Summer is upon us here in Eastern Pennsylvania. It’s the season of picnic ants, birdfeeder raiding squirrels, and mosquitoes. I usually stick to the home front to tend my garden, keep the grass from turning into a hay field, and read outside on warm evenings with a nice glass of lemonade, sometimes spiked with a bit of gin.
Then, I received a call from a dear friend from Southern Nevada who became ill. I, of course, offered to fly out and help while she healed.
“You know it gets rather hot here this time of year,” she cautioned.
“Oh, peshwa,” I told her. Having spent most of her adult life in the Southwest, she must have forgotten what ninety-eight degrees with a hundred percent humidity felt like.
The minute I stepped outside the Las Vegas airport, something akin to a turbo hair dryer on high instantly wrinkled my face. I settled in at my friend’s house and thought her outdoor thermometer was broken when it registered 120 degrees. It didn’t take long to notice that I was always parched. My first lesson was to always hydrate, because a desert humidity below 10 percent sucked the water right out of my pores. Now I understand the phrase, it’s a dry heat.
Trapped indoors during the day, I rifled through her bookshelf for something to read. My view of Nevada was limited to Las Vegas. With no shortage of books and guides in her collection, I found Sun, Sin & Suburbia: The History of Modern Las Vegas, by Geoff Schumacher. But there had to be more to Nevada, pronounced Nev-VAH-duh, not Ne-VAD-uh, than a resort gambling town.
My friend recommended two books. The first was an older hardback by Robert Laxalt, Nevada: A History, republished in 1991. From vastly differing climes, ranging from arid deserts to snowy mountains further north, the territory had a raucous boom-to-bust mining history following its statehood in 1864, long before Vegas became known as Sin City for legalized debauchery. The other was a recent title, by Nellie Shaw Harner, Indians of Coo-Yu-Ee Pah: The History of the Pyramid Lake Indians in Nevada, which offered a personal glimpse into the author’s growing up on a Native American reservation.
It was Shawn Hall’s book, Ghost Towns and Mining Camps of Southern Nevada, that piqued my interest in wanting to visit the deserted town of Rhyolite, a couple of hours away. My friend said the Rhyolite Cemetery guaranteed to send a chill up the spine, even in triple-digit temps. But, unless I wanted to add my desiccated carcass to the bleached bones of the many lost prospectors who didn’t heed warnings, I’d have to leave well before dawn and return by midday. Maybe I’ll come back when the weather is less of a scorching furnace.
All this history research opened my eyes to a part of the country very different from New England, and it had me wondering if I could pen a story set in the olden days of southern Nevada. I’ll first have to read Steve Bartholomew’s historical fiction, Journey to Rhyolite, to see how the pros do it.
Happy Reading and Writing
Betty Wryte-Goode