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The following is an excerpt from Meagan Day’s debut book, Maximum Sunlight, which delves into life in a former mining town in Nevada’s Great Basin. It was published by Wolfman Books, a small press in Oakland, California, dedicated to experimental nonfiction, poetry, and artist books.
Most of unincorporated America is relatively civilized. Beyond the borders of small towns we encounter rural houses, roads, crop fields, livestock, scattered machinery, an array of anthropogenic junk. In the East there is scarcely an unobstructed acre, but even in the West we eventually spot power lines, drilling equipment, ranch fences.
But the edges of Tonopah, Nevada, are sharp. There are houses and trailers with yards full of trampolines and car parts, and then suddenly there is only earth and sky. Tonopah, Nevada, is an island of civilization in a vast humanless sea.
In the desert, up is sometimes difficult to distinguish from down. After heavy rains, water pools between the blackbrush and mirrors the stratosphere. Just after sunset the crisp horizon dissolves into a hazy bluish band. An inverted Fata Morgana will sometimes appear, actual hills collapsing into an imaginary limit. Tough bald hills slope at impossible angles, as if molded under the heel of a giant. It’s easy to envision dinosaurs pounding this dry terrain with legs the size of refrigerators.
In Tonopah, I meet a man who warns me of the dangers of driving off-road in the desert at dawn and dusk. He crashed doing this once, going 120 mph on his three-wheeler. “I broke my neck out in the dunes and ripped my face off,” he says. “I told them there was no way I was going to the hospital, to just give me a beer and wipe the sand out of my lips and my eyes.”
This man has just spent a night in jail for a DUI and is sipping plain Coke through a straw. “I know where it sits now, the threewheeler,” he says, “and every time I see it I just get flashbacks to when I was flying off it—sky, sand, sky, sand, sky, sand. And that’s why you don’t ride at twilight. At twilight, you can’t tell what a shadow entails.”
In the centuries since the arrival of Europeans, Nevada’s Great Basin has inspired scores of esoteric origin theories. In 1924, “Was the Garden of Eden Located in Nevada?” made the front page of the San Francisco Examiner. The article was about the research of archaeologist Alain Le Baron, who claimed to have found petroglyphs not far from Tonopah that resembled Egyptian and Chinese characters, but predated both. He called the petroglyph site the Hill of a Thousand Tombs and believed it was evidence of an alternative anthropological timeline. His theory held that a prehistoric society called the Cascadian Race originated in Nevada and proceeded from there to populate the rest of the world.
Earlier yet, in 1917, an amateur geologist named Albert E. Knapp claimed to have found a fossilized human footprint from the Triassic period—the imprint of a shoe made of stitched dinosaur hide. This led him to believe that humans and dinosaurs had coexisted in Nevada’s Great Basin 200 million years ago.
The New York Times took Knapp’s finding somewhat seriously, as did Nobel Prize-winning Oxford scientist Frederick Soddy, who used it to support his pet theory of a superior race of prehistoric humans that destroyed itself after achieving scientific mastery over atomic energy. In Soddy’s account, the sophisticated civilization made a technical mistake that wiped them out, leaving us—their more primitive counterparts—behind to literally reinvent the wheel.
These theories share a design: desertion by superior progenitors, the Great Basin as the point of origin for a flourishing society that eventually evacuates the region. This motif of abandonment can be located, too, in less fringe mythologies of the Nevada desert. Nevada, like California, experienced a Gold Rush that produced enormous wealth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tonopah was known as a place where millionaires were minted. But the money made in Nevada boomtowns was soon taken elsewhere, mainly to California or back East in the pockets of savvy capitalists. Briefly, many of these towns were opulent. Now they are the residue of imperial advancement. Decade by decade their elegance fades.
“What do you think people in big American cities think about Tonopah?” I ask a woman in her fifties named Linda who’s smoking a Winston 100 inside a casino called the Tonopah Station. “Like on the East and West Coast,” I explain, “places like LA and New York.”
She’s playing electronic keno, a game that has a reputation as a working-class diversion—it was once considered too blue-collar, even, for gambling houses on the Las Vegas Strip. All around us colorful lights flash on gaming screens. The décor in the Tonopah Station is Western-fantasy, all wagon wheels and old saloon signage. The soundtrack is contemporary country, punctuated by bleeps from the gaming machines. The bar adjacent to the gaming room is doing decent business though it’s only one in the afternoon.
“Well, aside from Vegas, I don’t think they think about us at all,” she says matter-of-factly, ashing into a tray provided by the house. “They probably don’t know what Tonopah is, though it used to be a big important town. But we’re out here.”
The first time I passed through Tonopah, I lost an hour wandering its complicated streets, wide-eyed and straining with curiosity. I took one photograph on that first encounter. It shows the window of a white brick house. On the windowsill is a gold trophy. I remember that it was snowing. The trophy pricked me, a small sharp surprise, like what Roland Barthes means when he writes about the punctum, that subtle aspect that demands acute attention and inspires a groundswell of emotional attachment for reasons that elude reason. Tonopah itself is unsentimental. Its relics are not enshrined so much as worked around, even ignored. But I grew nostalgic all the same. I lost the photograph, but I see it clearly in my mind.
That first visit, I was especially transfixed by the Clown Motel, a pair of shabby two-story blue buildings at the edge of town. A plywood cutout in the shape of a clown points to a hand-painted sign announcing that truckers are welcome. Directly adjacent to the motel is a Gold Rush-era graveyard, a few paces from the parking lot. I stared at the motel in amazement thinking Why does this exist? Who the hell lives here, works here? I had no frame of reference.
