Read Online On the Back Roads by Bill Graves - Free Book Online

has owed the Mispah for thirteen years. He calls the hotel the “grand old lady” and runs her as she begs to be run: with good taste, twenty-four-hour attention, and the unrealistic love of a dreamer. Although its rooms are full most all the time, the Mispah has seen better days, economically. “Too many mistakes in the past,” Bill says philosophically, realizing that his dream may die because of them.
    The closing of the old hotel would be especially tragic. It’s the class act in town. Without it, Tonopah has none.
    Still, things have a way of bouncing back in this town that silver built. Bill may lose his dream or “give it away,” as he puts it. If so, someone will surely come along and pick up where Bill leaves off. Whatever keeps these Nevada towns alive, it may yet save the Mispah.

15
A One-Sidewalk, One-Airplane Town
Mina, Nevada
    E ugene Gates keeps his airplane, a two-seater Cessna, tied down next to his house between his big satellite dish and the monitoring station of the National Weather Service. To take off, he taxies for fifteen minutes. He steers his airplane down Helda Drive, crosses Wedge Street, takes care not to brush the trees by the Boyd’s house, angles off on a road graded from the desert, and finally reaches the airstrip.
    Gene has been a pilot for forty years and an amateur-radio operator for fifty. At age seventy-three, he has three jobs. The most recent one he began twenty-four years ago. Obviously, when Gene starts something, he keeps at it. Probably the only thing he ever started with the intent of stopping is life here in Mina. When he and his wife came to Mina in 1954, they planned to stay just a year.
    His twenty-four-year job, with what we used to call the Weather Bureau, does not pay anything. “They set up the equipment. All I do is read the numbers every day and keep a log.”
    Gene opened a mineral assay office in Mina almost the same day he got here. Whether it’s delivered by courier froma mining company or dragged in by a dirt-poor prospector, if it’s a mineral, Gene tells them what it is and what it’s worth. That’s what an assayer does. Gene’s success is not because he is the only one between here and Reno, it’s because he is the best. Samples for analysis come to him from all over this hemisphere, and some from Africa.
    During the last three years, mining has slacked off dramatically in this mineral-and gem-rich state. New federal laws have turned mining, even prospecting, into a bureaucratic nightmare. “Environmentalists have really made it hard for the little guy, who is out there digging on a hunch, and very expensive for the big guy,” Gene insisted.
    Gene is also a judge. He is the longest, continuous-sitting judge in the state. He has held the elected office for thirty-one years.
    â€œNobody runs against him anymore,” Ruth Fanning told me. She has lived here fifty-one years and ought to know. I met Ruth on the sidewalk. Mina has just one sidewalk. It runs a ways along the west side of Front Street. Front Street is also U.S. Highway 95. I came in on it yesterday.
    Ruth and her teenage granddaughter Kim were trying to see through the dirt-streaked windows of the Burger Hut. Although they pass it on their walk every day, this day they were curious. “It’s been closed for a year, but the lady who ran it is back in town. We hope that she will open again. Good cook, that lady,” Kim said.
    I walked with them for the remainder of the sidewalk. We passed a building with fiberboard sides and a sign: For Sale: Two Lots and a Shop. “You could buy a new Ford in there, when I came,” Ruth remembered.
    â€˜â€œOver there, the train used to stop every day.” Ruth’s hand, gripping a can of Diet Coke, swept the horizon across the street. “All that was depot and freight office and all imaginable kind of railroad stuff.”
    The splintered remains of a railroad station