Between daydreams and Las Vegas, Highway 95 drifts from boomtown to ghost town, across flats and up grades. Sagebrush, Mesquite, Joshua Trees, and rocks. A desert alive and full of souls. Wandering, working, waiting, whatever. Images of the past, trapped in the eternal moment, passed over by the wind and almost casting a shadow. I would have thought this was a place to avoid the afterlife.
The valleys of Nevada have big stone shoulders. The alluvial fans spread down from them, into each other, looking more like hourglass sand than rocks. Great boulders have fallen backwards from the rim, jumbling down into broken bones, jagged piles. Pass them on the highway and you'll never know they look to have fallen only yesterday, and that they are larger than billboards.
The sun had set before I got to Beatty. Casino signs like carnival lights, growing as I approached them. Breakfast specials. "Chicago of the West", where once three railroads met. Beatty, Rhyolite, Bullfrog, all places determined to be different than boomtowns before. Whithering iron and crumbling intentions lie all around. Ghost towns will retell themselves until the ripples go away. Two women stand along main street, one holding a chicken, getting ready to cross. One man is alone by the barber pole. A Pastor stands trying to greet people before his boarded up church. He is frustrated, again and again. A lonely hand reaching for anyone, the living and the dead ignoring him.
The 2:20 brings the Mercantile order. Schoolboys run to meet it, to help load the storekeeper's cart, make a penny. Even now, with Main St paved, their feet kick up dust as they cross it. Even now, where the tracks once were, a hot locomotive idles up to the watertank. Every time, as unforgiven as ever, the boys run out, and their little brother follows. Trampled under the team pulling a wagon, he writhes and dies in the dusty road.
This place is no place to get caught forever.