A Szechuan Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving Day 1991. I was living in Fallon, Nevada, a small town about an hour's drive east of Reno on U.S. Highway 50, known as The Loneliest Road in America. (I was stationed there in the Navy, so it wasn't my idea.) I had been living in a trailer on an old woman's guest ranch on the western outskirts of town since May of '89, at first with a roommate. But between one thing and another, he moved out after a year, leaving me to my own devices.

The Nevada high desert - so called because of the altitude - is a desert of alcalai, not sand. The climate is spectacular - the extremely dry air, the sky a great cupola of blue all year round, quite literally nothing in all directions for miles and miles. I was 33 and I was loving it, despite some personal - and professional - rough patches. The evenings were my element; the sunsets that seemed to go on for hours in the summer, the quiet disturbed only by the lowing cattle, an occasional coyote in the distance, the unobstructed desert wind that sometimes howled around my trailer, and the music I played on an old Victrola to which I jerry-rigged a cd player. And rum. Drinking for me was still at the fun stage.

I made no plans for Thanksgiving. I got no invitations that year to eat with someone else's family. My own family was in South Carolina - too far to go, I felt, for Thanksgiving dinner. So, sometime around 2 in the afternoon, I got in my car, a '76 Honda Civic, and drove into town, expecting to get a pizza. The map of Fallon in my memory is dotted with landmarks that are probably, in the real Fallon of 2018, no longer there or no longer recognizable. 27 years is a long time, even for a small town. I drove up a winding dirt road to Rice Road, turned left (west), left again on an access road, and finally reached the highway. I don't remember, but it was probably a cold day. (My AccuWeather app tells me that the weather in Fallon today is clear, in the 50s.) When I passed a Burger King, I noticed that it was closed. So was the Supermarket. Then I remembered how, on prior excursions on Thanksgiving Day when I was with my family, nothing was open. The first time, in Columbia, South Carolina, my parents announced that we were going to the NCO Club on Fort Jackson for dinner. We had done it before, but on Christmas Day, not on Thanksgiving Day. The NCO Club was closed. With nothing at home to eat, we began a pilgrimage across Columbia to find something - anything - to eat. At last we, the five of us, sat down to eat at the Marriott Hotel. My sister, Bibbit, made a scene when she sent her order back to the kitchen twice.

The second time my family made the mistake of trying to eat out on Thanksgiving, we were living in Denver. After driving all the way downtown looking in vain for somewhere to eat, we finally found a restaurant open for business - Josephina's in Larimer Square (now shuttered). The meal was expensive and delicious. (My sister wasn't with us on that occasion.)

Driving east on Lincoln Highway in Fallon that day was an equally desperate search. The pizza place was closed. So no pizza. I thought about a casino restaurant, but I wanted a take-home meal. Just when I thought I might go hungry on Thanksgiving Day, I found Szechuan Express was open. I also found that I wasn't alone in my search for something to eat that day. The place was packed. So, after standing in line for several minutes, I ordered enough for two people, collected my food, and drove home the same way I came.

Later, having consumed my crab rangoons and egg rolls, and started on my sesame chicken, I stepped out of my glass doors, sat down on the wooden steps, and looked out on my world - the view from my trailer that I'd gazed at for two and a half years. There was a broad pasture in front, surrounded by barbed wire. Beyond it some trees, with nothing else obstructing my view to the west. In four months I would be gone, bound for my next duty station, but those days and nights in the high desert, alone most of the time, took up a residence in my heart, and they remain there all these years later. It turned out to be a memorable Thanksgiving after all.

Robert Frost wrote about his own "Desert Places,"

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars - on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Loneliness is what he's talking about - the loneliness of the natural world in which we have no proper place. But it didn't scare me then, looking out on an eventless horizon. And it doesn't scare me now.

Happy Thanksgiving.