The route between Reno and Vegas is five hundred miles of America with essentially zero cultural profile. That’s roughly the distance between Boston and Washington, DC, a stretch that encompasses hundreds of hyper-distinct cultural enclaves. Even rural Nevadans themselves, like Linda at the casino, will admit that they are neither contradictions to nor embodiments of any particular social archetype. The nation draws a blank on rural Nevada.
In 1940, the Works Progress Administration published a guidebook to the state that betrays a kind of sour-grapes attitude toward Nevada’s abandonment in the broader American imagination:
Relatively few Americans are familiar with this land. If the citizen of other states is asked what he knows about Nevada, he is apt to laugh and mention gambling and divorce . . . Pressed for the state’s physical characteristics, he will usually mention the Great Basin, envisioned as a huge hollow bowl . . . There are various reasons for this vast ignorance about the sixth largest state in the Union, but the chief one has always been the reticence of Nevadans themselves. They have always known their State’s great beauty and are unusually sensitive to it, but humbled by long neglect on the part of the vast traveling public, it is only recently that they have begun to tell the world about Nevada.
And yet, when it comes time to enumerate the specificities of Nevadan culture, all the writers can muster is that Nevadans like to eat at counters, a characteristic so trivial and generic as to be absurd.
It is doubtful whether there is a restaurant in the state without one; even the smartest places feature counters. Usually the board is high and the stools are mounted on a small platform. No Nevadan is quite sure why he likes “counter-eating.”
Rural Texans have the stalwart cowboy, Iowans have the forthright yeoman, and Mainers have the hard-bitten seafarer with rubber boots up to his knees. Nevadans have the counter-eater. Evidently I am not the first to grasp at straws.
In recent years, perhaps Cliven Bundy’s high-profile standoff with the federal government has replaced the counter-eater of yore with the modern right-wing libertarian weapons stockpiler. But that still doesn’t explain what a clown-themed motel is doing next to a graveyard in the middle of the treeless wilderness, or what that trophy was doing in that window.
For years, I’d think of Tonopah and be socked with the realization no matter what dramas and excitements visited my own life, some kind of existence continued out there in the desert, inscrutable to me. My enigmatic compatriots—I was and remain both curious about and troubled by this blind spot. I came to Tonopah to write, eventually, not because I wanted to answer a specific question, but because I had no idea what kinds of questions even applied.
From the balcony of a dive bar amid a cluster of short-term residences called Humbug Flats, you can see every building in Tonopah. Small ranch-style houses with tidy facades alternate with puzzling complexes of shacks, sheds, and mobile homes. The town sits in a saddle slung between steep hills, and the houses are crowded together, gradually terraced on the gentler slopes.
Tonopah is a striking anomaly, a small town in the middle of a great desert characterized by relative density rather than by sprawl.
The cause of this peculiar urban geography is that Tonopah is completely surrounded by public land. You can’t build on it, but you can do just about anything else—hunt and trap, rummage for rocks and artifacts, drive your four-wheeler or pre-runner as fast as your heart desires. At the town’s border, roads turn to dirt and extend faintly across the desert toward distant purplish mountains.
I’m told that there are two forms of entertainment in Tonopah: drinking and off-roading. People drink because of the isolation—“there’s nothing else to do”—while the off-roading is a consequence of proximity to hundreds of miles of unobstructed public land. So these recreational proclivities spring from the same source: the desert, which functions as both the town’s playground and its quarantine.
Tonopah sits roughly halfway between Vegas and Reno on route US 95, about three and a half hours away from each. Its population is less than 3,000, and even at that it’s the biggest town for more than a hundred miles in any direction. To the west is the imposing Sierra Nevada mountain range, with its snowy crests and flamboyant vistas. On the coastal side of the Sierras is California’s productive Central Valley and its lush coastline. On the inland side of the divide spans the Great Basin, an arid region characterized by spindly mountain ranges stretching north to south and the flat desert valleys between them. From an airplane, the ranges look like slithering snakes.
Wallace Stegner wrote that one has to get over the color green in order to appreciate the American West. Natural green is a rare sight in the region around Tonopah, but hypnotic combinations of bruised purple and burnished gold at sunrise and sunset make a decent substitute.
In the bar of the Mizpah Hotel—built in 1907, carefully restored in 2011 after long abandonment, and now the most upscale business in town—I overhear two men introducing themselves to the bartender as federal employees. “The dreaded BLM,” they say, and laugh. The Bureau of Land Management controls nearly 48 million acres in Nevada, about 67 percent of the state. Its mission is sprawling and contradictory—it monitors the health of plants and wildlife, maintains trails and recreational areas, and issues permits for drilling, mining, and cattle grazing.
With so many interests competing for its use, Nevada’s BLM land is a battleground for opposing visions of the role of the federal government and the meaning of the term public. Consider the Cliven Bundy standoff: Bundy was up against the agency over unpaid cattlegrazing fees, a private disagreement that quickly turned ideologically epic. “We are after freedom,” he told the press of his ad-hoc encampment of far-right armed militiamen. “We are after liberty. That’s what we want.” The BLM was the enemy in the Bundy party’s fight for nothing less than independence.
In theory, the people of Tonopah are not thrilled about the BLM. They wrinkle their noses at its mention—to many it’s both a symptom and agent of federal authoritarianism, bureaucratic tyranny, and government overreach. At the same time, somewhat confoundingly, people tell me that Tonopah is a stronghold of individual liberty (one calls it “the last bastion of free America”) precisely because they can largely do whatever they want out in the desert. The very same people who despise the BLM call the neighboring desert “the people’s land” and refer to it proudly as “my backyard.” There would be no bobcat trapping or informal desert drag racing if the land were private.
