|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| June 1993 | Ruth Moorhead, Pocatello, Idaho |
Here's MY story of Austin, Nevada (I've gathered, over the years, that there are others out there):
I was driving to California to help my mother get through her first cataract operation; it was June of 1993.
Always the adventurer, I chose Highway 50, "The Loneliest Road in America" in its Nevada segment,
and yet also "the backbone of the highway system" across the continent. I slept my first night on the west edge
of Ely, in a pinyon and juniper forest that hid my green-and-white VW bus remarkably effectively.
Resuming in the morning, I drove at least an hour or two, maybe, before seeing the Four O'clocks
(shown here (by "here" I mean my "Nevada" gallery on this Pbase website)
in another image...you can't miss 'em...I saw them from 75 yards away and going least 60 mph)
and getting some exercise by going out to see what they were. By the time I reached Austin,
it was well past noon, and I was hungry. I learned long ago, I can't drive effectively when I'm hungry...
make bad decisions. So I stopped for a scrumptious turkey sandwich and probably a milkshake, and I think
I even got an extra sandwich, or else the first one was so big that I wrapped up the second half for later.
Came time to pay, and they didn't take credit cards. I didn't have either cash or a checkbook. Egads!
And then they told me, "That's okay, you can pay us when you come back through!"
Now, I hadn't been planning to come back to Idaho on that same road;
variety is good, don'tcha know? But that's exactly what I did. The second time through,
I probably got another couple of sandwiches and a milkshake (that was before I knew
I was allergic to wheat and cow milk!), and paid for the lot of them, and everybody was happy.
It was after 6 in the evening by then, and I decided I could be ready to find a place to curl up for the night.
Just outside of Austin, there's a mountain; the road onto it leads right off Highway 50,
so up I went, and went on following that road as it got narrower and narrower. Meanwhile, though,
it had taken me through a lovely saddle, with views of the mountain itself and far out
to the east, and also the light was getting low enough to be really pretty, and there was
some fabulous cloud action developing. I decided to work on getting some photos there before
finding my night-time niche. So I turned the bus around and parked it on the north edge
of the saddle, and got out my Pentax and all the film I had, and set to.
Everywhere I turned, there was another great find, so I just kept at it. One by one, I went through nine rolls
of film that way; mine were usually 36-shot slide film, but I might have had some 24's too. I don't normally
print any of my images, but that stop gave me three of my favorite prints on my wall at work.
Only a few have been digitized, of which three are shown here. I've got a slide-and-neg scanner
on the wish list, so you are within reason to hope for more from this stop eventually.
When the nine rolls were used up, so was the light, but my energy was WAY up, so I drove clear back to Ely,
found the same juniper forest in the dark (they had cut a lot of the pinyon out for some reason
I couldn't figure out), and I was glad I'd gotten some shots of the tall, blue penstemons there on the first morning,
since I didn't have any film left for that by then.
All photos copyrighted; do not use or download without permission.
| Karen Moen | 01-Jul-2010 23:38 | |