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Travel Photography > Great Basin > Loneliest Road
At the second-floor lounge at the Ramada, the waitress says Chablis like Shab-less and she says Merlot like Myrhh-Lot. We enjoy dinner to the purr of slots below us. The amount of casino-entertainment in this distant town is astounding, and – with nothing to offer outsiders and no links to other Nevada towns, Ely, a border town, is primarily a getaway for Utah folks. Ely, then, is a reminder that even Mormons lavish their sins.
We watch the fruitless struggles below us - Mormon gambling struggles - while discussing our own homeless fate. The slot-machine player is addicted to the high of nominal monetary pay-off; he encapsulates the lowest man can become: Pavlov's dog tapping on a machine. Slot-players all have bad skin and many more have the chain-smokers cough and bad taste in clothes.
Below, a woman in a big oversized t-shirt hears the clink of coins, and she stands up waving her cigarette in the air and doing a Homer Simpson dance. With her other hand the coins come out into her ice-cream pail. She is on top of her world. Sixty-five dollars, maybe? Another four hours more, little conversation, few thoughts, many quarters.
This homeless fate is maybe not so bad. When you leave what’s not important behind, when you have no gardens to tend and few belongings, when you have no music, no entertainment and all that is left is you and your life partner, then the idea of home really strikes you. The more you gather, sometimes, the less you remember that home is really an ongoing conversation with family than a physical place.
The next day I notice the elevation in my breaths. The air is crisp, and we in our low-slung truck; we're going west on the Loneliest Road in America. The press maligned this East-West road through Nevada in the 1980s as the most awfully dull road in America. Time Magazine and the American Automobile Association both panned the road as unremarkable if not outright dangerous to motorists.
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