US Highway 50, Granada, Colorado and the Amache Internment Camp

Amtrak a Passing Shadow, Granada, Colorado, US Highway 50
acrylic
8 1/4 x 23 1/4 x 3 3/4 inches

In 2005, I began photographing US Highway 50.  My focus was a section of highway known as the Loneliest Road in America that traverses Nevada.  Raised in Utah and Nevada, I grew up crossing the Great Basin.  An area of interior drainage, the rivers never make it to the sea.  Instead, they vanish in shallows of stagnation.  The Great Salt Lake is a good example of this.  My parents lived at opposite ends of the 500 mile divide of mountains and valleys.  Highway 50 was the connection between Fillmore, Utah and Reno, Nevada.  In 2012 I extended the highway theme to include Colorado.  This past fall, I covered the rest of the highway on a road trip that took me all the way to Maryland.  This is not a project to be completed in a single season.  It will likely involve the rest of my life, but I really like the idea of covering the breadth of the nation from the vantage point of a single highway.

I wanted to capture all the towns along the way.  As I traveled, I realized that kind of exactness would never actually happen.  Maps never entirely capture the idea of habitation.  What constitutes a town or community is not always straightforward.  With all the clusters that happen along the way, the abstraction of a map was necessary.  I missed some towns because I didn't know I missed them.  Sometimes I turned around to fix the mistake, and sometimes I didn't.  Then there was the problem of cities and the surrounding suburbs.  I confined cities to skylines and downtown intersections.  I didn't hit museums or spend much time dining out.  This wasn't about tourism, although it often touched forgotten places, the kind of places only known to those coming home to houses shadowed by freight trains on tracks that preceded miles of automotive travel.

Heading west out of Kansas, the sun had just come up.  In Granada, Colorado, grain elevators bathed in morning sunlight.  I pulled over just in time to catch a passing Amtrak.  I didn't realize or imagine that Granada had been the site of an internment camp.  That knowledge came to me later at a rest area.  However, I recently caught it on my way home from Maryland.  There wasn't much. There never is.  The only standing structure was not from the past, but rather the reconstruction of a guard tower.  Signs at the entrance provided a brief history.  The Granada Relocation Center also known as Amache held 10,000 people of Japanese ancestry from August 1942 to October 1945.  This was one of ten camps that held 110,000 prisoners.  Two thirds of the prisoners were American citizens.  The interesting part about the figure is that another internment camp has the number at 120,000.  I noticed the discrepancy because there happens to be a camp not far from where I live.  Out in the desert of west Millard County, Utah are the remains of the Central Utah Relocation Center also known as the Topaz Internment Camp.  Whatever the number, wartime seemed to inflame racism, a racism that many are never willing to acknowledge. 

The reconstruction of a guard tower at the Granada Relocation Center,
 also known as the Amanche Internment Camp.

The Central Utah Relocation Center, also known as the Topaz Interment Camp.

A Railroad Crossing Outside of Hazen, Nevada

The following is from a handmade book for one of the paintings in The Loneliest Road in America exhibition at Valley House Gallery, Dallas, Texas 2010.  In describing the Great Basin, my thoughts turned to wildfires.

A Railroad Crossing Outside of Hazen, Nevada
oil on canvas
16 1/16 x 36 1/8 inches
2008

Although it had been green across most of the state, many low-lying areas remain barren even in years of abundance.  All of us have seen or heard how deserts bloom after rain showers.  That happens here as well, but not as often as it does in Texas or New Mexico.  It is not only a matter of it being dryer; it is also due to the timing of the rainy season.  The monsoons of the desert Southwest arrive in summer.  In much of the Great Basin, precipitation falls as snow when plants are dormant.  Because most of Nevada has no drainage, snowmelt stands in low-lying areas awaiting evaporation, saturating soils with mineral salts that never make the sea.  The soils are toxic to an awful lot of plants, including many weeds.

 

I wonder how so many of the world’s plants came to be weeds.  Until recently, anything native qualified, and juniper are still thought to be in need of clearing.   Nevada is said to have had vast grasslands when the cattle arrived; the sea of sage is explained as overgrazing.  At Great Basin National Park, displays say the landscape is new due to fire prevention.  From driving around, I agree that northern Nevada was mostly grassland, but the pinion and juniper that drape mountainsides along US Highway 50 have been there for a very long time.  That can be a problem with scholarship.  Historical documents talk about vast grasslands and some assume that applies to the entire state.  Early travelers followed the Humboldt River where mountains and hills are simply sage.  It is a mistake to extend that description to other ranges of the region.  If the Snake Range was not thick with juniper and pinion pine 100 years ago, where did the evergreen abundance come from?  It takes hundreds of years to grow trees of any size in the dry climate.  Count the tree rings; fires were not routinely roaring through the forests.

 

There are some parts of the country, where burning the undergrowth is the same thing as burning up trees.  Nevada is not a land of towering pines like Florida or northern California.  The brush cannot be burned without torching the oak, juniper and pinion pine.  The many fires have more to do with climate change than unwise fire suppression.  When you go from three dry years in ten, to seven, fire becomes reality.

