Don’t Be a Stranger
I have been thinking about Nevada women in the Forties and Fifties who lived in godforsaken places: remote ranches, mining claims, highway maintenance stations at least fifty miles from bread and milk. They had telephones and electricity, but that was it. Many don’t think they have stories, but they do.
Last summer I went with my friend to visit a woman who lived most of her married life in out-of-the-way places. Now in her eighties, she and her husband retired on a little spread along the south fork of the Humboldt River, about an hour and a half drive from Elko. My friend had been raised in this house and on this ranch and invited me to come along for the ride. Before we got out of the car, my friend said, “She has cancer.”
The thin woman moved and talked with effort. No action seemed easy, not even leaning forward letting herself receive a hug from my friend. “I need to get something in my stomach,” she said as her husky, fortyish daughter handed her a small dish of bread pudding. As we chatted she took one or two teaspoons of food from the blue and white china bowl.
Somehow, we got on stories about trusting strangers; how, in the old days, people were more helpful. “Last spring we were on our way to Oregon,” she said, “and had car trouble about sixty miles this side of Denio. No one would stop. People always used to stop.” My friend and I nodded, sitting across from her on a brown naugahyde couch that matched her armchair.
“Well, Mom, somebody musta stopped or you’d still be there, right?”
“Don’t get smart with me, missy,” the woman said, making the effort to smile at her daughter. “Of course someone stopped. A rancher pulling an empty horse trailer. He took us to Denio, at least forty miles out of his way. That’s how it used to be.” She handed the nearly filled bowl to her daughter, pleading, “ Don’t scold me.”
She leaned her head back into the worn chair and told us this anecdote. “I was alone in the house. My granddaughter was in the bathtub. These two deer hunters came to the door, saying their truck was stuck in a creek some miles back. They’d spend the night in the truck, had been walking all morning.”
“I asked them, ‘Do you want me to fix you some breakfast?’ Well, I fixed them some breakfast and told them the men were gone for the day. There was nobody around. “
My friend and I glanced at each other. We knew the Nevada-Idaho border country she referred to. We understood how alone she and the child were.
“After I fed them breakfast I said, ‘I guess you could take that truck over there and try to get yourselves out. The keys are in it.’”
“One of the men said to me, ‘Don’t you want our driver’s licenses or something?’”
“No.” I said. She looked at her daughter, as if she were the one who would understand the intuition and experience that had taught her how to live in the middle of nowhere, how to recognize dangerous men. “I couldn’t see any point,” she said.
“Well, they took the truck and went and got their truck out of the creek, came back, and went on their way. It turned out that one of them was with the sheriffs department in Reno. He showed me his badge. He said,’ You know, ma’am, you really shouldn’t have done that.’”
We laughed. She smiled and we thanked her for the nice visit. At the door, I glanced back and noticed she was lighting a cigarette. I heard her say to her daughter, “Don’t scold me.”
