AS WE DRIVE WE GO BACK IN TIME.
That’s the idea, at least, 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. Elko, fifty miles away, represents late December, 1868; at the time, the journalist J. H. Beadle reported it to be a “pretentious and lively city.”
The temperature outside drops and continues to drop. We are driving into a climatic curiosity with real thermal effects: this valley around us, in the high desert some five thousand feet above sea level, is one of the coldest places in the continental United States. Northerly winds carrying bone-chilling Idaho winter air down through the ridged desert before running into the eleven-thousand-foot meteorological brick wall that is the snowcapped Ruby Range. In early January of 1869, as numberless Chinese crews worked here to extend the Central Pacific line into Utah, the temperature plunged to ten degrees below zero and stayed there. For three days, the cold seized up some of the streams the men relied on for water. They were burning green wood, freshly-cut pine still heavy with moisture, hauled down from the Sierra foothills on locomotives that struggled to make steam enough to head back. It was simply too cold.
There’s traffic coming up on the road ahead. Work zone: 55 mph speed limit. Us and a dozen other cars blow past a temporary radar sign that strobes our speeds back at us with unheeded alarm—76, 75, 74. We’re slowing down at our own pace, bleeding speed off into the wind. I merge into the left lane as we pass an orange sign announcing that the right lane will end in a quarter mile; we are passed on our right moments later by a baby-blue streak, a BMW goaded into triple-digit glory by the narrowing lane who cuts ahead of a truck a few hundred yards ahead of us. The truck lets out an indignant blast of its horn.
Elko is the heart of Nevada’s gold-mining economy—which is saying a lot, considering that the state itself represents nearly 80% of all gold produced in the United States annually. Only four countries produce more gold than Nevada. And most of that gold is Elko gold, dug out of the dirt from rich lodes in the surrounding area. The reason there’s so much gold here is also the reason why this moonscape desert is corrugated by mountain ranges that have, between them, thirty-five different mountains above ten thousand feet. Most mountain ranges are compressive; two tectonic plates push into one another and a range buckles up and out of where they meet. The ranges in Nevada, on the other hand, come from pulling. Salt Lake City and Reno have put nearly sixty miles of new distance between them over the last 20 million years. All that stretching has torn the earth into vast and asymmetric blocks, heavier on one side than the other; over untold millennia, these blocks have tipped into more stable configurations. As the heavier end tips deeper into the earth, the lighter ends of these blocks rise up endlessly into the air, their tops slashed into jagged peaks by millions of years of wind and water. And these rising ranges carried upwards with them the riches of the deep earth: gold.
In Elko we stop at the Amtrak station for a moment. The wind blows continuous and cold. The rails curve away in either direction. These are not the same rails that those frostbitten Chinese crews laid a hundred and fifty-two years ago; those tracks—or rather, what remains of those tracks—are a quarter-mile to the northwest. I look left and right, west and east, past and future. A truck from the neighboring geochemicals company roars to life. I watch it crawl up the driveway and leave. I get back into the car and in a few turns we’re on the freeway again. Miles and miles disappear behind us; months and years vanishing as we thread backwards the route of the rails.
Everywhere distance and time intercede.