hands in the brook, reaches for a rock and falls in the pond. We leave 1930s Paris behind.

There are dry clothes in the car; Olga Carlisle gives us a towel. We change our boy in the Carlisle chalet. We all return to our cookies and tea, upon the deck, beneath the pines, my wife and I and our boy and Olga Andreyev Carlisle, once again far from Russia, discussing the joys of parenting and the finer points of the pediatric diet.

We are at High Camp, atop the mountain. There is a pool and an ice rink and a great pine deck from which we look out over the valley. My son, who is doing pull-ups on the deck's rail, acquires a long, brown splinter along the lifeline of his palm. My wife takes his hand.

"Can I look at it?" she asks.

My son pulls his hand away. "No," he says, "you can't."

"Can I just look with my eyes?" she asks.

"You can't even look with your eyes shut."

I have been attending lectures, really I have. Lectures and workshops and little group conversations on the finer points of creating literature and editing literature and sending it off into the world. It all feels familiar, cribbed from some analogous quest in my past—Outsmart your opponent on the tennis court! Master your depression! It's like listening to "My Country 'Tis of Thee" and hearing in your head the words to "God Save the Queen." I have lost the studious instinct, the faith that something new can be said, that people who don't know you can dole out wisdom in lists and maps and shiny verbal nuggets and set you on your proper path. What I want is accompaniment, a friend to watch me on the way, someone with whom I can match wits and laugh and test cherished assumptions. I want to applaud and be applauded (hmmm), critique wisely and be wisely critiqued. I want—this business has its practical side, after all—to swap connections. There is, though, this thing I do, this peculiar emotional scat dancing—See me! Join me! Betcha can't catch me!—that keeps me always three feet from the people I'm reaching out to. In the end, there are my wife and my son, whose motion I seem to understand, and who seem, somehow, to understand mine.

On our final day in Squaw Valley, we take a stroll along the foot of the mountain. As we pass a chairlift, my boy takes a sharp turn to the right and heads uphill. Up he goes, and further still. We follow him, catch him, stay a step behind him. He scrambles up boulders, through dry and prickly brush, over a million fallen pine needles, legs churning and tireless, to a rock outcropping far above the village, and he stops, and we stop, and we share a bottle of water and look down at the beauty of a land that is not home.

We make one more stopover in Carson City on the way home, and eat dinner in a restaurant called Red's Old 395 Grill. From the patio speakers we hear the Go-Go's. They are singing "Vacation." My son is drumming with straws. A guy comes by, smiling beneath his mustache, and says, "Hey, what've you got here, the next Phil Collins?" Then he says, "Hopefully he'll be just as successful." George Harrison sings, "I've Got my Mind Set on You." Whatever-his-name-is sings "One Night in Bangkok." I took this trip to restore my faith in the future, and I have wound up, on the last night of my travels, somewhere in mid-1985.

The speakers go silent. I sip at a brown beer. At the bar inside, the live music begins. My son takes my hand and leads me inside. We stand next to the guitarist. A white-haired lady hands my son a fistful of dollars and whispers in his ear. He stuffs the money in the musician's empty pint glass.

(A) There is a thunderstorm that always seems to be one mile ahead of us. There is half of a modular home that has fallen onto the roadside. Between Carson City and Virginia City: a slim, empty street named for Mark Twain. Somewhere south of Yerington there is a sign for the Rock-Chuck Gallery: "Come and Visit Our Clean Restrooms." There is Walker Lake, still and brackish. We park and walk clear down to the algae; we pick up a souvenir stone. There is the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, Hawthorne Detachment. On a flat brown plain at waterside, a hundred strange, bunkerish buildings, close to the ground and full of God-knows-what. Fifty-one miles east on Highway 361, Berlin Ichthyosaurus State Park. We are behind two Landstar trucks and a Dutchman trailer, where even the passing lane feels impassible. The clouds here have bottoms as smooth as tabletops. A man in white is walking a bicycle alongside the road. Where is he going? He turns toward a town called Mina. I guess he's going to Mina.

(B) There is the Bunny Ranch. "Look," my wife says to my son. "A bunny ranch." I tell my wife that the Bunny Ranch is not a bunny ranch. A hand-painted sign: "Nevada Dept. of Wildlife and Washoe County District Court Killed the Lobster." In Goldfield, we stop. The streets are deserted. We peek into the chamber of commerce, where a mustachioed man tells us that Wyatt Earp once lived here. Lunch at the Mozart Club. My son orders a root beer and drums on it. The waiter tells us we're giving him too much sugar. Then he asks us if we want to stay in Goldfield and manage the place. I walk the streets with my son on my shoulders. Down a dirt road, the Santa Fe Saloon, founded 1903. Across from the saloon, a gorgeously dilapidated shack ready—ready for years, one imagines—to collapse upon itself. I aim the camera but my wife tells me to save my film. She's seen plenty of picturesque dilapidation in the Russian countryside. I tell her that for a Las Vegan, dilapidation is refreshing. On Boiling Pot Road, there are houses surrounded by mountains of rusting junk. I do not find them refreshing.

(C) We have almost caught the thunderstorm. A single shaft of light lands on a mountaintop. There is a green field under a gunmetal sky. A rainbow. This is just off Fleur de Lis Road. Our son is silent behind us. We are listening to our new Blue Turtle Seduction CD. Suddenly, I miss my boy. I reach behind me and hold my hand out for five and he almost tears my arm off. Beatty. Past the Sourdough Saloon. I feel home drawing near. I feel the weight of all the questions our trip has delayed but failed to answer. At the Happy Burro Trading Post, I spill gas all over myself. My son thinks he's done something wrong. "I'm gonna tell D.J. I'm good!" he exclaims.

(D) Clark County is huge. "Desert National Wildlife Area," I tell my son. "Bighorn sheep live up there." He likes the sound of this sentence. He repeats it. We make a chant of it, then a song. Bad jokes: "Central Nevada is sparsely populated. Central California is parsley populated." We read road signs aloud: "Prison Area: Hitchhiking prohibited." We pass a slow-moving truck from Terrible Herbst. We speak to each other in the language of our cats, who are waiting at home. Meow? Meow. We sing, in Russian, "Khochu domoi," which means, "I want to go home." We sing and we sing, "Khochu domoi." We sing until our throats are sore.

And then it dawns on me: We mean it.