Managed though it is, BLM land is the freest and most open land in America. Perhaps the people of Tonopah have grown accustomed to a degree of autonomy with which the rest of us are unfamiliar, for their primary complaint about BLM land is that it’s not free enough.
I stop in at the University of Nevada in Reno and speak to Leonard Weinberg, an expert on grassroots right-wing politics, about the political landscape of Nevada. Nevada owes its blue-state badge largely to the Reno and Las Vegas metro areas, he tells me. The rural parts, by contrast, are characterized by staunch libertarianism.
“Nevada has the lowest rate of church attendance of any state in the union,” Leonard says. “So it’s not like the South. What we call the Cow Counties, including Nye County where Tonopah is, are overwhelmingly right-wing Republican, but the issues that excite people there aren’t questions of morality and traditional values like you have with Southern religious right-wingers. Additionally, racial prejudice is not the driving force of right-wing politics here the way it is in the South.”
Instead of the Ku Klux Klan or Christian family values groups, far-right organizations and movements here primarily include the Tea Party, the Sovereign Citizens, the Oath Keepers, and various armed militias united in their deification of the founding fathers, fear of socialism, hatred of the federal government, contempt for taxation, mistrust of all politicians, and abiding commitment to the Second Amendment. “The main issue that gets people going is the government telling them what to do with their property,” Leonard tells me.
“What’s the situation with the wild horses?” I ask. I’ve read that they’re a major source of tension between the federal government and rural Nevadans.
“Wild horses are accused of eating too much rangeland, harming cattle operations,” he says. “There’s a tussle that goes on between ranchers’ associations and the environmental types who are defenders of wild horses. The ranchers want fewer wild horses roaming this territory.”
They got their wish in 2007, when seventy-one wild horses wandered onto the Tonopah Test Range, a highly classified military base, and died of nitrate poisoning after drinking the water there. This was not the first year horse poisoning had been recorded there—Tonopah Test Range employees were even known to have operated a betting pool to guess how many would die. The poisoning may not have been intentional, but neither was it unwelcome.
At the Mizpah Hotel bar, one of the BLM employees—an abandoned mine specialist—explains, “They’re not really wild. They’re feral, and they need to be managed somehow. So there’s a federal program to manage them, and there are areas called horse management areas, or HMAs.” The bureau, for its part, is “just trying to deal with the situation and listen to all sides the best we can.”
I ask Leonard if rural right-wingers in Nevada are patriotic. “They would probably tell you that they are,” he says, “but that’s debatable. I remember there was one Iraq War general who retired to Douglas County,” a bit west of Tonopah, “and said that it reminds him of Iraq—everyone hates the American government and they all have weapons. There are people here for whom the Second Amendment is the only part of the Constitution with which they’re familiar, and they consider defending it to be the ultimate act of patriotism.”
“Is immigration a big right-wing issue in Nevada?” I ask.
“Sure, there’s anti-immigrant sentiment in Nevada. But even that manifests more as loathing for the federal government than for individual Hispanic people. There’s racism here, no doubt,” he concedes, but there’s also an individualist live-and-let-live streak that precludes certain forms or manifestations of prejudice that one finds in other conservative regions, namely the South.
“Keep in mind that the Nevada state nickname is Battleborn,” he says, “because it was created during the Civil War as a non-slave-owning state. There’s a fair amount of pride associated with that here. In a sense, the anti-slavery cause relates to the local theme of ‘Leave me alone, do whatever you want to do but just stay out of my way.’” He laughs and says, “In fact, now that I think about it, that seems like it should be the state motto,” in place of the ill-fitting All for Our Country.
Tonopah is, in many ways, the apotheosis of rural right-wing Nevada. It’s an isolated town in an isolated and isolationist state, a self-reliant town in a state where rural residents not only prize but insist on selfreliance, a town fully surrounded by federal land in a state that feels besieged by the federal government.
Unsurprisingly, many people I speak to in Tonopah are vocal about their right-wing political views. I hear that the government is planning to confiscate private citizens’ firearms, that Barack Obama is not an American citizen, and that Obamacare is the biggest current threat to American liberty besides Islamic terrorism.
Most people I speak to, however, tell me they don’t care for politics at all. I ask one woman whether she’s more liberal or conservative. “I don’t follow that stuff,” she answers, annoyed. “All I know is I wish I had a time machine so I could go back to the 1700s with George Washington, back in the time when people didn’t rob their neighbors so much.”
Another person tells me, “I don’t talk about politics. I can’t do anything about it anyway, and that pisses me off. And I don’t vote because they already know who’s gonna win.”
At one point I ask a room full of people, who’ve all been open and obliging so far, if I can talk to them about their political views. They bellow “No!” in unison, followed by rowdy laughter and clinking of beer bottles. One quietly mumbles that he likes Hillary Clinton, and his friend quickly interjects, “He doesn’t speak for us,” but declines to clarify her own political leanings.
Perhaps the people I’m speaking to consider political inquiry an invasion of privacy. Or maybe they really don’t care—maybe Tonopah is simply too far removed, geographically and in its unique local concerns, from the nation at large for people to feel invested in national politics. It’s possible that, just as America has neglected rural Nevada in elaborating its pantheon of cultural archetypes, so too have the people of rural Nevada turned a blind eye to the goings-on of the nation.
Like an island, Tonopah is strictly circumscribed. There are limitations on its latitude—because of the BLM, the town its prohibited from sprawling. The population remains steady and financial resources scarce, so Tonopah residents don’t build up, either. They just don’t build much at all.
