The Golden State

The sky is just starting to mellow into the warm pre-twilight light, bruising faintly at the horizon, when we get out of the last stretch of plain and up over the forested hills to the basin where Altavista sits. Honey wakes up now, crying. “We’re so close, sweet one,” I tell her. “Hang in there,” but she’s justifiably grumpy and she cries and I listen to the crying and roll down the window to imbibe the juniper and try to bolster myself for the sight of the wildlife preserve and the fields and the town that will greet us over the crest of these little mountains, but as with everything up here it’s the scale and the sparseness that are striking, and the thrill of recognition at first sight is replaced almost immediately with a feeling of deflation, the knowledge that there’s no one waiting on the deck to greet us. The highway turns into the main street and we pass the area they called Indian Town which is a rocky slope just outside of where the grid begins and presumably where the people were made to live who weren’t shipped off to Oklahoma after the Indian Wars or into one of the tiny rancherias out yonder. And then we are in town proper, Honey crying past the abandoned false-front emporia past a few shops past the High Desert Hotel past the tiny movie theater with by god a newish release spelled out on the marquee. My heart sinks as I take in the empty sidewalks and empty storefronts, the gas station, the railroad tracks now defunct, everything looking like it was the last time I was here, that is, not exactly thriving.

The drive is supposed to take six and a half hours but somehow we have been on the road for eight when we come to the wooden sign sunk into grass that signifies the entrance to Deakins Park. Although Honey is still caterwauling, passing the sign feels like entering protected land, something apart from the ravages of the town. It sounds like hair-splitting to parse the varieties of mobile home, like something only a person obsessed with imperceptible class minutia would do, but there are mobile homes and mobile homes and despite how mortified I used to be by the fact that my grandparents lived in one now I happen to think Deakins Park is just as nice if not nicer than many a suburban cul-de-sac of for example the Nut Tree–adjacent variety. It’s a circle of nicely appointed and discreetly mobile mobile homes of different styles and patterns built on either side of a large circular street, each kept up nice and with a good-size yard. The outer ring of houses is bounded by a split-rail fence, and beyond this the town gives over to the high desert, with low, prickly sagebrush and rafts of tumbleweed through which jackrabbits bound and antelope poke delicately in the cool mornings. Everyone has plenty of space and a view of the low-lying mountains ringing the basin. It’s a little neighborhood on the frontier. Home on the range, if you will.

I drive past what was the original eponymous Deakinses’ place, left empty by their deaths like my grandparents’ and also kept up by their children, and down the road ahead of us I see my grandma’s birch tree with its white paper skin I picked strips off of as a child and its luxuriant fall of green and the low chain-link fence and the tidy squares of yellowing grass bordering the concrete walkway up to the porch.

I pull up to my grandparents’ house, or my house, I should say, and the empty lot next door which is technically also mine. There’s a Realtor’s sign stuck into the front yard, curling at the corners and cutting off the final vowel on the Basque name of a local gal who handles all the dealings for a hundred miles. Every few months someone makes as though they want to buy it, ranch hands or frail retirees hoping to be closer to grandchildren, but they tend to melt away after their first inquiries to the bank, or some issue with the required paperwork. Uncle Rodney informs me that last winter the only title company in Paiute County closed, precipitously leaving all real estate deals such as they are in even greater disarray.