Finding Everything
“Where’s your favorite place in the whole world?” my twelve-year-old brother, Max, asks as we careen down a snow-covered mountain in our leaking, rusty, beat-up 1997 white Ford Expedition. That car has carried our family thousands of miles, and I love that rusty pile of bolts more than anything. We’re heading home off the mountain from our grandma’s cabin in Lake Tahoe after weathering the heaviest winter I’ve ever experienced, with it having snowed for almost a week straight, covering the world in a four-foot tall, clean, blindingly white blanket. Maybe that’s not a lot of snow to some, but I’ve never shoveled so much snow in my life, and my arms are still feeling the ache.
But what is my favorite place in the world? My sister Jaiel, seventeen at the time and younger than me by two years, immediately shoots out, “Home!,” and we all give a little groan, a little chuckle, a little laugh. I think we all knew her answer, and there’s something comforting about the consistency, about knowing someone so well that you can predict their responses before you ask the question. But what’s my answer? “I don’t know,” I say, honestly, thoughtfully. Then again, but to myself this time, “I don’t know.” How do you choose one place among hundreds? And is an entire city too broad? Do I pick somewhere that looks the prettiest, or someplace I have the best memories of?
The question is soon forgotten, as we leave our memories behind to watch the scenery in front of us, eat Goldfish crackers, and play a round of Travel Bingo and Rubber Neckers. But something about the ambiguity of this question makes it stick in my head, and I don’t forget.
__________
We drive for a few more hours, a drive we spend most of playing road trip
games involving singing and counting and laughing. And lots and lots of laughing. But after
driving for a long time on a lonely stretch of desert road in Nevada, we finally arrive at our
destination, a destination that was unknown to all of us except our dad. He loves to surprise us
like that, and I love being surprised, so when we start to see the first sign of civilization for
miles, my excitement begins to build. “Where are we?” I ask from my seat behind the driver, my
face pressed against the cool glass of the window that broke a few years back on a family road
trip down a bumpy dirt road leading into Bodie, making it so that it no longer rolled down. “A
little town called Tonopah, Nevada,” Daddy replies, the smile clear in his words even though I
can’t see his face from my seat. “It’s an old mining town that grew to be one of the largest cities
in Nevada in its time, but now has only a few thousand residents. It’s a living ghost town.” At
first glance, the town of Tonopah looks dusty, worn, and slightly dilapidated, but all that is
insignificant in face of the history we’re looking at because this town is something straight out of
history. “A living ghost town…Wow.”
After a short drive through what appears to be the main drag in town, we pull off the road
and into a parking lot behind a grand, slightly imposing five-story stone building, something that
was clearly built in the town’s heyday. “Is this where we’re staying?” Mommy asks as we all
unbuckle as quickly as we can, our legs cramped from sitting for so long in one position. “Yep!”
responds Daddy. “It’s the Belvada hotel, and they recently renovated it, just last year actually, in
2020. It dates back to 1907, and was originally a bank until they restored the whole thing to
make it a historically accurate hotel. And this is where we’re going to stay tonight,” he finishes
up as we walk up to the front of the building.
We pull open the heavy yet intricately engraved doors to step into a piece of history
brought to life. My shoes slap lightly on rich dark brown wood before settling onto an intricately
patterned plush runner that’s painted in warm red and beige tones. The entire foyer exudes a
warmth that feels real, and I can’t help but brush my hand across the inviting light green velvet
couches and easy chairs that pepper the room, creating little corners and private sitting areas
around hand-carved wood tables. My gaze travels upward and I stop in my tracks with my face
pointed up, starting in awe at the detailing carved all across the wood ceiling.
“It’s like stepping into the past,” I whisper to Max almost reverently. I peer out the large
picture windows that are framed by heavy, deep green velvet curtains to see the equally
impressive Mizpah across the street, a restored restaurant and hotel where Wyatt Earp was said to have frequently stopped for dinner and a room. “It’s like I could just look out here and see a guy ride past on a horse, or watch a horse and buggy roll by.”
“It’s straight out of one of your Louis L’Amour books, right?” Daddy asks me with a
smile as he glances my way. “Yeah,” I reply with wonderment, “it’s exactly like that.” And it is.
As we check in and walk up the stairs to our room on the third floor, I can’t hold back little gasps
of wonder, as there’s something new, but at the same time so so old everywhere I look. A safe
with a one-foot thick metal door with several cranks and latches that’d been converted into a
sitting room, an intricate detailed and boldly colored tile floor in the bathroom, a wrought iron
bed frame, and the overall warmth and 1900s feel of the whole place just take my breath away. I go to bed feeling warm and happy tonight, filled up to the brim with the comfort of the past.
When I wake up, the air feels sunny and clean, as it always does in the early morning. We head out after breakfast of biscuits and gravy, which we eat on one-hundred-year-old plates in the Pitman Cafe below the Mizpah hotel, the same plates that Wyatt Earp ate off of. We drive south on Highway 95 and pass through Goldfield, a town that was once the largest city in Nevada, but that now has only a few hundred inhabitants. The history in this town rivals that of Tonopah, with old buildings, homes, and cars peppered everywhere you look. But it’s where we go next that really blows me away. After Goldfield there are no towns or semblances of civilization for miles and miles, but it’s that land there, in the plains between the hills and among the shadows of those mountains that make me feel so deeply the pull of the past.
When Max asked me yesterday where my favorite place in the world was, I didn’t know
then, but I do now. It’s there. In between the beautiful hills and majestic mountains and nothing
but you and the blue sky, the clouds, the hills, and the occasional burro. I can see in my mind’s
eye a man on horse, or maybe it’s me, traveling across that plain, under the shadow of the sky
and between the hills and ridges, and it’s just the most beautiful and touching image I’ve ever
seen. As I look across that stretch of vast and all encompassing beauty, a wave of emotion hits me, and the beauty of the scene in front of me brings tears to my eyes. I don’t know how to put this feeling into words, this feeling that the land is a part of me and I of it, untouched as it is by humans. The raw beauty and possibility of it all is indescribable and the motion of traveling slowly across it feels something like hope and love. I try to put this into words and explain it to my family, but how do you put into words such a deep gut feeling? I can’t quite get it right, and Jaiel says slightly disdainfully, “It just looks like a lot of nothing.” But I don’t think so. To me, it looks like everything.