Clabbers is sitting up at the podium with her fake smile, very coiffed, very white teeth and power suit along with her colleagues, who are all over fifty and don’t seem to be suffering from the general physical and spiritual malaise as the other residents of Altavista I’ve seen here and there on the streets. Maybe they live out of town, in big spreads out in one of the valleys where the grasses are green and the air is sweet. They drive down below to Reno once a month to do their big shop at the Costco and they go over the border to Oregon for their above-standard health care and they have life insurance and homeowner’s insurance and boats to put on the lakes and snowmobiles to put on the winter snows, and they are rooted and prosperous and friendly but apparently mad as hell about something.
Based on the quality of her noises which are calm but rising in volume I feel that Honey is in the vanishingly rare frame of mind and body when she might actually go to sleep in the stroller rather than just lying there gaping up through the stroller window at the sky or the fluorescent light until she panics and screams and struggles to get out. And people have been flowing into the room and the crowd has actually become so large as to encroach on our patch of territory at the back. So I take her off my knee where she is still “hey hey hey”ing and put her back in the stroller, and while another man is at the podium saying “We are an island now, controlled by a foreign government” I wheel her out whispering “’Scuze me ’scuze me sorry pardon me” and the people shuffle aside and smile at the baby and we wheel down the accessible ramp to the side of the courthouse stairs which is hey a federal intervention from which I am now benefitting.
We go three circles around the courthouse which lets me admire what a beautiful little building it really is—they’ve painted the dome an odd bronze color but the rest is white and polished, probably some kind of veneer because underneath I’m guessing it’s that porous volcanic Paiute stone. And it’s got nice lines, neoclassical, short without being squat. Just the right size to stand out of the high desert as an edifice of colonial law and order. Things take a turn for the worse in its immediate environs with those too-wide streets. Somehow up here we missed the narrow Victorian niceties of the gold country, we’ve got no cozy saloons and our main street is so wide you can see two tumbleweeds ambling down it at the same time. The land is always trying to reassert itself or the people always trying to spread out.
I have done one loop looking at the wide streets listening to something that is probably a frog and feeling the waning heat of the day but I see that Honey has her eyes closed and we head back to the ramp and haul open the big door of the courthouse and stand just outside of the meeting room from where a woman’s voice has slipped out to echo around in the dim hush of the rotunda.
I see it’s an older woman, classic Altavista, short hair western shirt nice white pants, she could actually be my grandmother back from the dead, except that my grandmother loved being a Californian, loved going down to the cities, loved eating Crab Louie in San Francisco and tacos in San Diego and going to Los Angeles to visit her cowboy friends in the film lots. I can’t in my bones believe that she would support any of this but then again she was a Republican her whole life and maybe this is where that ends up now. I’d also like to think my grandmother wouldn’t say “Barack
This lady says “We’re just having a terrible time up here. Our economy is hurting. My husband and I were looking at property recently and the number of foreclosures—we just couldn’t believe it. Like the gentleman said, we’ve lived here all our lives and this was just a paradise. We had all the industries we needed and we were providing food to the whole nation. Something has to change, I don’t know what but it seems like this is the closest thing to an answer we’re going to find. I just hope we can do it in time.”
