Mature Life Features

. . .has been resked for

2 p.m. next Tuesday

in the 2nd floor theater.

So now get down to

3 p.m. Thirsty Thursday because this will be

Nick’s last turn behind the bistro bar.

= = = = =

Nevada’s Other Side Also a Good Bet

By Beverly Rahn, Mature Life Features

ELY, Nevada — If you want to get away from it all, this is the place.

  As we zipped along Highway 50 — “The Loneliest Road in America” — that bisects this state, we saw how this land looked when pioneers bumped over it in Conestoga wagons.

  We drove for hours through cactus-dotted plains under hori­zon-less skies just a half day from two of the glitter-gulch capitals of the world — Las Ve­gas and Reno. This is a land of wild mustangs and wrecked Mustangs. It’s where the deer and the antelope still play under an assortment of rainbows prancing with storms that clam­ber over the mountains.

  We embarked on our week-long trip through rural Nevada from Reno and drove 320 miles east to Ely and 280 miles south on Highway 93 to Las Vegas.

  While the land is harsh, the folks are friendly. We learned quickly the difference between a fairy tale and a cowboy story. A fairy tale begins with ‘Once upon a time.’ A cowboy story starts with, ‘Now listen, this is no bull—-.’

  Planning to stretch our legs a mite on a fuel stop in Austin, we pulled over to a fence and saw a sign that said “Don’t even think of parking here.” We moved on because it was quite a clear statement in a land that has nothing but space.

  In Eureka, we parked under the courthouse balcony that was used for, among other things, public hangings during the town’s heyday when it was the leading lead producer in the world. There were 13 smelters operating in this Pittsburgh of the West during the 1870s.

    We took some time to hunt for pine nuts. These nuts, about the size of your little fingernail, were harvested by Native Americans each year after the first frost. They thrashed the pi­non (pine) trees to tumble these seeds out their cones. The nuts were, and still are, roasted, salt­ed or mashed into a meal or butter.

  Midway through our trek, we cruised into Ely, birthplace of the late First Lady Pat Nixon and home to a Basque commu­nity (and its gusto food) that was born when these Pyrenees people were imported to tend to the flocks of sheep raised here.

  We had called well ahead to make arrangements to ride the Ghost Train of Old Ely and wave to the call girls who greeted us you as the train chugged by the pleasure houses on the edge of town.  We used our Golden Age passports at nearby Great Basin National Park to tour the Lehman Caves. This was anoth­er stop in the past that included several museums and a leap into prehistory to tour petroglyphs (stone etchings) across the ribbon of road and an expanse of desert from Fallon Naval Air Station.

  The next morning, we took a side trip to Rachel, which is on the real loneliest road in Ameri­ca — Highway 375. The settlement perched on the edge of Nellis Air Force Bombing and Gun­nery Range and Area 51/Groom Lake, is reportedly a major Earth terminal for unidentified flying objects (UFOs). The so­cial center of the community is the Little A’Le’Inn, where we ordered an alienburger that tasted “out of this world,” of course.

  Lore has it that it’s easy to identify aliens in the Little A’Le’Inn: they enter the water­ing hole and sit at a table for hours without ordering anything to eat or drink.

  Gliding by sparkling Lake Mead as we dropped down into Las Vegas the next morning gave us the time cushion to adjust to our return to the clat­tering casinos of Reno’s neon neighbor.

  It seems odd that a state in which most of the homes and buildings we saw dated back to the 19th century has enacted laws that prohibit anyone from disturbing anything that’s more than 50 years old. My husband, who’s older than that, says he likes the idea.