Travel Photography > Great Basin > Loneliest Road

The Toiyabe Cafe is dark and with the fragrance of the decay of burger meat and with that mold smell you only smell in dark corners of small town buildings. On the green wall and in the windowsills hang clown and buffoon dolls, and the bust of a pronghorn antelope. All seem to stare eerily, as if from beyond the grave conspiring for our fries. By the bathroom, the sign says:

Question: God, Why Didn't You Intervene at Columbine when all those children were murdered?

Answer: God: Because they don't allow me in the schools.

The owner of the Toiyabe Cafe interrupts us with questions while we read Mike's pamphlet. The owner's hair is mostly missing up front, but like a wild shag rug in the back. His skin is the color of the chicken you forgot was in the fridge. How come a man so lucky to live in the sun is so pale?

Maybe the myth of the wide open is wide-open spaces. The farther from civilization, the closer the houses, the tighter people cling. Here in Austin, where homes are like sardines cropped by a sea of sage, you see that country people are little different from city people, only with less data by which to judge the world - small country towns breed indoor people too.

Reading the pamphlet that Mike gave us is like reading any small town scribe legitimizing the lifestyle of his town ('When I left the rat race, I realized how little the rats missed me being in their race') but this part I read twice:

Central Nevada is the last place in America where freedom is truly free.

The theme of freedom inundates the human experience in central Nevada, and this pamphlet is just one small hint. But what happens when wide open country spaces feel the pressure of the world's growing population? Do the rules of freedom change as the world becomes more crowded?

I am thinking back to that breezy conversation with Steve, the window guy, about freedom. Little do we know that soon, Jane and I will get caught in the middle of a raging debate about the changing nature of freedom in Nevada. As we head west, we’ll land dead-center in a debate that is sparking violence and hatred and lawsuits. A debate that involves off-roaders, out-of-state environmentalists, a serpent who hisses in the wind, and a group of Indians, whose sacred spiritual lands have been taken from them.

The hill slopes upward, and we cross through millions of giant green caterpillars in furious slow motion. What I want to say to the caterpillars is slow down, enjoy life, why inch along so fast? But instead we just ride over them.

The ones that we don't run over are tomorrow’s hummingbird sphinx moths, one of the largest insects of the North American deserts.

Up in elevation again and the road is all orange butterflies. A handful slap to juice against the truck, but millions more curve up and over the road like a vast hooved migration.

I don't know about this area, but for some reason it attracts butterflies and moths.

Some people think the word butterfly is a once-whimsical mispronunciation of a type of insect that seemed so free. In old English, this sovereign creature was thought to be named for its lighthearted disregard for gravity. Before English settled on its name, they say the butterfly was the 'Flutterby.' But other etymologists point out the Old English word was ‘buttorfleoge’, a word that in the old European languages means roughly ‘milk thief.’ This latter explanation holds more water, because northern Europeans thought those heavenly creatures stole their milk.

While some butterflies adapt to changing conditions, the majority of the world’s butterfly species (there are about 18,500 species in the world, but only 750 in North America) are sensitive to change, and unable to adapt to quickly changing environments. Because of this, butterflies are often used by ecologists as indicator species - when they dwindle, it means other dwindling is on the way.

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