Many live in timeworn houses or inventive structures made from repurposed parts of other edifices. Architecturally, the town speaks a junkyard vernacular. Every sliver of space is a profusion of materials and textures—corrugated tin, rusted steel, weathered wood, chipped paint, mortar, rebar, drywall, old cars and furniture put out to pasture. Whatever your vantage point, you can see a whole lot without turning your head.
Beyond the town limits, the nearest trees can be found in neighboring Goldfield. The natural landscape is characterized by stony crags and desolate flats meagerly populated with nondescript grasses and shrubs. Ninety percent of the earth’s surface is pale dirt so dry that it whips into dust at the slightest disturbance.
If you say the word plant to people in Tonopah, their minds first turn to the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project just west of town. The solar plant is a mystical arrangement—10,000 mirrors surround a 600-foot tower filled with molten salt. From the highway, in the afternoon when the sunset illuminates the tip of the tower, Crescent Dunes looks like a candle flickering in the desert. From overhead, with its mirrors arranged in a circle nearly two miles in diameter, it looks like a throng of pilgrims encircling the Grand Mosque of Mecca. All day long the mirrors swivel to capture maximum sunlight.
The rollout of Crescent Dunes has been mostly quiet and efficient. Only one occurrence betrayed the formidable, almost occult power of the machinery. For unspecified reasons, employees staging a test adjusted the mirrors so that they directed light at a focal point 1,200 feet above ground, twice as high as the tower. The suspended field of light attracted birds, which flew into the solar flux and were immediately incinerated. Scientists noted over a hundred “streamers”—trails of smoke and vapor—left behind by individual cremated birds.
The plant’s owners apologized for the “avian incidents” and redirected the mirrors back down at the tower. Since then, the plant has continued preparatory testing without drama, but locals regard it with more trepidation than they did before. Some say it’s badly built. They say if you look at it closely, you can see that it leans.
Between 2011 and 2013, over 4,000 people worked on the construction of Crescent Dunes. Many were Tonopah residents—particularly those hired to assemble the mirror panels—but the majority were specialists from elsewhere who left once construction was completed. A company called Cobra brought out a lot of Spaniards. There were hundreds of them during the preliminary stages, living in the Mizpah Hotel or Humbug Flats or even the Clown Motel. There are still a handful of Spaniards in town. They speak poor English, but drink and play pool with the locals.
Now only a few dozen people are employed to oversee daily operations on the site. Crescent Dunes mines sunlight, and like every mine in the history of the region, its peak employment window was astonishingly brief. This is the nature of industry here: residents wait for news of a new mine or plant or infrastructure project, strike while the iron’s hot, and know not to expect anything permanent.
I’m standing on Main Street looking for people to interview, feeling graceless and unprepared. Finally I get up the nerve to approach an older man in Carhartt overalls, a bucket hat, and dark sunglasses. He’s sitting on a bench with an ancient laptop balanced on his knees. “Hi,” I say too eagerly, surprising him. I scale it back. “I’m writing about the town. Can I talk to you about living here?”
He takes off his sunglasses and sizes me up. “Well, I’m not from here originally,” he answers, then pauses, searching for the most concise way to let me down.
“Ma’am,” he finally decides, “I’m a Baptist minister, and my opinion of Tonopah is not high. There are behaviors in this town to which I’m not accustomed.” He smiles, pleased with his pithy assessment. “So I’d better pass.”
The first person to accept my invitation is the town bookseller. He leads me through his store, its shelves abundant with volumes crammed in at strange angles, to a dim kitchen lined with dark green floral wallpaper. We sit in folding chairs with our elbows propped on a red-and-white checkered plastic tablecloth. “So,” he begins, but says nothing else, evidently waiting for me to speak first.
I ask his name. Joe. I ask his age. Seventy-three. I ask if he’s from here. He shakes his head. “So what brought you to Tonopah?”
“Well first,” he says, “what brings you here? You writing a travel piece?”
“Sort of,” I say, “but I’m less interested in tourism and more interested in daily life. I used to drive through here sometimes and it always gave me a strange feeling. It’s like its own planet, so far away from everything else. And I did some research and learned about the mines, and the wild horses, and the nuclear testing, and the military planes and everything.” My face flushes. “So I’m just curious, I guess.”
This is good enough for Joe. He leans back and folds his arms across his chest. “I was living out in California before this,” he begins. “I moved here in 2008, after I retired. I’m a sober alcoholic, been sober for over twenty-four years. My sponsor in AA was dying, and I hadn’t quite figured out what I wanted to do yet in my retirement. He said he wanted me to take Alcoholics Anonymous to the wilderness.”
Having already decided on Nevada, Joe conducted an Internet search for the town that had the most drug and alcohol arrests and the paltriest recovery resources. “Winnemucca and Tonopah tied as far as the most arrests, but Winnemucca already had meetings,” he says.
Joe lives off his pension and savings, and opened the store for essentially the sole purpose of establishing a space for Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous meetings. In the back of the store is a meeting room with inspirational posters on the wall, pamphlets for the taking, and folding chairs assembled around a white folding table. The shop barely makes any money, he admits. And he’s not particularly bookish himself—he tells me he’s read only two books since he opened the place seven years ago. The first was a mystery novel, and the second was “more scientific,” though he can’t remember the subject matter.
I ask him what the impact of the meetings has been so far. “It’s given some people their life back,” he says. “It’s given some people life who never even had a life. I started drinking at ten years old,” he confides easily. Like many sober alcoholics, he has his story down pat, each phase measured in years and each turning point attached to a precise age, a highlight reel from a life of internal struggle. “There’s a lady in town who started drinking at nine years old. She comes to the meetings. Until you learn to live a different way, you don’t know any better.”
