In 2020, on a whim, my childhood buddy moved from the soft green snugness of our native Vermont to the parched, heat-blasted, dun-and-buff-colored infinity of Nevada. Folks we grew up with deemed Sean insane. You’re going to…Vegas? You’re trading moss-fringed creeks and abundant backcountry skiing and progressive politics and extra sharp cheddar and an inhabitable climate for…the Strip? I was the only person, it seemed, who understood.
A decade prior, when I was new to wandering the West, when I was twenty percent smitten and a solid eighty percent freaked out by the aridity and vastness, a vision came to me on Route 50, the narrow thread of asphalt that traverses the Great Basin (seventeen mountain passes, five towns) and has been touted as “America’s Loneliest Road.” It was autumn, sunset, seventy-five mph. I was at the wheel of my two-door, four-speed, busted-radio Toyota Tercel, tired and dazed. A Tercel-sized tumbleweed, aptly named, tumbled across the double yellow,
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