Almost Any Port in a Storm — Except in Nevada
After two years away, she was (maybe overly) anxious to get home to California.
April Orcutt
When I approached California’s Sierra Nevada mountains from the east on Highway 80 in Nevada — alone in my beat-up, blue, 1968 VW camper-bus — it was late October and late at night with a major storm blowing in from the Pacific. The radio announcer warned that the tempest raged cold, large and early — “like the one that trapped the Donner Party.” They had 80 people. I was alone. If I got trapped for the winter, what would I eat?
I was moving home after two years away from California, and my bus was crammed with my life — four boxes of books, three suitcases stuffed with clothes, two photo albums, pots and pans, and an ironing board. Nothing edible.
If the Highway Patrol closed Donner Pass, I would be forced to drive hundreds of miles out of my way north or south to go around the mountain range. I barely had money for gas so I couldn’t consider a hotel. I focused on one thing: crossing the Sierra before I had to camp another night cuddled with the ironing board.
Twenty miles east of Reno a squall shoved my boxy bus across the road, and I wrestled with the steering wheel like Hercules with the Hydra.
I was now, it seemed, driving an air-hockey puck.
Downwind a 70-foot semi-truck lay on its side. I imagined the angry gale lifting and spinning my bus with pots rolling, clothes floating, photos fluttering, and the ironing board targeting a cactus like a missile. Then, my bus, my strewn possessions, and I would slowly disappear under drifts of complicit snow into a free-form cryonic chamber. . . .
In the real world, with tumbleweeds zooming past, I gripped the steering wheel like a Piper Cub pilot in a gigantic 3-D pinball machine.
Then I got the bright idea to stop at the next town, find a pay phone, and call the Highway Patrol to learn about the storm and road conditions.
Towns are rare commodities in Nevada.
At last I spotted it — my salvation from being flung someplace not so lovely as Oz: a green highway exit sign with an arrow and one lovely town name: Mustang.
I anxiously pulled off and looked for civilization. The pavement ended, and the wind swirled the dirt road. One tall streetlight dimly lit a dirt parking area with several semis and a dozen weathered trailers. These weren’t travel trailers with tourists seeking shelter from the wind — these were rusty single-wide, stationary trailers missing side panels. I worried: once, long ago, had their owners only stopped to check the weather?
At the end of the arc of trailers stood a tavern. A lively, wild-west saloon, I imagined. I pulled my jacket up around my neck, braced for the gusts, psyched myself up for a loud band, and entered.
No music played. Shades covered the few windows with their unpainted sills. Three slot machines blinked silently by the door. Several beer posters clung to brown walls, and a couple fluorescent lights hung from the ceiling while two red bulbs glowed behind textured plexiglass fixtures above the bar. The place smelled of stale beer.
Half a dozen beefy, middle-aged men in worn jeans and heavy wool jackets with baseball caps pulled down over their foreheads sat hunched over drinks at separate wooden tables or on orange Naugahyde barstools at the scuffed bar. Like magnets with the same polarity, they all kept at least a two-barstool distance from each of the other grim patrons. No one toasted. No one spoke. Each guy looked lonelier than a prairie dog in Antarctica.
Then I realized that there were no other women in the bar and the dismal patrons were eyeing me. I hadn’t had that much attention since I fell off a bicycle in a crowded campground while going two m.p.h.
The bartender pointed toward the restrooms, and I hurried into the back, down a dark hallway, and across yellow and orange plaid carpet that was so dirty you could grow crops on it. The entrance to the ladies’ room was a swinging door — like those between the kitchen and the dining room of a café. I was out of that place faster than you could say, “Two eggs, over easy.”
Back in the howling wind, the anemic streetlight lit the pay phone as I fumbled for change.
I needed help, guidance. I explained my situation to the officer on the phone: Highway 80, east of Reno, strong winds, old VW bus, shoebox vehicle pushed across road. “Yeah, yeah,” he said, bored. I continued about wind lifting the bus and increasing my fears. I could hear him yawn as he repeated, “Yeah, yeah.”
“But I can feel the bus rising with the gusts! I saw a semi that was tipped over a few miles back.” I explained about the soon-to-be-scattered clothes and pots and the impaled cactus. “I don’t know whether I should get back on the highway and try to get over Donner Pass . . . “
”Uh-huh,” he muttered.
“ . . . or whether I should spend the night here. I’m in someplace called Mustang.”
“You’re in Mustang?” He perked up. “Did you say ‘Mustang’? You just get back in your bus.” He was energized. “You get back in your bus and get on that highway right now! ‘You hear? Get back on the highway now!”
At last — a definitive answer. I left a message for my friend Susan telling her where I was and that I would be driving through to San Francisco.
The wind increased past Reno, and the deluge arrived before I hit Donner Summit. Temperatures dropped. My windshield wipers beat their fastest all the way to San Francisco — but I made it before the snow hit or the bus fell apart.
When I arrived, Susan said, “When you called, were you at the Mustang Ranch?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “It didn’t seem like a ranch.”
“No!” she said. “Mustang Ranch — the most famous bordello in Nevada!”
“Ohhhhhh!” I said. The lightbulb finally went on in my head. And it was crimson.
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