 

 

Suppressing fire with fire promotes grass, as any rancher knows.   A few years ago, a ridge burned not far from my parents’ house.  Before the fire, the flat was open, and most of the oak and juniper grew along the hillsides.  It was lichen-covered rock, dwarf sage, wildflowers and very little grass.  The quick burning fuel that drives wildfires was in short supply.  Afterwards, golden waves of grass tumbled into the woods waiting to be thunderstruck.  Instead of quelling the threat, it is raring to explode.  That might be why ranges that burn keep catching fire.    

 

 

 

  

Handmade Book
4 1/2 x 3 1/8 x 3/8 inches
2010

US Highway 50: A 500-Mile Stretch of Utah, Nevada Aridity Marginalizes Farming to the Edges of Great Basin

Intersection of North Harmony and Stillwater
oil on canvas
11 9/16 x 10 5/8 inches
2010
The agricultural area of Fallon, Nevada is on
the western side of the Great Basin.

On the 500 mile drive across the Great Basin, there is farming in the shadow of the surrounding ranges.  The one end of the highway mirrors the other.  However, everything in between is far too dry to support anything more than grazing.  If it were not for the many mountain ranges that rise and fall away on sliding horizons, there wouldn’t even be the short lived streams that occasionally fill dusty playas.  What I wrote below is based on a memory of impressions.  Having lived some of my life in rural Utah, I know farming is more than fields of green and quiet highways.

 



I photographed the fields of Fallon, Nevada so long ago that I wasn’t sure which way I was facing.  The light seemed to signify the east, and that was confirmed by the enlarging profile of Fairmont Peak as I zoomed in on a horizon of shaded debris, the hallmark of farming.  Even in June, the days are never long enough to complete all the chores.  Tire swings and irises divide houses from dusty ruts, outbuildings and alfalfa.  Lawns function as mud reducing turf for car chasing dogs bent on the senseless joy of barking.  Deep-rooted vehicles and discarded parts are indispensable links to laboring children home from school and the many families dependent upon backyard tractor cannibalization.  Farming can be like navigating a dead cow up a canal with a sunflower stock of a stick; the flies are a reminder of bloat in the reeds.

 

The image was cropped from three horizontal frames.  Although it was a shame to leave all that information out, it is nice to work vertically.  That is something I seldom do; I really like being able to describe the lay of the land.  However, the arbitrary nature of the composition still comes down to content.  The details equal design.  There is no need to rely of on fabricated relationships or kiss up to the picture plane.  The only things that matter are the things that do, and they are not the similarity of summarized shapes, patterns of textured gestures, the rhythms of obstinate stumbling blocks, the chime of untimely riming, focal points, undeniable plots, or graveyard junipers pruned to view Saint Patrick’s Cathedral more precisely.

 

The beauty of the question is asphalt and intractable weeds injecting seasonal green into sorted stones shouldering the pullover of lost and lonely motorists.  Not all are stranded.  Some come for the quiet splendor of the countryside, the home of those clinging to the land of ancestors, even if it was just Uncle Jim and his son Rob trying their hand at ranching.  Wealth resides on a porch of screened in evenings.  Crickets rise and fall in pale twilight.  Constellations are bound to rule the night.  Dogs yap, howl and bark at elusive horizons.  Moths bombard blinding isolation; a jackrabbit is hit by rolling headlights in the glare of hesitation.  The evening conceals the fatality of grinding traction in a swell of sweet smelling alfalfa. 

US Highway 50, Hinckley, Utah
The agricultural area of Delta, Utah is on the eastern side of the Great Basin

 

 

           

The Loneliest Road in America: US Highway 50, Nevada and the Great Basin; Peavine Peak, a Painting from an Exhibition at Valley House Gallery, Dallas, Texas

The next several posts come an exhibition at Valley House Gallery, Dallas, Texas that I did in 2010.  The paintings where a survey of U.S Highway 50 crossing Nevada.  The following is written information from the invitation and the handmade book that went with the painting of Peavine Peak.

 

A Railroad Crossing Outside of Hazen, Nevada
oil on canvas
16 1/16 x 36 1/8 inches
2008

The Loneliest Road in America

 

Although it may not be America’s loneliest road, a portion of US Highway 50 has that designation for a reason.  On its way from Maryland to California, it crosses Nevada, the driest state in the union.

 

For personal reasons, I extend the theme to include some of Utah.  As a child, I traveled back and forth between parents on this highway.  The 500-mile drive from Fillmore, Utah to Reno, Nevada was devoid of farming for 410 miles.  The rivers that rise on either side of the Great Basin never find their way to the sea and wind up wasting away in large evaporation ponds like the Great Salt Lake.

 

The region informs the way I think about light, and although I was not aware of it, the long vistas taught me to see instability.  It is a feature of any horizon and key to a sense of depth in painting.  It is nice to return to mending miles of silence strung along by power lines and waves of sage known as The Loneliest Road in America.

