Hello from a hot Nevada highway! 

 

Jaime, my friend and fellow musician, is currently operating the “automobile.” I say “automobile” because everything out here makes me feel like 1950.

We just stopped for gas outside of The Great Basin, where Utah becomes Nevada in an unremarkable murmur of hot, still air and tattered crow conversation. I don’t know what the raggedy birds were talking about, but they sat on top of a sun bleached and weathered road sign taking unhurried inventory of their view. They seemed to be enjoying the heat of the afternoon just sitting on their front poarch, following us into the station with their eyes.

I imagine their conversation went something like this, something just like Jaime and I’s conversation right now... Something to pass the interminable time while miles of brown and burned up desert flat whip past the windows, while mirage heat lines wiggle like belly dancers at the horizon line.

“Did you ever hear about all the bodies at the bottom of Lake Tahoe?” He asks.

“What?!” I respond. “Or out in the desert?” he says.

Our brains are just playing now, entertaining. Our eyes are enjoying molasses shadows from overhead clouds crawling down the desolate and distant peaks.

“Jacque Cousteau dove down there in the 70s, and when he came up he said the world wasn’t ready to know what was at the bottom of lake Tahoe. I don’t know anything about it, but I just imagine him in a little homemade historic bubble submarine made of glass and bolts and sheet metal.”

“Who’s bodies were down there?!?” I ask. I feel frantic.

“Mobster fatalities. Some think Chinese railroad workers that the government wanted to avoid paying. They say the cold water prevents the bodies from rising and slows down the bacteria breakdown. They are probably all very much in tact.” 

I wince. 

And, he adds “we’ll drive over Donner Pass later today.”

He tells its history interrupted by emphatic pointing and his expressed admiration for the emptiness outside. A suddenly sunlit and whipped dust storm emerges out on the plain and it looks like circulating salt. We try our best to immortalize it in an iphone picture.

“Donner Pass got its name because a group of settlers trying to make it to California died there in a horrifying incident of cannibalism. The party got lost up there in 1846.”

Well.

What can I say about all of this? It’s pretty early in the tour. Jaime and I haven’t killed each other yet. Hope you can make it to the shows while conditions last. ;)

Here’s where you can find us …

 

Gabrielle 

 

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