[The Sign]
It all began with war, and the war began with the wooden sign. Or, so we children were convinced. Children tend to hear news second-hand, usually from the hyperbolic talkers, and piece everything together as best they can.
Ten miles west of Reno, a traveler would long have left the empty sprawl of city behind him, passed into the hills, and come to an exit sign proclaiming "Red Rock Rd." To his right, he would have beheld the little desert basin the inhabitants called Red Rock; and should he have taken that exit, he would have passed a gas station into the middle of a loose confederacy of ranch-houses.
This valley was Red Rock, named by the pioneering forebears who had settled there a hundred years before. Though they themselves remained shrouded in the mists of unmentioned history, they had no doubt had the leather skin and bleeding lips of their descendants. Who needed the Truckee River a few valleys over? Luxury. These ancestors settled at the foot of Mount Peavine, hewn in by hills on all sides, digging wells and breeding cattle. A few of their fierce children still remained on the first ranch plots, brazen and expansive.
But the wooden sign shouted WELCOME TO GOLDEN LAKE, not able (as it were) to learn of the exciting history of Red Rock. The real estate corporation behind the wooden sign was able, incidentally, to learn of Red Rock’s exciting history, but "Red Rock" wouldn’t attract buyers – at least, buyers of the corporation’s desired sort.
We ourselves had moved into the area a few years earlier, transplants of an aircraft manufacturer out East. By then I’d developed a sense of the place. The sign amazed me.
"What does it mean?"
My dad had seen the sign on his way from work, and now in that evening we were going to church.
"What does what mean?"
"The sign, Dad."
"Oh. I think they’re renaming the subdivision."
"Who?"
"Whoever owns the subdivision."
"What lake?"
"Hm?"
"What lake is the sign talking about?"
"Oh. I’m not sure, Josh."
Two years before, Dad had built a planter-box for Mom in the backyard – not in the vast two acres of brush and sun-baked clay, but safely within the fence near the house, on the sprinkler-fed grass. My mom bought topsoil and grew tomatoes and cucumbers. While my sister and I ate cucumbers like dessert, we both shared an inability to eat tomatoes without gagging or otherwise ruining a meal. Or, at least I wasn’t able to do so; in hindsight, I think Sarah might have been following her brother’s lead, joining in. In any case, when the planter-box fell into disuse the next year, we ate store-bought cucumbers and rejoiced at the disappearance of tomatoes. The planter-box soon found itself outside the fence.
After Bible study on that day of the sign’s appearance, we returned to Red Rock and were intrigued to find it well-lit from below. The sign was planning to stay, a monument.
The coming weeks brought the sneers of the local ranchers; I enjoyed them at the gas station, the hub of the neighborhood’s pulse. I would bike over every so often to buy a candy-bar and hang around if a rancher was gossiping to the gas station owner.
"What do you make of it?" the rancher was asking.
"Of what?"
"The sign out there."
"Ah."
"My opinion, they can name this goddamn place anything they want, it’s still gonna be Red Rock. –Excuse my french, son."
"Ah, him." My legs were crossed, eyes absorbing the rancher’s burnt face, "Our private-I. Don’t worry about him."
"My great-great-great-grandfather dug the well on my land. Far as I’m concerned, this is Red Rock."
Sometimes two ranchers would intersect at the gas station, and that was always particularly fascinating. Once there was a dispute over a fence built, allegedly, on the adjacent rancher’s land. One rancher’s donkey would terrorize the neighborhood from time to time. Overall, however, it was fascinating to me simply because grown men – tough ones, at that – were talking. The topics of conversation in themselves were generally as bland as feed, fences, and water concerns; the gas station owner was the closest thing we had to a bartender or priest.
There was that one time:
"Did you hear about the McCaskell boy, detective?"
"No. What happened?"
"One of the Irvine boys stole his birthday bike. There was a scuffle, of course, but the Irvine boy’s older, and so he basically just took the bike. So then – all you got’s a ten?"
"Yes, sir. Sorry."
"So then the McCaskell boy – he’s seven, you know – he goes and gets his father’s shotgun. Ha! Your eyes – no, he did get the shotgun, but it was unloaded, of course. He got his bike back. –Here’s your change: five, one, two . . ." For some reason he found that particular story on that particular day exciting, and I didn’t know why; like most bartenders he had ears for all the anxious customers simply because he was stuck behind the counter.
The gas station buzzed for a day or so about the arrival of the sign, but then life chugged along as usual. Nothing fell out of the sky, no visitations or omens. Every so often someone would mention the sign in an effort to stir up conversation. When the owner didn’t listen attentively enough and I was around, these bored souls would bounce their wares off me.
Machinery came a few weeks after the wooden sign, and I was amazed. I wondered about some sort of magical listening device in the area: So, Joshua Baker, you question our naming of this place? You ask where the lake is? Well, we will give you a lake, young sir. No, I would have protested, it wasn’t that sort of question. I just wondered why, that’s all.
For a year, the glorified pond called Golden Lake – a nice pond, mind you, but hardly a lake – stood as a monument. Incidentally, the wooden sign with its proud golden text had already begun decomposition; Red Rock ate latex, bleached dyes, and blistered exposed wood right where it dared to show its face. Golden Lake didn’t have much of a trumpeter anymore.
Wasn’t Nevada the silver state, anyway? I often wondered.
A year later, the sign was barely legible. The real estate corporation appeared to have given up the fight. "Golden Lake," sitting half-planned on the desert basin, dried up before the next spring. My mom’s planter-box splintered and twisted around the same time, chafing against its nails, no longer of use and a cool home for various kinds of scorpions.
-r
