[This is Chapter 7. The story begins here… I recommend viewing on a laptop or desktop or even a tablet to let the photos breathe a little more and help convey the vastness of the American West.]
May 22, 1903 — Wadsworth, Nevada
"I left Wadsworth at 7 o'clock on the morning of May 22 and, leaving it, said farewell to the Truckee River, and what few vestiges of trees and grass there were in this part of Nevada. Out of Wadsworth I was facing the great desert; the plains of alkali that sifts down from the mountains on each side, and which are barren of everything except sagebrush. As I stand before mounting and gaze across that parched, dull-gray waste of sand, alkali and rocks, with the spots of gray-green sagebrush, and think of parting from the Truckee River, which seemed so trivial a water course before, a pang of regret shoots through me. I know I shall miss the gurgling stream, and there is a sinking of the spirits that cannot be overcome as I face the leaden-hued skies and sands so unutterably dreary. Almost one can, in fancy, see the sign of ‘leave hope behind all who venture here.’ This is the Forty Mile Desert of Nevada that was so dreaded by the immigrants in the days when the prairie schooner, the bronco, and the mule were the only conveyances used by man to cross it. Many perished in this desert from want, and many more from the attacks of the then hostile Indians. The old overland trail is what I was following. It is what the railroad follows, and in many places the rails have been laid directly over the old wagon tracks. At times the old trail runs right alongside of the rails, and now and then it swings off for a few hundred yards, a quarter or a half mile maybe, only to wind back again to where the surveyors kept to a straight line for the railroad and removed the rocks and sand dunes that the prairie schooners digressed to avoid."
George A Wyman
July 14, 2016 - Traveling across the Great Barren Desert was difficult enough but the most difficult section was a forty mile stretch between the Truckee and Humboldt Rivers where there was no water at all. For those severely weakened by the long journey, it was a death sentence
Wyman had a considerably easier time crossing the Forty Mile Desert, but it was by no means easy. The sand is deep here.
"I walked the first mile out of Wadsworth pushing the motor bicycle and pausing every 10 feet to take a ******e. Then I took to the railroad."
George A Wyman
Wyman struggled with the poor roads, crashing so often that he stopped writing about it ("I do not mention falls, as a rule, as it would make the story one long monotony of falling off and getting on again."). He obviously didn’t have a fancy interstate to retreat to, and his answer to the deep sand was at once deceptively simple yet treacherous; riding on the railroad tracks of the Transcontinental Railroad. He did not ride alongside the tracks or on the smooth iron rail, he rode across the railway ties, sometimes on the outside the rails but often between them. Imagine roads so bad that riding on the railroad tracks sounded like a good idea. That was the Nevada that Wyman was trying to cross.
"I bumped along over the ties for 20 miles and then reached Massie, a telegraph station with a water tank for the train and section hands. The water for these tanks is hauled in water cars from Wadsworth. At Wadsworth I had taken the precaution of adding a water bottle to my Equipment, and here I mixed it with good water. I had hardly got to riding again before I got my first puncture of the trip, and it was a beauty. It was a hole into which you could stick your finger. It was no laughing matter at the time, yet there was something bizarre about the incident that now causes me to smile, for that cut was made by a fragment of a beer bottle. Imagine it if you please - I am in the middle of the Forty Mile Desert with a wild waste of sand and sagebrush bounding the horizon from every point of view, and, save the lonely telegraph shanty, there is not a sign of human life about. So far as the outlook is concerned, I and the telegraph operators are the sole inhabitants of a globe of sand, and yet I get my tire cut by a piece of beer bottle bearing a choice Milwaukee label. It rather adds to the grotesqueness of the situation when I recall the appearance of the ground alongside the railroad track in that unholy desert, where countless men and animals have perished after being crazed by thirst. All along the tracks the ground is strewn with beer bottles that have been tossed from the car windows as the trains sped by. Now and then one of the flying bottles struck a tie or a fellow waif and broke, but most of them landed on the sand or brush and lie there intact. I could have gathered enough of these unbroken glass beer flagons to have started a good sized bottling establishment, and, in spite of the gloom caused by my puncture. I could not help thinking what a veritable paradise this same deadly wilderness would be to some city junkman. In this land of the ‘Terrible Thirst’ an habitual beer drinker surely would be turned into a raving lunatic by this sight."
George A Wyman
One of the benefits of following the Transcontinental Railroad was that work crews were stationed all along the railroad. Each section crew was responsible for maintaining a section of track, inspecting and replacing deteriorated ties, maintaining ballast (the crushed stone between the ties), and using long poles (a "gandy") to lever rails back into place after a passing train shifted them out of alignment. This was low-wage, back-breaking work and the section crews (mostly immigrants and ethnic minorities) lived alongside the railroad in section houses, simple wooden structures or railway cars. For a good part of his trip, Wyman found food, accommodations, and sometimes help with repairs with railroad work crews.
Wyman plugged the flat and soldiered on. He passed a railroad section gang and got a little delirious in the unending heat.
"So far as signs of life other than my own were concerned I might have been a pre-Adamite soul wandering in the void world before the work of creation began; but the railroad was there to testify to the presence of man prior to me. And with that before me, I imagine myself to be the last of the race, who by some strange freak has escaped the blight that caused the end of the world and had been left alone on the dead planet, over which I was now coursing in search of a habitable spot. Perhaps you can picture the cheerfulness of the place that inspired such fancies in my mind~ imaginings of this sort are the legitimate offspring of the desert…It is not strange that men go mad in a waste of sand so broad that to the eye it is as limitless as the sky, so dead that one feels a thrill of relief at the sight of a lizard or a swooping vulture: the wonder is that any man can see it and afterward be sane."
