 So this one, the Shoshonians. Let's begin. Thanks for subscribing and listening. Tell me what you think in the comments box. Leave me recommendations, requests, questions, and critique. Here we go. So these guys, they're going through Nevada. They're driving. They're driving through Nevada. They're stopping through reservations, through Nevada and Idaho, around the Snake River area, and lots of places. You'll see. There's a map in this book to Lovelock, northeast. This time the humble sink is out the left window. And beyond, southeast to Route 40, scattered over the land are danger areas, a red pocking on the map, bombing and gunnery ranges. Finally, one would come to the vastest pustule of all, the Las Vegas bombing and gunnery range, an odd-shaped exclusion of land approximately 40,000 square miles. Lovelock is difficult to place. It is 95 miles northeast of Reno, and one accepts that figure for it. This time the simple strategy, crossing the railroad tracks with an eye out for the standard signs of broken cars and falling apart shacks, didn't work. The enclave was north of the tracks, north of the highway, on a single clay street. There was a city cop standing by his squad car, its red light oscillating on top, waiting for two bums to climb down out of a boxcar. It was quiet otherwise, a sort of deadly hot stillness. A dog crossed the dusty street to get to another spot of shade. A filling station attendant came out of a grimy garage interior to fill a tank, then quiet again. He passed the bus station, and a block later a single person sitting pointlessly on a bench in front of the courthouse. A pair of girls giggled along the street. The movie house was shut down, boarded up as if done a long time ago. The town now fed completely by TV, and that not so easy to receive judging by the height of the antennas. The air was heavy with a Texas meanness. Pickup trucks with men and cowboy hats, cowboy shirts, fresh shaven, the smell of lotion, filtered cigarettes, long range rifles, a bale of hay in the back of a truck, an empty gas can, a mechanical assurance to fix a motor, affirmative reflexes, 410 over and out, Roger, get that satellite up there. You betcha just passing over Australia, kill the president, water rights, the wheat referendum, and subsidies, the grim, jawed insistence that girl you married was a virgin. Cops checking out toilets. The one armed shoe shine man earlier had said, look out for love lock. They're mean and love lock. Try to stay out of sight and love lock, man. Just pass right on through if you can. Of course, most people would do nothing else, but if you did have to linger there, you'd notice this thing about it, a deadly threatening stillness, not even too many cars once off Route 40, but always passing the corner of the eye, an official sort of vehicle, sheriffs, deputies, and again, those dangerously capable women in pickup trucks. Literally everybody a part of the constabulary, a constabulary, once when we were sitting in the car, a water department truck came around the corner, and even the waterman shot us a long suspicious look. By the way, Leroy Lucas and Edward Dorn, they were black and white guys. Okay, so they're getting, obviously it's like, you know, big deal out there, you know, it's like, what the hell, what the hell's going on here? You guys hanging out together? All right, so anyways, just to, just so you know, even the waterman shot us a long suspicious look. I thought he might stop. One had the brooding feeling it would be unwise to talk to anyone in this town. And if you went so far as to stop an Indian, the town would rush at you, suddenly animate, get away from our goddamn Indian there. Hey, what are you doing? Talking to my Indian, the mirage of kidnapping and murder hung in the air, banged heads, cut up bodies lying scattered at the edge of town. At lunch in the bus stop cafe, we were looking at the mural on the wall back of the counter. It was done in some vaguely crude amateur style, never quite primitive, yet short of even a standard professional vulgarity, a golf course scene. My friend pointed, check that caddy jack. I looked at the old man with the bag over his shoulder. He was so, he was as black as the color they, they use would permit. Man, that's realism. They know what's happening. You know who he is. Oh yeah, that's straight. And it was, even though there was, there surely wasn't a resident black man in town, at least for his sake, one hopes not. Along the back of the Love Lock Enclave, however, there is a grove of immensely old cottonwoods, dense grass and brush, a thousand birds. And then the land fades back toward Reno, motels and filling stations into the thin, thrown up fronts that make the edge of a western town. 72 miles later, Winamucca is a different story. You enter a bustling town. The people are preoccupied with the gambling. It gives the place an action Love Lock lax. They are at least busy with it, and therefore indifferent. Indifferent is a relief. Here again, one sees the vagrant-minded Californian pulling the levers, throwing the spotted bones in the green box tables. A greater number of tourists have stopped, stayed on a few hours. There are the obvious tourists, all sexes, all sizes and shorts. It seems at a glance that all of the Californians, mostly the elderly with time and money, those famous Siamese twins are here, riding a couple, meaning time and money, riding, riding a couple in the front seat, a couple in the back, in those high-priced cars. The women gray-haired died to silver with spotty tanned skin. The men like they had been put together with enriched flour in the back room of some Bank of America branch. They park their cars and get out, unending attention, hiking up the belts, swatting the imagined wrinkles from the backside, wash and wear. Wrinkle-free clothes are very difficult for the old to get used to. They remember winning this country sitting on their wrinkle-making bottoms. Then all the rolling up of windows, checking the keys, locking the car, double-checking the locking, looking up at last, and then all four moving off to see what particular fountain of youth Winamaka is. Outside one of the casinos at the main intersection of Route 40, there are half dozen or more ponderous wooden Indians. They are carved from six-foot sections of log. Painted on vague human shapes are Indian clothes and faces, black eyes, brown semi-gloss skin. They are all startling, a naive sort of dream being in their solid presence. They have no bearing on Indians, of course. I should think that they stand in the same relationship to Indians as those little cast iron livery Negro boys with rings do to blacks. To get to the Indians, they told us, you cross the tracks and then take the dump road. The enclave was small, a collection of a dozen shacks, rather hidden away in some trees by itself. In Winamaka, there is also a small mixed section of Negroes and poor whites. That was just an excerpt. Thank you for listening. Let me know how you like my stuff. Check out my playlists. The one you'll find good readings. 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