Thank you all so much—to the selection committee, to all of you here with us tonight, for coming from far and wide to celebrate stories together. It’s such an incredible honor to be here. When I relayed the news of winning the Carnegie to my grandmother, she first paused for a while, and finally said: in times of success, it is most proper to be humble. And my grandmother is always right.
Read MoreThirty feet below us is a five-hundred-yard tunnel dug through solid granite, pitch black and glazed with ice, one in a series of tunnels that took Chinese laborers almost two years to excavate. These are the Donner Summit tunnels, blasted by hand some century and a half ago; below us is Tunnel 6, the Great Summit Tunnel. We cross a gently sloping snowfield, cut downslope, and suddenly greet a cavernous maw punched into the mountainside. The tracks that once ran through these tunnels are long gone. While we walk through the tunnel, our snowshoes crunching on the glossy ice, our headlights barely pushing through the darkness, I feel a profound sense of awe.
Read MoreWe keeps our speed to twenty miles per hour or so as we drive up Dun Glen Canyon Road, a dirt road barely two cars wide that wends some nine miles northeast from where we left the 80. A huge slash of yellow dust boils in our wake, coating the entire rear windshield and rendering the rearview mirror useless. I glance down at the directions on my phone. Dun Glen—what’s left of it, anyway—is three miles, twelve minutes away.
Read MoreWe walk a little ways from the service road until the trampled grass beneath us turns to a fawn-yellow hardpack dirt trail. Ahead of us lies the railroad. I look westward down its line, mistaking heat shimmers for diesel-electrics. I’m almost sure we beat it out here, but I didn’t think we’d beat it by this much. It’s been at least five minutes already since we got here.
Read MoreI think as we drive we go back in time. That’s the idea kicking around in my head when Elko first starts appearing on the interstate signs. The Transcontinental Railroad was built from two ends by two competing companies—the Union Pacific, building west from Omaha, and the Central Pacific, building east from Sacramento. And so the youngest rails on the line would have been those laid near the center of the route, at Promontory Summit in Utah: May 1869. The months rewind as we drive.
Read MoreThe temperature outside is in the mid-40s, brisk and dry, and the road ahead of us is straight as a sunbeam. Salt Lake City is sixty, seventy miles behind us, and the Nevada border is another fifty miles ahead. I take off my regular glasses, pass them to Pia, and for a moment I am squinting and driving into a blurry field of color and light. Then I manage to get my sunglasses on: the world comes back into focus, sepia-toned and clear. Not a moment too soon. The taupes and tans of the desert around us bleach and flatten, and suddenly we are racing across the surface of the moon.
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