True Grit
Two summers ago, as the snow melted and the days lengthened, I was exiled from Truckee.
My writing career was on the skids. Magazines were either rejecting my work outright, or accepting it and then not paying me. My foray into freelancing had landed me one step below indentured servitude in society’s employment hierarchy, and I felt like I was doing the impossible — slowly sinking even lower, perhaps heading for an entirely new category of debasement that had not been created yet, but one I would form and then solely inhabit when I arrived.
Writers have the egos of emotionally fragile teenage girls, so as each article and story pitch I labored over was met with either a carefully worded rejection or deafening silence, I began falling into a financial and emotional funk that would outdo even a pre-pubescent, skinny jeans-wearing, emo middle-schooler.
Had I only myself to think about, I might have subsisted on pine nuts, peanut butter, and a collection of weepy Conor Oberst albums stolen off of LimeWire. But my two-year-old daughter had expensive tastes in designer milk and organic fruits, and so I took an offer to work the summer on an alkaline salt flat in a dry lake bed where U.S. Navy bombers drop bunker-busting bombs. It was a job that promised to match my mood, which stood somewhere between ‘500-pound bomb detonation’ and ‘armor-piercing phosphorous rounds’ on my informal, ordnance-based psychiatric scale.
I loaded up the Subaru, bid adieu to water, greenery, Californians, and progressive politics, and headed east to exile.
The Navy’s B-20 bombing range in between Lovelock and Fallon, Nev., might as well be the moon. Scarred by millions of bomb craters, festooned with warning signs, and completely devoid of any life except for a family of foxes and an occasional bird, the enormous plot of land was an unearthly example of the extremes of nature and man.
Our job was to build miles of temporary road that would allow us to dig miles of trenches for fiber-optic cable. The road kept trucks and heavy equipment from sinking into the quick-sand-like silt of the lakebed. Stories of cement trucks swallowed whole by the muck circulated the job site, and a host of alien fanatics were rumored to stake out positions on the hills above our construction area, believing that an alien city was buried beneath the earth we worked in. Every day, mine sweepers fanned out in front of us, supposedly clearing the desert of any buried, unexploded bombs. But still, during the first few days that excavators and backhoes clawed into the earth near me, I shuddered, hoping each ‘clunk’ and ‘clank’ was metal bucket hitting rock, and not the last sound I would hear before an undetected explosive sent me into orbit over the Silver State.
Just as interesting as the surreal job location were the coworkers I labored with each sweltering day. As I age and remain in Truckee, I have recognized my tendency to mainly associate with like-minded individuals. Finding people who enjoy and appreciate similar things is rewarding and enriching, but I’ve always been wary of becoming entrenched in a monoculture, surrounded by the tyranny of nodding heads and reaffirmations. In Truckee, it can be easy to be lulled into a life of craft beer and organic arugula, powder days, and singletrack sessions. It’s a beautiful reality, but at the same time, it is partly a mirage. Nevada was a chance for me to immerse myself in the consequences of consumption, to revisit the real world where the mechanics that fuel our lives are laid bare in all their unsightliness. As weird as it sounds, I was salivating for a summer of diesel fumes, desert grime, crushed rock, and steel. After a deeply frustrating winter of pointlessly hammering a keyboard, creating failed stories and unpublished prose, I couldn’t wait to throw my back behind a shovel’s blade and turn dirt, create more than a pile of letters and punctuation, and be the odd man out in a sea of rowdy truck drivers, right wing excavator operators, and pipe fitters.
Immediately, I fell in with an immensely skilled equipment operator who looked like Opie from the Popeye cartoons, and consumed an astounding quantity of any ‘food’ that sounded like a doorbell chime or Santa Claus’ laugh — Ho Hos and Ding Dongs. I watched him scarf down these gas station confections in the middle of the bombing range during short breaks, and pondered the cause-and-effect, chicken-and-egg conundrum — did he eat so many malleable, spongy, tube-shaped cakes because of his single-digit tooth count, or did all the Ding Dong eating lead to dental disaster?
At lunch we’d sit in the shade of a backhoe wheel and talk about raising children, construction accidents, and the amazing power of hydraulic rams. After weeks on the job, I began to recognize my coworkers for what they were — often tender, regularly insecure, extremely generous, immensely knowledgeable men. It was a world I knew little of — how to jumpstart a diesel truck using compressed air; how slipping out of gear on a steep downgrade can kill you; how ground vibrations can raise subterranean water to the surface.
One of our truck drivers named Terry could tell stories that made me literally weep with laughter. A former resident of a lawless region of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Terry sported arms full of tattoos and a ragged black beard that were the perfect comedic backdrop for his self-deprecating stories of pig-headedness and calamity.
There was an ex-Marine whose eternal dress code of fatigues and a white wife-beater accentuated his medicine ball of a beer gut, an anatomical feature he worked on by religiously draining a King of Beers 12-pack each evening. Another truck driver, a Palestinian former POW, gesticulated so fiercely when he spoke that it looked like he was waving off a swarm of attacking yellow jackets each time he opened his mouth.
The summer wore on — 12-hour days in blistering heat punctuated by blinding dust storms. We became mired in a disastrous portion of the dry lakebed where our road materials — dirt, gravel, boulders — were swallowed by the muck. Roving military personnel detonated bombs in the distance. I felt like a desert zombie, waking in the pre-dawn dark, toiling through the windless noon in a place forgotten by the world, a place where the implements of death are tested before being deployed to distant wars.
But I was redeemed each morning by iridescent desert sunrises that held impossible beauty and forewarned another cycle of mind-numbing heat.
By late summer the job began winding down. My coworkers Daryl and Joe and I would take shotguns into the desert most evenings and skeet shoot as the molten sun melted into the horizon.
I left the bombing range for the last time one Friday in early September. I had completed my exile. I had done my penance. I felt like a man reimmersed in a world in all its beauty, contradiction, destruction, and renewal. I had seen the weapons of war, built friendships over heavy machinery and 12-gauges, and rewired my brain after a long winter spent chasing a freelance writing dream that I knew would never materialize.
My Subaru threw up a rooster tail of dust into the desert as I left my bomb-pocked summer home with a hundred desert sunrises seared into my brain, and odd new energy coursing through my veins.
As I wound up the Truckee River canyon, pulled off the highway at Donner Lake, and soaked my eyes in the green forest and placid blue liquid, I fell in love all over again with my mountain home. The evenings were already cool and crisp, and the still peacefulness of fall had lulled Truckee into the doldrums of autumn. I pulled in a deep breath of diesel-free air, shook the gear grinding and engine rumbles from my ears, and stretched a summer’s worth of heavy shoveling out of my sunburned back. Truckee had never felt more transcendent.
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