George A Wyman
I ride past expansive salt flats baking beneath an unrelenting sun, the white lines on the road ticking like a metronome while the mountains move slowly in my peripheral vision. Every vent in my high-tech summer riding jacket is open yet I still feel like I'm in a hair dryer. There's a sparse, rugged beauty to this place but after a half hour in this giant toaster oven I want nothing more than to find an exit and a gas station with a shaded canopy and convenience store with air conditioning and a refrigerator case full of cold refreshing drinks. I want to sit in that small ice box and drink Yoo-Hoo or something cold with caffeine to cool my core. I want to snack on Buggles and Cheetos. I want to go to a bathroom with a heavy steel door, cinder block walls, and harsh fluorescent lighting and turn on the faucet and douse my face with cold water. I want to close my eyes for five minutes and recharge my body before tackling the rest of the Forty Mile Desert.
There's an exit up ahead. I count down the miles and look forward to the gas station of my mind. I use my turn signal to exit (even though there’s nobody around) and come to a stop at the bottom of the ramp. To the right is a gated dirt road leading straight into the Forty Mile Desert (and maybe a mine). Straight ahead is the ramp back onto the highway. That's it. No gas station, no convenience store, no air conditioning, no Yoo-Hoo, not even a small building or tree where I can hide in the shade for five minutes. I take the connector road running beneath the highway to the other side in the foolish hope that my gas station oasis is hiding there. Nope. Defeated, I park in the shade beneath the highway, sit on a little gravel hill, and take a big, cool swig from my insulated water bottle. I lean back and my eyelids drop. George, how did you deal with the heat, the sun, and the vastness of the West? How did you…Five minutes later, I'm awake and refreshed. I take a another swig of cool water, put my helmet back on, and get the hell out of the Forty Mile Desert.
"Sixteen miles east of Brown's I reached Lovelock's and the Forty Mile Desert had been crossed. I don't know who named it but he had a poor sense of justice to deprive the desert of any part or due in distance when he gave it the Forty Mile title. It is 63 miles on the straight rails from the station at Wadsworth to that at Lovelock's and the green growth of the town does not encroach upon the 63 miles of desert for more the 8 or 9 miles. l am speaking by railroad statistics now, for I lost my cyclometer between Reno and Wadsworth, and could not tell what my mileage was. This was the second cyclometer. the first having been bounced off the bridge over the Sacramento"
George A Wyman
With the Forty Mile Desert in my mirrors, I pull into Lovelock, Nevada. Wyman called this place an oasis and compared to the Forty Mile Desert, he's not entirely wrong; there are actually trees here thanks to the Humboldt River. But as I roll through town, "oasis" isn't the first word that comes to mind, "empty" is more like it. The main drag is dotted with nondescript and low flat-topped buildings, small restaurants that look like they haven't been open for weeks, and mid-century motels (the kind Tod and Buz might have stayed at) that look like they haven't seen a fresh coat of paint since Barry Goldwater was in the news. In the two minutes it takes to go from one end of town to another, I don't see another soul.
"Lovelock's is much like an oasis, for while the Forty Mile Desert of Nevada ends there, to the east of it is the Great American Desert of Utah, and eastward beyond that is again the Red Desert of Wyoming, and I learned that the worst is not always over when the alkali wastes of Nevada have been crossed. This oasis of Lovelock's is about 20 miles across, and there is some excellent farming land on it. It is quite a place, but I reached it in the middle of the afternoon, and did not stop, except to get some gasoline and a cyclometer. I pushed on through Lovelock's to Humboldt, 33 miles beyond for my overnight stop."
George A Wyman
I was hoping to get a charge and then proceed to Humboldt, the next town on Wyman's journey. The mobile home park on the edge of town wants $10 for a charge, which is kind of steep. And it's later in the day than I had anticipated (I blame the $5 breakfast) and frankly I'm knackered from the heat. More importantly, Humboldt is little more than a dot on the map these days.
I decide to look for a room in Lovelock. I stop at the Cadillac Inn, a classic 50s-era motel with a neon sign on a pole by the curb, a little office by the street, and a low-slung L-shaped building wrapping around a small, empty parking lot. I step into the office and step back in time, the paneling, the little reception counter, and the bulletin board with local attractions all evoking the mid-century. It's a greenhouse in there though, at least twenty degrees hotter than outside. At least it's a dry heat. I ring the bell on the counter and slowly bake. After a short wait a young woman appears. She and her husband just bought the place and are working on fixing it up. She says that mining keeps the town afloat. They have a room. I take it.
The room is more old Chevy than Cadillac, with a single bed on a plywood platform and simple furnishings. But it's clean and has new sheets. I turn the air conditioner onto "High Cool" and it wheezes into action with a faint, pack-a-day “breeze” tumbling weakly from its vents; this is going to take a while. I run an extension cord from the room to the bike sitting just outside and then take a shower to undo the day's exertions.
Fresh and clean, I step outside and walk to the casino/hotel/restaurant nearby. The sun is setting but I can still feel the day's heat radiating off the asphalt. The restaurant's got a diner vibe, with thickly cushioned booths along the walls. I belly up to the counter and order chicken fried steak. There are a handful of men at the counter but none of them seem to be in a conversing mood, so I sit and eat and fall into my phone as the slot machines in the adjacent, empty casino blink and ping.
After dinner, I walk back to the hotel. There are a handful of work trucks in the parking lot now. The sky is a deep and clear blue. The air conditioner is still working to cool the room but it's actually cooler outside. I sit on my little porch and listen to the night while the Zero charges.
Love this! Really enjoying the comparison of the modern journey with the 100-year-old version.