33

Nevada

I WOKE IN the night. I was cold. Thinking that the night would be warm like the day, I had only a sheet over me. Hastily, I located the duvet and snuggled down, remembering belatedly that we were in a desert, high maybe, but far from the ocean and therefore subject to extremes of temperature with hot dry days and bitterly cold nights and hot, dry summers and icy winters.

By seven in the morning, the sun was up and the apartment was uncomfortably warm. There was a cooling system called a ‘Swamp Cooler’, a large, ugly affair on the roof. This seemed to be the poor relation of the air-conditioning that we would enjoy later in California.

George went off to explode his bombs. Andy appeared in bathing trunks and not much else and we took the dogs down the wide, gravel approach to the lake. Our two ‘canines’ plunged into the green water with glee and Andy followed more gingerly: the water was still cool from the cold night but he was soon striking out between the boats moored near the jetties.

I sat nearby and could now see that the mountains across the water were higher than I had supposed in the darkness and were part of a red-brown range stretching east and south of the lake. I believe them to be part of the Monte Christo Range.

Andy came back. ‘There were some boys here last night,’ he observed. ‘Perhaps at the weekend…?’ He was missing his island companions but he was a gregarious boy and would soon make friends, crossing whatever barriers might arise. And I felt instinctively that there would be barriers.

There was another man living nearby who worked at the Hawthorne Army Munitions Plant and who had given George a lift so I had the car to get supplies. We go shopping, the Americans generally, and certainly the Nevadans, get supplies.

Andy and I went into Hawthorne. Although very ugly, the town had some good shops with a smattering of Native American craft work and paintings. I was told that there was an Indian reservation at the north end of Walker Lake but, disappointingly, we rarely saw any Native Americans.

It seemed that they were kept very strictly to their own land and this seemed a gross injustice to me but I soon discovered that this opinion is not one to be voiced in certain circles in Nevada.

We began to get to know other residents in the apartments. What a diverse group! In one, there was a tall, bronzed, muscled young man living with his equally bronzed and determined wife. His father, also bronzed and tall, picked him up each morning in a huge, red truck. They went off to their nearby silver mine which had closed in the 1930s as being ‘worked out’, but new technology meant that there were now ways of extracting the silver from the rocks and these two hard-working, hard-drinking men were sure that they were going to make a fortune.

Two girls, whom I took to be in their twenties but who turned out to be sixteen and seventeen, worked in El Capitano, departing in the evening wearing high heels and make-up but helping in the silver mine in the day. When did they sleep, I wondered?

A young couple, devout Baptists, lived below and to the right. During our time there, Babs gave birth to her second child. They had no health insurance and the cost of maternity care was such that she had had no antenatal care at all and only went in to the local(ish) hospital when her waters broke and she was well advanced in labour. She was back again in less than two hours, driven home by the Pastor of their church. Her husband could not afford to lose even a few hours work. This was rough, tough Nevada, not the easy living of California.

That evening, however, all the residents of the apartments were invited in to their home to sit in a circle on the floor holding hands, to thank God for Bab’s safe delivery and God’s gift of a baby. From my perspective, I certainly felt that He must have been smiling on her and the baby. The whole scenario seemed unbelievably desperate.

In the apartment below us were a very odd couple and their nine-year-old son, Jason. Being Jewish, they did not attend the celebrations; in fact they seemed unwilling to even talk to Babs and her husband, Harley, a tall, thin man who wore a lungi most of the time and no shoes.

Jason’s mother was a New York lady with an accent to match. (I was apparently an ‘English Poyson’). Jason was at school in Hawthorne. His stepfather was a very angry individual, who shouted at our dogs for no reason except that they were there, who grumbled at all the residents for a variety of imagined slights and was generally disliked and ignored. He had a ‘sidearm’ and a rifle, both of which he carried everywhere, even down to the restaurant by the lake if they were eating there in the evening. When Jason announced that he had saved up enough money for a bicycle and mentioned the figure, his stepfather remarked, ‘What a waste of money. You could buy a good gun for that.’

Being unused to the gun culture of the States – very obvious in Nevada – we were uncomfortable with his general attitude, wondering if he was perhaps dangerous. Eventually his wife told us that he was a Vietnam War veteran who still had nightmares and whose insecurities stemmed from some horrendous experience that he had endured but would not speak about. We all tried hard to be friendly and to find something to like in him, but were rebuffed at every turn. We were very sorry for him but we gave up – what else could we do?

