I'm back from another 8-day work tour near Ely (say it like Keeley without the K). I've been doing trail work since I've been here, but since my boss quit our crew has become a saw crew, meaning we get to cut down naughty trees all day instead of pound dirt or cut sagebrush out of the way. It's a welcome change, because chainsaws are really, really fun to use, as it turns out. Putting in the initial cuts, hearing a loud snap, seeing the tree come down and then cutting it into firewood-sized pieces is immensely pleasing. Well, as long as everything goes well. If you have a crappy chain or bar, it's hell to cut with. But mostly it's a pack of fun. This fellow has put in a face cut large enough to fit several people into, and he's about to start his back cut.
On the way out of town we stopped at this place and had a large breakfast and some bloody marys and then gambled. Well, I did. Just a dollar. In a slot machine. I lost, of course. Fun way to start the day, though.
And this didn't happend and I didn't see it on the way back, but google found it ("ely nevada"):
But I'll be out of contact again for a while, because I'm going to go camp in the Redwoods in California and maybe go back to San Francisco, and then I'm going to start another 8-day tour, which will be in wonderfully warm southern Nevada. So I'm probably out on Story 3, though I have enjoyed my few sentences. One thing that is nice and bizarre about these long stretches in the middle of nowhere is that I have no idea what is going on in the rest of the world, and I'm starting to lose my desire to know, for example, everything about the latest developments in Pakistan. This entire experience is so intense and self-absorbing that it's easy to forget about other things. I don't feel like I do much, but I feel like I have hardly any time to do much of anything.
Also, I had my birthday, and to celebrate we all went to town and had Mexican food, and of course I had to wear a giant sombrero. Halloween was not celebrated in the field, but I did finally get around to dressing up as Mahmoud Ahmedinejad (as I had intended to do last year) at a pre-party the previous weekend.
You really should come visit and get a feel for how big and different this place is. I'm starting to really like some things about Nevada: the massive, relentlessly open landscape, the lines of mountain ranges that cross the Great Basin, the perfect (if sometimes a bit chilly) climate, and the lack of moralistic Christian crap that assaults you so constantly in the South. Now, it might be debatable whether it's really an improvement to be assaulted by enticements for gambling, drinking, and whores- which are legal, by the way, in every county except Washoe* (Reno) and Clark (Las Vegas)- but at least it's stripped of the self-righteousness that I'm so allergic to.
When camped in central Nevada, you can see all sorts of military activity at night, and you can hear bombing practice all the time.
Nevada is pretty empty, human-wise:
If you subtract the population of Clark county (1,912,654) and Washoe county (409,085) from the population of the state as a whole, you get 173,790, which is how many people live in the rest of the state. Less than Little Rock!