“We just had a man named Chuck die at the end of June,” he continues. “He was six years sober. He used to be a fall-down drunk and he used drugs intravenously. He had just lost his job shortly before he came to AA, and was several months behind on his rent. He was ready to commit suicide.” Chuck heard about the meetings at Joe’s bookstore through a friend, and Joe helped him get back on his feet, putting him to work shelving books.
“Chuck died right here in this store of a heart attack,” Joe tells me, nodding toward the entrance where a sagging couch greets visitors, be they customers or addicts. On the coffee table in front of the couch is a jigsaw puzzle, only the perimeter completed. Joe’s balding Chihuahua shivers in its tiny dog bed. The carpet is brown and flecked with lint. The shelves in the back are draped in clear tarps for a repair job that’s been put on indefinite hold.
Despite Chuck’s early death, his body battered by decades of substance abuse, Joe considers his story a success. He shows me a framed picture of a man grinning through a biker beard that’s as gray and dense as a thunderhead. “Chuck was a good friend,” he says with soft eyes.
I ask him why people drink so much here. “That’s what there is to do,” he replies.
“How many bars are there in town?”
“There’s the Mizpah, the Tonopah Liquor Company,” he counts on his fingers, “the Station House, the Bug Bar, the Bank Club, the Tonopah Brewery. And there used to be the Club House. That was a hard-drinking dive bar. A miserable place. Bar fights every night. Closed earlier this year, but the drunks still sit right out front on the sidewalk there.”
Then he says, with sudden urgency, “I got out before I killed anyone. I had blackouts all the time. I could’ve killed someone in a bar fight or car accident and not even known why I was in jail when I came to. I said I couldn’t do that.”
He shakes his head vigorously. “And people in this town, they’re suffering. So you see? That’s why I’m here.”
“The people are still living on the history,” says Wilma, who works in the office of the Clown Motel. “Many of them are descendents of the original miners. And many are miners themselves. Out in Round Mountain or Silver Peak, mostly. There are generations of them who’ve lived here since the 1900s, and their attitude is pretty much still the same. Wild West.”
“What do you mean by that?” I ask her. She’s probably in her early fifties but has a girlish face and round, earnest eyes. Her waist-length red hair is bound by a scrunchy at the nape of her neck. When she speaks, each r sound shades slightly into a w.
“The miners used to drink a lot,” Wilma replies. “That was their only other thing besides mining. They would sleep in the mines for like seven days, and they would come out and they didn’t have family to go to because they were single guys or their family was way back somewhere else, so the only thing they had was the alcohol. That’s staying, that kind of attitude.”
I tell her that she’s not the first person to bring up booze when explaining the town to me, and her laugh betrays a bit of concern. “Alcohol use in this town is tremendous,” she says. “I mean, wow. It’s a huge situation.” Her affect is now serious, a bit stunned. “I don’t know much about the drugs. Meth is pretty prevalent here, I know that. But the alcohol, yikes, it’s way out there. You can see it at night in the town. It keeps ’em low, keeps ’em icky.”
Wilma pauses to take a phone call, and my eyes scan the room. To my left are several shelves of clown figurines, over five hundred of them. A sign hanging in the middle reads:
SPECIAL CLOWNS FROM
AROUND THE WORLD NOT FOR SALE
Behind me are two life-size clown dummies. One is an early iteration of Ronald McDonald, while the other is more of a Barnum & Bailey type.
“Don’t look into that one’s eyes,” says Wilma, placing the phone back on the receiver. She gestures toward the old-timey one clad in a rainbow jumpsuit. Several fingers are missing from its life-size hands. Wilma was afraid of clowns when she first came to work here, she tells me. She’s mostly gotten over it, but that one still strikes her as “a little off.”
The Clown Motel sits at the western edge of town. For the phobic, there’s no skirting the issue—there’s a clown on every door and clown paintings above every bed. Adding to the potential fear factor is the cemetery right next to the motel, visible from nearly every vantage point.
“Are people freaked out by this place?” I ask. The smaller clown figurines are cheerful portrayals with oversized shoes, accordions, and juggling pins—vestiges of a time when clowns enjoyed more favor in the hearts of the masses. The whole history of clowns is on display: There are porcelain harlequins with cherubic faces and rosy cheeks, hobo clowns with patches on their pants and sympathetic frowns, and polka-dotted buffoons with frizzy orange hair poking out above their ears. One, however, is obviously a later creation, fabricated after John Wayne Gacy Jr. and the movie It transformed the clown into a popular object of dread. Teeth bared and eyes crazed, it’s perched in a metal cage like a lethal zoo animal. This figurine is prominently displayed near the front desk, demonstrating a wry selfawareness on the part of the Clown Motel’s management.
“Oh sure, people are scared,” she answers. “But we still get a lot of business. Some people actually come here to face their fear. I’ve seen ’em faint and I’ve seen ’em scream. It’s not uncommon to see somebody walk in and their face turn pure white.” She tells me she’s even met people who were sent here on the advice of their therapists.
“If you ask me, the Clown is not nearly as scary as the cemetery next door,” she says. “There’s a lot of paranormal activity there. We get tons of researchers. Psychic people, sensitives, ghost hunters. They always find something.”
“What’s a sensitive?” I ask.
