2004 08, Nevada

2004 08 23 Tonopah Airport, Coaldale

Today I was up early and out to Tonopah by 7.  I shot some long lines of phone poles along 6 and 95 (no digital snaps) and then was on my way back through Tonopah on the way back to Truckee.  One of the things you see along 6 about 10 miles west of Tonopah is this next.  This very well protected sign is at the end of a road that goes about 25 miles south in a straight line into Tonopah Test Range.  Another link.  This is surrounded by the Nellis Air Force Range.  All of this is very restricted space.  A trucker I talked to that had delivered material into the Tonopah Test Range said that at the gate they of course make sure you are authorized to enter, but then they take your cell phones, cameras, binoculars, any recording devices, the mike from your CB radio, basically anything you could use to communicate.  Anyway, it was interesting to see how unassuming the main road in looks.

Just a few miles west of there is the Tonopah airport.  Tonopah is a pretty small place, and the airport just looks way too big for general aviation in such a small place.  Turns out it was built in 1942 to train B24 crews.  I was told that there are many crash sites in the area that still contain a lot of airplane bits.  Maybe another trip...  Looking in towards the airport from the highway you can see these big brown buildings in the distance.  Driving in you can see these look like:

There are either three or four of these wood hangars remaining.  They were used to house the B24s while the base was operating.  They are really cool looking buildings, but clearly not bearing up well after 60 years in the desert.  One was burned down a few years ago, someone playing with matches, who knows, and it took 18 minutes to completely go up.  Nice dry wood..

You can see that there is a realtor sign in the above picture.  I wanted to get in and photograph one of these, but since there was a fence, and a few people around, I didn't want to go in without permission.  I called the realtor, actually talked to him, and he said go ahead, go on in.  He wants me to send him a couple of pictures.  I also had to find the truck driver / caretaker that lives on the property and let him know I was around.  I did, and he turned out to be a very interesting guy.  More about him later.

So I was in and around this building for about 4 hours shooting film.  Very interesting structure.  I really doubt if they will all be standing in 10 years.

Lots of history, very interesting structure visually.

So this may be close to the perfect Nevada picture.  It has it all: military history, scary mining history, the junked car in the desert, the desert itself, mountains in the far distance, line of telephone poles.  This digital snap is not well exposed, but I think I covered this better in film.  Perhaps the only thing that could make it better would be Wayne Newton standing out there next to the trashed pickup with his arms around a couple of Las Vegas show-babes.  Maybe not.

Another interior shot.  I think prints of some of the film I shot in here will be very nice.

And of course there are a few junked vehicles sinking into the sage.  This is a particularly picturesque pickup.

I don't know what this was, but it looks like it was strafed.

So after that I was back in Tonopah, about 3PM, when I thought I would be out by 10AM.   On the north side of Tonopah is this defunct motel/bar: Betty's Buckeye Bar.  All pink, all seedy, all sinking into the desert.  Except, as you will see in the next snap, it's built entirely on heaps of mine waste that have been graded flat.  How perfect is that?  I will have to go back and photograph this place.

Now that's high quality Nevada real estate!

Just across highway are the remains of a huge mill that looks like it was long gone 80 years ago.  But in Nevada it could have been 20 years ago, or 120.

I always wonder what was in the cans you see littered all over around mines.  Oil?  Water?  Whiskey?  Cyanide? 

On out of Tonopah on 6 to the west and north.  At the intersection of 6 and 95 is "Coaldale", which not only is on all the maps of Nevada, but is also a major reference point for commercial flights on the way east/west.  Coaldale in reality is the remains of a gas station - restaurant - truck stop - casino (size small) - motel that looks like it went out of business at least 20 years ago. I have been through here many times and have photographed it a couple of times.  The last time was 6 months ago, and at that time the restaurant was still standing.  Not any more.  And it looks like this fire was just a few days ago, since there were large puddles of standing water around the ruins.  This was all so pathetic looking with the rubble of the restaurant in the foreground I had to shoot some more film here.

More.  A beautiful dry lake bed to the south.

More.

So on out of Coaldale, towards Hawthorne, home of the Hawthorne Army Depot, home to a very large pile of bombs.  The sun was making nice sunbeams.

And then past Walker Lake, another large terminal lake (Walker River) just north of Hawthorne.  A beautiful sunset in an extremely clear sky.

So, more about the caretaker I ran into at the hangar in Tonopah.  He was a really interesting guy, and we talked for quite a while about Nevada, and traveling, and photography, and a lot of things.  As we talked more, it became apparent that he was what I would call a true "Nevada Libertarian tax nut". This is an archetype.  He believes that the tax code is entirely voluntary, and that this is actually very craftily hidden in the law itself.  There is a cult of tax nuts that spend their lives deducing the legal foundations for completely refusing to comply with Federal tax law.  These guys make a point of never filing returns, returning all mail unopened and refused, and in general not "going along".  The guy I talked to was very well spoken on this matter, and could quote IRS regs and the tax law at great length and in a very convincing manner.  There are a surprising number of these people in the US.  The unfortunate thing is that whenever one of them gets into court, as the loudest or the richest of them inevitably do, they always lose.  Their claims are always rejected as specious.  They always wind up in jail or losing everything in auctions.  It would have been interesting to ask him about that specific fact, and also to ask him who is going to pay for the vast array of Federal benefits and protections that we all seem quite accustomed to.  The military seems to be a particularly good example that we could take out of current events.

This guy also had a lot of other "interesting" beliefs, all of which he had very elaborate and consistent explanations for.  One of them is his legal name.  It is Joseph-Robert:Smith (not really) but what is important (to him anyway) is the punctuation.  It's that way on the side of his truck in very nice lettering.  This all means something in a legal sense to him, and is all part of his elaborate defense against the Federal government.  He has refused to sign legal documents saying that he is a citizen of the "United States", but rather is a citizen of "Nevada, United States of America".  Again, this all means something.

All in all this was fascinating.  The sort of conversation you come away from wondering why, if you were both speaking the same language, you really didn't understand any of it.  His view of the world and the legal machinery that we operate under is so different, but yet so similar in appearance to ours, that the whole conversation seems sort of surreal.  Either he's been in the sun too long, or I have.

There are a million questions I would have liked to ask him.  I think I could, since he didn't seem a threatening person.

It was interesting.