Land of Little Rain

By Andrew Church

I once read that only 24% of Nevadans were born in Nevada. The rest of us are migrants, pioneers, transients, exiles, and opportunists of a modern sort. But in spite of our varying origins, what we hold in common is that we all came here, to the Great Basin that encompasses most of Nevada and beyond. Which raises the question, does that commonality have any significance in who we are? 

In her works, Mary Hunter Austin, also a transplant to the American West, explored the notion of environmental determinism, the idea that nature and the landscape in which we reside shapes our culture, our worldview, and our personalities in sometimes overt and sometimes subtle ways. It is a concept that keeps coming to my mind of late, especially as the systems and societies we have built up around us are shaken. If you take away the creations and rituals we surround ourselves with, who then are we? What do we believe? I think part of the answer to that question is external to ourselves.

In The Land of Little Rain, Austin wrote, “If one is inclined to wonder at first how so many dwellers came to be in the loneliest land that ever came out of God's hands, what they do there and why stay, one does not wonder so much after having lived there.” When I was younger, I would have said that was a long-winded way to describe Stockholm syndrome (or would it be the Nevada-specific Comstock syndrome?). But as I have grown older here in Nevada, I too begin to see something that was hidden before. It is difficult to reflect on, for it is hard to analyze the very mechanism with which you analyze all things, but perhaps there is an ethos to this place that in turn becomes that of its people. Or perhaps I’ve spent too much time in the sun. I’ll leave that for you to decide. 

The most observable trait of the desert is its disdain for excess. All one has to do is look at the flora and fauna that evolved here, each taking only what is needed, not asking for any more. There are no towering and greedy water willows, no corpulent rivers and streams.  Given enough time, the desert whittles defiant cedar fence posts to toothpicks, and grinds haughty mountains to dust. There is an invisible balance between giving and taking, a tacit contract between desert dwellers. That is the reason why decadence and opulence is so garish to those having just stepped out of the wilds. And why, if one spends their years here, they begin to see the glory of a solitary shady spot, the bounty in a meager trickle of water, and the beauty in whatever plant can be construed as a tree. 

Nevada is a place where one’s sense of time is distorted, and the present is not counted in the passing of the minutes and seconds, but rather it is stretched out, elongated over long and hot summer days, dusty decades, and geological eons. Time expands during the summers, but then contracts during winters, each day somehow painfully short and the winter’s months paradoxically unending. This desert time dilation is especially noticeable should you be in mountains as the sun begins to set and the desert wind lightly buffets your ears, and there is a sensation of being stretched thin between the planes of past, present, and future. 

The perception of this expansion and contraction of time goes hand-in-hand with the ability to see the most minute transformations in a world that to outsiders appears static, and simultaneously understand that those changes are seemingly inconsequential when one stands in the long geologic shadow of rhyolitic flows, smothering blankets of tuffaceous strata, arroyos carved into alluvium, silhouettes of a hundred broken ranges. Yet glacial change is change nonetheless. Slow is how the desert works, and equally slow is how this land can transform us too without our knowing. 

But these are all facets of a higher law of the land, that of impermanence. For the desert, and Nevada by extension, is a place of extremes, of dearth and plenty, boom and bust, giving and taking, coming and going. And we, as do all desert-kind, ride out those cycles, and that ebb and flow either mimics our hearts’ own beating or else it is the heart that beats in a tempo that is in harmony with this space.

So, in the context of this pandemic, take solace in the fact that we will endure. It is in our Nevadan nature after all. And if you are in need of evidence of that fact, it is best to look to our most venerable of desert cousins, for it is the bristlecone, which endures in the most desolate and barren of places that is the hardiest and longest lived.

Images/Andrew Church

Andrew Church was raised on a cattle ranch in Northeastern Nevada. After working abroad on the high seas, he returned to Nevada where he currently resides in Elko County.

Blogger image/Blogger Andrew Church is “the fella in the blue shirt.”