Flashes of Light: Vignettes from the Road
By GennaRose Nethercott
“If you come thiiiiiis way, we’ve got two thousand clowns.” Reeva’s eyes light up, a grin highlighting the gap left behind from a tooth she’s just recently lost. She’s six and isn’t afraid of anything—even the piles and piles of clowns lining every surface of her family’s novelty motel. Ragdoll clowns and porcelain figurines. Pennywises and hobo clowns. Jack-in-the-boxes and red-nosed puppets. This: her legacy.
When I drive away from Tonopah’s World Famous Clown Motel a few hours later, I leave with an original crayon drawing of Reeva and I, holding hands.
Life on tour is always like this. Encounters sparking like a flash of lightning over the desert—there and then gone. People and places and strange, impossible sights stacked one atop the next, with a single trait in common—they all end up in the rearview mirror.
I spend a lot of time on the road. As an author, I’ve been touring since September with my debut novel Thistlefoot—including a two-week stint zipping around Nevada as part of Nevada Humanities’ Nevada Reads program. In that time, I shared 11 readings and book signings—each accompanied by an ornate puppet show, animating chapters of my book. Drive. Unpack. Perform. Chat. Pack up. Drive. Hotel. Sleep. Lather, rinse, repeat.
It turns out, you can fit a heck of a lot of encounters into two weeks. Many flashes of light. Many Reevas. I watched aerialists levitate on green silk in Las Vegas. Wandered through herds of big horned sheep in Boulder City. Read tombstones by flashlight in Goldfield, paged through cowboy poetry in Elko, and tracked the sunset as it glanced over the 14 residents of Tuscarora. I tumbled in and out of libraries and theaters across the state. Shared meals with residents in town after town, small world after small word. I filled my pockets with stories, and I passed them on where I could in exchange for books and trinkets. Handshakes and histories. At one point, I was even led to a towering, life-sized reproduction of Baba Yaga’s house on chicken legs—a folkloric figure that just so happens to be the protagonist of my own novel. And though I’d never seen it before, visiting the house felt like returning to an old friend. In fact, so much of Nevada felt that way. Story after story that seemed less of a discovery, and more of a homecoming.
Have you ever been a ghost? I have. I have passed through cities like a trick of the light. Walked through walls. I have entered into others’ lives, and just as quickly, vanished. But there’s something about ghosthood that they don’t tell you. The haunting, it isn’t only something you leave behind. It sticks to you, as well.
Leaving Nevada, I didn’t leave alone. I left with memories. Hauntings. Reeva’s voice as she described her favorite clown’s pink collar. The bray of the burrows as they crossed into the mountains. The pale, golden dust of a road winding through a ghost town. And among it all, the promise of someday, somehow—coming back.
GennaRose Nethercott is the author of a novel, Thistlefoot, which is a current 2023 Nevada Reads book selection, and a book-length poem, The Lumberjack’s Dove, which was selected by Louise Glück as a winner of the National Poetry Series. She tours nationally and internationally performing strange tales (sometimes with puppets in tow) and is a writer and researcher on the podcast Lore. She lives in the woodlands of Vermont, beside an old cemetery.
Thistlefoot puppetry performance photo by Ezra Distler.
All other photos courtesy of GennaRose Nethercott.