“People that are so sensitive they can feel the entities around them,” she explains. “Ghost hunters bring sensitives with them, and if the sensitives feel like something’s going on, that’s when they start their cameras. And sure enough, bam. There’s a lot of activity in this town, because there was a lot of death here. The mines were so dangerous. A lot of death.”
I ask her why she came to work in the Clown Motel if she was afraid of clowns. “My husband and I were really down on our luck when we first arrived here,” she answers. “We had a car that was acting like a real idiot.” She explains that she was on her way from Texas to California when her car started to falter, just past Las Vegas. By the time they got to Tonopah, “the car decided that it didn’t want to go any further,” she laughs. “Piece of work is what it was.”
She and her husband slept in their busted car in the parking lot of the Bank Club, a local small-time casino with an adjoining Chinese restaurant, for about three days. “Then one of the nice people at the grocery store told us, ‘Hey, go talk to Hank P., he can help you out.’ So we did and he offered us a job.”
Hank P. owns the Clown Motel, along with a large share of the retail space on Main Street. I tell her I’ve already heard stories about Hank P., that he employs people who have no money, people who have substance abuse problems, homeless people, out-of-town drifters. I’ve heard that he gives them work at the Clown, or the pawnshop, or the Economy Inn, and that he often hooks these people up with places to stay. She nods her head in agreement with everything I’m saying. “He just cares,” she says finally. “He cares about the people and the town. He’s descended from one of the original families. He wants to rise the place up.”
I don’t tell her that in the few interviews I’ve conducted thus far I’ve also heard him called a loan shark and a slumlord, that I’ve heard him accused of exploiting the desperation of the local down-and-out. People seem either bitterly resentful of Hank P. or eternally grateful to him.
“He helps you get on your feet,” Wilma continues. “Like Jeff. He’s one of the hard-ups. He has a real problem with alcohol, major. And he comes off of it and he’s a sane person, and then he leaves for a while. He does it in waves. It’s a cycle. And Hank always hires him back.”
I ask her if Hank ever has problems with the people he helps out. “Yeah, I mean sometimes he has to forcibly get the money from them because folks like to use and abuse. And he’s a strong person.” She emphasizes this by leaning forward across the counter. “You don’t mess with Hank P.”
“Is this a violent place?” I ask. Night is falling and my car is parked closer to the center of town, so I’ll need to walk.
“Well there are bar fights,” she says laughing, “so try not to get into one of those. We used to have a place called the Club House. That was a hang spot, but it just got closed down. It was a fighting, brawling kind of place. It was a really cool place though, with a beautiful old bar and a lot of history. People would go just to hang and let loose. It was the spot.”
I tell her I’ll avoid bar fights and thank her for her time. “Hey if you go to the cemetery,” she adds, “just watch your phone battery. The cemetery always drains phone batteries.”
Outside the pawnshop is a sign that reads, “Free Lifetime Parking reserved for Hank P.” He owns this building, and I’ve heard that Jeff works here. But even though it’s the middle of the day, The Hock Shop is locked up and there’s no one in sight. On the door is a hand-scrawled sign announcing three open beds in a mobile home, available immediately for solar or construction workers. The sign says to call Hank P. if interested, and that rooms at the Clown Motel are also available weekly or daily.
I keep walking down the block, past the Tonopah Liquor Company and the shuttered Club House. A middle-aged man sits on the sidewalk with an open beer in hand. I pass within two feet of him, but he doesn’t lift his head.
On the other side of the Club House is a small storefront whose handwritten sign says The Hock Shop 2. A guy out front is holding a pair of dancing Native American dolls. He looks to be in his early forties, with unkempt blonde facial hair, sunburnt skin, and a jumble of improvised tattoos. I tell him I’m a writer working on a story about the town and ask him if he’d be up for an interview.
“Just as soon as I put price tags on these drunk Indians,” he says with a chuckle. “They’re for storing whiskey, see?” He shows me the openings where the liquor flows in and out.
I wince and say, “Oh. Look at that.”
The shop is more like a storage unit, barely any attempt at organization or attractive display. The guy, named Zachary, invites me to sit in a metal folding chair, pushing aside an ashtray on a cluttered table so I can rest my arm. I take stock of his appearance: blue eyes, baseball cap, missing teeth.
Suddenly he remembers something and gets up. “Sorry,” he says, turning the sign on the door from closed to open. “We’re having a little sale. A lady in town, Barbie, her husband committed suicide two weeks ago, so I’m donating twenty percent of all my profits for the weekend to help her cover the funeral costs.”
“Is Barbie a friend of yours?” I ask.
“Kind of. She works at Giggle Springs,” he says, referring to the gas station and convenience store across the street. I later learn that the name is a mistranslation of the town’s Paiute name, which does not mean “laughing water” as the original owner had believed. “She’s a real nice lady that helps anybody out in town. When I came to this town I didn’t have nothing. And the gentleman that owns this building gave me this store to run, gave me the house I live in, and everything else. So somebody helped me, and now it’s my chance to help someone else.” The gentleman, of course, is Hank P.
I ask him where he came from, and he says Arkansas, though he’s originally from Aberdeen, Washington. “The hometown of Kurt Cobain,” he adds.
“How does Tonopah stack up?” I ask.
“It’s a quiet little town,” he says, “but there’s too many alcoholics here. There are about twenty of them that sit out front of my store every day. It’s irritating. A few of them live in apartments up above the Hock Shop. If you went into the Hock Shop and talk to that guy, his name is Jeff, he’s drunk from the time he wakes up to the time he passes out.”
“Jeff seems to have a real reputation,” I say.
“Oh yeah,” he confirms. “He comes into my store all the time and helps himself to my stuff. All my jewelry from Africa ended up in his store for sale.”