Two other girls lived at the end of the block. Sheila was about seventeen and her sister, Amy, about twenty. There was some sad reason for the sisters living there, away from their parents, but I did not understand this at the time. They worked together in the restaurant at El Capitan and Amy seemed very protective of her sister. They loved swimming in the lake but by the time they got home, it was dark. No long, northern twilight here: darkness fell suddenly at around seven and, apart from our little group of lights, the twelves miles of the lake and its surroundings were completely dark. Except for the moon and stars. Delightful!

One evening there was a knock on the apartment door and the sisters stood there in their swimsuits.

‘Come swimming,’ they invited. Andy was out. Were they asking me? Two young girls asking a fifty-year-old grandmother to swim with them?

‘Me?’ I asked.

‘Of course! It’s quite warm. We always dive off the jetty. See you there.’

Dive off the jetty? In the dark? Into dark green water of unknown depth?

Suddenly, I felt almost flattered to be asked to join two young girls in their swim. I was being asked just as myself with no reference to age or foreign-ness.

‘I’ll be there,’ I said.

I changed rapidly and ran down to the jetty – no longer the dignified Nurse Macleod.

They dived into the blackness. Heart in mouth, I followed, shutting my eyes long before I hit the water. It was still warm from the heat of the day and we swam about, treading water sometimes to chat and get to know each other. What I did not let them know was that I had always had a dread of dark water! Only later did I see, hanging in their webs from the underside of the jetty, dozens of ‘Brown Recluses’. I am more scared of spiders than of dark water and these enormous creatures were just inches from our feet as we joyfully ran along the boards. They are about three inches across (taking the leg length into account) and have the unpleasant habit of biting folk. Although the bite usually has no generalised effect on the body, the flesh around the bite rots away to leave deep and lasting scars, sometimes an inch in diameter. Once I knew about these monsters, I began to notice such scars on the bare arms and legs of some of those around us.

We swam most evenings after that until the lake ‘turned over’. Like the Recluses, this phenomenon was a total surprise. In high summer when the sustained heat gets to a certain point, the plant life from the bottom of the lake rises to the surface, sending the cleaner water down. This process happens in many of the hot desert lakes. The resultant smelly mess of algae and other plants make the lake impossible to swim in and very difficult even to launch a boat, and this state of affairs lasts for several days or even a week until the whole disgusting, slimy matter sinks again. Clever people have tried to explain this to me but I still have only the vaguest notion of why it happens.

But long before the lake ‘turned over’, George and I had a ‘conference’. Here we were beside a lake for the long hot summer and boating was
free with no charge to launch, no licence needed or restriction of any kind – so why did we not have a boat? Andy was ecstatic when we decided to fill this gap in our lives. Enquiries were made, a few telephone numbers rung: someone was selling his boat business and there were bargains to
be had.

Next weekend, we set off for Topaz Lake. Topaz and its lake are on the border of California and Nevada in the mountains to the north and west of Hawthorne. The fact that it was about two hundred miles away did not seem important.

We looked at several boats including a pretty, comfortable potterer. This took my eye but was instantly dismissed as ‘useless’ by Andy and George who wanted something fast. Andy wanted to water-ski.

We bought a sixteen foot fibreglass boat and a seventy hp Evinrude outboard engine and some water skis (later found to be far too heavy and had to be replaced) and some special propellers to cope with the four thousand feet altitude of Walker Lake. We intended to ski on the six thousand feet Lake Tahoe at some point, too. A trailer came with the boat: we had a hitch fitted there and then and set off back through the now darkening mountain roads.

Next morning, we reversed the trailer into the lake. As with all boating, there always seems to be help on hand coupled with much advice, delivered on this occasion through puffs of an enormous cigar rolled from side to side in the mouth of a huge young man, who seemed delighted to push the boat in, start the engine, adjust this and that and generally take us under his wing.

After a while, we got the hang of it, loaded the dogs into the boat and Andy jumped over the side, prepared to ski. In his first few attempts, he failed to ‘get up’ at all but in less than half an hour was skiing well and enjoying himself enormously. Watching him, I decided that if a fifty-year-old grandmother could swim nightly in inky black water, she could surely learn to water-ski. So I did!