“Do you live in these apartments back here?” I ask. He scoffs and says you couldn’t pay him to live there. The apartments are on the backside of the building. I can see them from my motel room, and have observed the comings and goings of various men clad in dirty jeans, often accompanied by muscular off-leash dogs.
“Are the guys who live back there Hank P.’s guys?” Zachary nods his head yes. I ask if he’s friends with any of them.
“No. I’m not friends with any of Hank P.’s guys,” he says with a sneer. Zachary is himself one of Hank P.’s guys, but evidently envisions himself a cut above the rest. “Actually I can’t say that. There is one guy that works for him as a mechanic that I’m friends with personally. But he and I have a similar background, so we get along pretty well. The other guys are all just a bunch of worthless drunks.”
“Do you think it’s good that Hank helps them out?” I ask.
“Yes and no,” he responds. “It’s good that Hank gives them something productive to do for the day, otherwise they just sit here and bother people. But it’s bad that he gives them the money that he does, because he knows they’re just gonna go out and drink. That’s the only time they come in and work for him is when they need money for booze. And I have a problem with that.”
Bells jingle and a Latino man walks in, wobbly on his feet.
“Hey Lee,” says Zachary coolly.
“Has anybody come in here and tried to sell you a DeWalt drill?” Lee asks, leaning on a cane to steady himself.
“Nobody’s tried to sell me anything stolen,” answers Zachary. “They know better. Everything that comes into my shop goes to the sheriff’s department for thirty days and then comes back.”
“That DeWalt cost me $170,” Lee says in protest. “That sucks. That was expensive.”
“Well, I’ll keep my eyes out. If someone brings it in I’ll snatch it up and call the sheriff’s office.”
“I think he left town,” Lee says, shaking his head.
“Who was it?” Zachary asks. “Nate?” Lee nods yes, anger glowing in his eyes. “Nate left,” Zachary confirms. “He owed Hank a lot of money. He split, man.”
Lee is quiet, disappointed. Abruptly he lifts his cane and brings it down hard. “I hate thieves,” he declares.
“Trust me, so do I,” says Zachary. “I’ve had many thieves in here try and steal stuff from me. They were willing to go to jail for fifteen dollars—hey, fine by me. They don’t realize that I can put handcuffs on ’em myself and take ’em to jail.” He turns to me and straightens his back as he boasts, “I work for the sheriff’s department here and in Mineral County. I can arrest people.” Somehow I doubt this is entirely true.
Lee is silent, stewing. After a long pause he says resignedly, “Well you have my number,” and turns to leave. Before he exits he looks over his shoulder and says, “Hey, you want these?” He’s waving a stack of envelopes.
Zachary asks what they are.
“My bills!” says Lee, and laughs from his belly, his spirits temporarily lifted. The bells jingle again, and he’s gone.
Zachary turns to me. “He’s one of the drunks I was telling you about. He had a dog called Tiny. It was a really big dog. He had that dog for twenty years. And somebody from California come and hit it with a car, and it had to be put down. Lee’s been drunk ever since.”
Throughout the Cold War, the United States Air Force ran a classified program to test the capabilities of its aircraft against foreign fighter planes. The USSR-based Mikoyan-Gurevich Design Bureau was building exceedingly agile aircraft and supplying them to the United States’ Cold War enemies. By the late 1960s, as the Vietnam War came into full swing, American air-to-air combat losses due to these planes—known as MiGs—were growing worrisome.
In 1967, under a program called Have Doughnut, the United States acquired a Soviet MiG from Israel. The plane had been handed over by an Iraqi fighter pilot who chose to defect rather than drop napalm on Iraqi Kurdish civilians. It was flown to top-secret Area 51, between Tonopah and Las Vegas, to be poked and prodded by the United States Air Force.
Over the next decade more captured MiGs were flown in, and secret dogfights began to take place over the Nevada desert. To keep the program under wraps, airspace was fully restricted and the area was blotted out in red ink on aerial maps—furtive measures that contributed to Area 51’s prominent place in conspiracy theories about UFOs and insidious government plots.
In 1979, these foreign technology evaluation tests were relocated to nearby the Tonopah Test Range, known as Area 52. The fighter pilots there, known as the Red Eagles, lived in a dormitory called Mancamp, which consisted of “a chow hall, an Olympic-size stainless steel pool, bowling alleys and a sports field that was lit up at night,” according to an interview given by pilot John Manclark after the official declassification of the secret program.
Some pilots played the role of aggressors—they were tasked with flying Soviet planes and replicating enemy tactics so that trainees could troubleshoot effective responses. Several pilots died flying the unfamiliar aircraft, for which the United States had no manuals. “We didn’t know what 90 percent of the switches did,” said Manclark. “We had one switch that we just labeled BOMB EXPLODE.”
At the same time, Lockheed was busy building the F-117 Nighthawk at the Tonopah range. It was America’s first stealth aircraft, designed to avoid radar detection in enemy airspace. The engineering of the F-117 was a highly classified black project and the Tonopah Test Range a black site. Thousands of personnel worked on the project, and were flown to Tonopah on Mondays and back out to the Las Vegas area on Fridays. They were prohibited from telling their families where precisely they went all week.
The United States government came up with a cover story involving a surrogate aircraft, justifying the program’s existence to the civilian world and deflecting suspicion. Early biometric technology was used to screen everyone who entered the base, and vehicles that came too close to the range were searched and their occupants warned away.
The F-117 flew only in the dark, and its manuals were kept inside a hyper-secure vault. The pilots were called Bandits and wore patches featuring scorpions, sphinxes, atomic symbols, grim reapers, and eagles with lightning emanating from their talons. One patch featured an image of the plane and the embroidered words, “To those who hide at night, beware of those in the shadows.”
Eventually, the Nighthawk was ready for war. In 1991, leaflets rained down on Iraqi villages showing the plane wreaking havoc and warning civilians to “Escape now and save yourselves.” The aircraft dropped thousands of bombs during the Gulf War, and continued to operate through the ’90s.
Only one Nighthawk was ever lost to U.S. enemies—the aircraft, named Something Wicked, was shot down by Serbs in Yugoslavia in 1999. There is speculation that the missing equipment was acquired by China or Russia for study, bringing full circle Tonopah’s relationship to the top-secret world of foreign aircraft exploitation.
While Tonopah’s Area 52 is not as ubiquitous in conspiracy theories as neighboring Area 51, the site’s combination of strict confidentiality and global impact lends itself to paranoid interpretations. Most residents know bits and pieces of what takes place in the desert outside their town, but nobody knows everything. Parts of the history are still classified, and secret projects are still underway.
Proximity to the genuinely clandestine inspires eccentric worldviews in locals, or at least an increased openness to what might elsewhere be considered crackpot conspiracy theory. But few people dwell near government black sites—information about the land we live on is readily obtainable, largely predictable, and often mundane. If secret plots are actually unfolding in your backyard, orchestrated by absentee elites intent on consolidating global power, it becomes difficult to dismiss other theories that follow the same pattern. For some residents of Tonopah, the mystery of nearby government activity is understandably destabilizing.
“Do a lot of people believe in UFOs around here?” I ask Wilma at the Clown Motel.
“Oh yeah,” she says unreservedly, her eyes growing wide. “A lot of people have seen UFOs here. I’m one of them. I’ve seen multiple UFOs throughout my life. I know it sounds crazy. But I had people with me who witnessed it.”
I ask her to describe what she’s seen in Tonopah. “I’ve only seen one here,” she says. “It was a couple years ago and I was walking home from work at the Clown. I saw this thing come flying in, no sound at all, right in the middle of town. There was no denying it was freaky. It did a little back and forth thing, a very intelligent type of movement, and then it went straight up into the universe. I mean, c’mon!”
“Why do you think people see so many UFOs here in this part of the country?” I ask.
“It could be the Indian reservations,” she explains soberly. “That’s a huge possibility. The governments are not allowed to touch the UFOs or even try to go after them in the reservation areas. I know that for sure. And the Native Americans are firm believers in UFOs. It’s part of their whole thing.”
Mounted on the wall to her left is a placard that boasts a silhouette of the F-117 against a map of the Middle East, pockmarked with little cartoon explosions. It reads TONOPAH STEALTH—1ST TO STRIKE IN THE GULF.
I suspect that Wilma would believe in UFOs whether or not she lived near a secret government site. Throughout our conversation, she eagerly divulges theories about additional forms of paranormal activity (while she has not seen a ghost at the Clown, she has smelled one—it wafted in on a cold wind and “smelled like a very ancient perfume”). Other residents surprise me a bit more, like Clifford who works at Joe’s bookshop.
A self-described computer nerd who moved here six years ago from Southern California, Clifford speaks matter-of-factly. “I help Joe out in the bookstore,” he says, “but my skill set is more technical. Computer networks, information systems, business systems.”
He gets excited when I mention the Tonopah Test Range and the stealth bomber built there. “Oh man, it’s an awesome piece of war machinery,” he says. “It’s a killing machine. The designers were all told to design different parts—the wings, the cockpit. There was no collaboration whatsoever. That’s how they keep the secrecy of the design.” He relishes both the technical sophistication and the cloak-and-dagger gravity of the project.
“Somebody told me they’re building another secret plane out there,” I offer.
“That’s what I heard,” he affirms. “Man, the security measures that they have in place are serious. If you wander off the beaten path and end up on the test site, within minutes security will come out of nowhere and be all over you. It’s very tightly controlled.” I had read accounts of wayward explorers who suddenly found themselves surrounded by a swarm of military vehicles, unaware that they had trespassed from public into top-secret land.
I ask him if the secrecy has any effect on people living in town, if it fosters theories about covert activity. Clifford strikes me as a rationalist, and I’m expecting to chuckle together about local kooks. Instead he says, “I mean, I don’t know. I’ve seen some pretty weird stuff myself that I have no explanation for here in Tonopah. I’ve seen flying objects that I couldn’t identify. The flight path and the flight pattern, the maneuverability, there’s nothing that we have that I’m aware of that can maneuver like that.”
He continues, “I’ve seen glowing orbs in the sky. They go one direction and then another and then they just disappear. Then they reappear somewhere else, and it makes no sense.”
I ask him if the flying objects could be military technology and not intelligent extraterrestrials. “Absolutely,” he says, relieved by my suggestion. “Here in Nevada, there’s so much open ground that it’s a lot easier to test aircraft without having to worry about communities getting an eyeball on it. They mostly fly out in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes a camper or a hiker will see something, but they largely go undetected.” He lights a cigarette and leans back in his chair, taking a long first drag. “The stuff we see is just one fraction of what goes on out there.”
Later, I’m at the Tonopah Liquor Company conducting an interview when a man comes up to me and says quietly, “So you’re a reporter.”
I nod my head and he says, “I work for the government. Listen. If you go up into the hills, find the golf balls. And when you’ve found the golf balls, look southeast. There’s stuff out there that isn’t there, if you know what I mean. It isn’t there, but it is.”
I never learn his name, and I never find the golf balls.