 

 

 

Peavine Peak
oil on canvas
5 7/8 x 17 1/2 inches
2009

 

Peavine Peak

 

As remote as it looks, Reno is on the other side of the mountain.  This in fact, is not far from Horizon Hills, a subdivision just down the hillside.  We lived on Pawnee Court, a dead end street, in a maze of streets claiming tribal ancestry.  In a way, that may have been fitting.  The development looked like a reservation.  The houses had an air of being manufactured and the lots were mostly barren.

  

I don’t mean to paint a bleak picture.  As neighborhoods go, this was nicer than most.  However, architecture in the state, if there is any, looks haphazard.  If you want more than gaming and houses of prostitution, stick with the sage.  Wind-rustling brush shapes the face of the horizon, and from our place, it was either high or low.

 

By suppertime, the wind was roaring and tin canned processions of tumbleweeds and milk cartons assaulted backyard gardens.  Although there were dogs in the neighborhood, there was no need for them. The wind had a canine sense of design.  Had there been any trees, thrashing branches would have whipped leaves into the sound of many waters.  No one had air conditioning, and the afternoon heat was chased away through open windows that later closed to keep out the night.  Then, in the chill of morning light, the wind was silent.

 

 



Handmade book for Peavine Peak
4 1/4 x 3 x 3/8 inches

 

CLIFF’S GAS DIESEL, Holly, Colorado; U.S. Highway 50

CLIFF'S GAS DIESEL, Holly, Colorado; U.S. Highway 50
acrylic
8 3/8 x 26 x 4 inches

Holly, Colorado was the last town before crossing over into Kansas on east bound U.S. Highway 50.  The plan was to a camp north of Stockton, Kansas so I could drive with sunrise back into Colorado.  Exhausted, I stopped at a closed filling station to examine a map.  Turning around, I searched for a road I failed to spot.  At that hour, the highway hosted only intermittent trucks.  In an area of fog I saw the turn off.  The methane fog filled with dust driving in a land of feedlots.  With each and every turn I wondered if I was getting any closer.  The road came to a tee.  On the left, there was a hollow of trees.  A lane straight ahead led to a house and other structures that hovered around a small porch light.  I turned right.  Headlights highlighted insect collisions when a sense of destiny began to settle in.  Continued travel on gravel only led deeper into starlit fields with a moon that would soon slip behind the horizon. 

It was nice to be on the highway heading back to a rest area I past just before leaving Colorado.  Although the plan was to camp, sleeping in the car was not impossible.  By folding the backseats forward, the trunk could accommodate 8 foot lengths of molding, it seemed like a sleeping bag could also fit into that space.  With part of the bag encased in the hollow of the trunk, getting in was a bit tricky.  Climbing through one of the back doors, I slid into the sleeping bag.  With my feet in the trunk, I embraced starlight from the calm of my pillow.  Although more comfortable, the car provided a private viewing of the nighttime sky that a tent denies.  It was nice to no longer be moving.  I settled in listening to the sound of crickets and other travelers pulling in.  With a sweep of idle headlights, car doors opened and closed.  Restrained voices trailed off; time acquired the weight of late arrival.
 

CLIFF'S GAS DIESEL, Holly, Colorado; U.S. Highway 50 (Left Side Detail)

I arrived by morning light.  The main street was off the highway as many main streets are out on the open plains.  Back on the highway, CLIFF’S GAS DIESEL was surrounded by piles of tires.  It was hard to tell exactly what Cliff did.  Outdated pumps stood in front of a rundown building, yet his business seemed to carry on.  I liked the station’s architecture.  It reminded me of a time when I enjoyed the highway as a child.  To say I like something implies a preference for the subjects I select.
While that may be true, it doesn’t happen in the ways you might expect.  I like everything.  Every place has moments, and one of those moments was a moment when I happened to be somewhere.  That may sound egocentric, but the only moment I know is the one I’m living in.  I realize dawn has come to Holly many times before, and that morning is an ordinary affair, but it is that common occurrence that seems to be so rare.  Instead of trying to create or capture the spectacular, I am thoroughly invested in minor events.  And since life is always happening, it doesn’t matter whether I am standing by a pile of tires or overlooking a vale of the Great Basin.  The same light that revels in sedimentary uplift sparkles in bits of broken glass and the asphalt patina flash that skips past fast food carcass discards along an open highway.  Feel the exhilaration in a swirl of rough and dusty leaves kicking up ruts and sailing across puddles permanently plaguing the bend of an alleyway. 

CLIFF'S GAS DIESEL, Holly, Colorado; U.S. Highway 50 (Right Side Detail)

With the filling station withstanding the ravages of time, I thought it might be nice to capture the historic nature of the place.  Of course, that could easily be achieved by using color.  Although color generally belongs to the realm of painting, I thought I would paint the station in shades associated with photography.  And although we see in color, thoughts of yesterday can be layered in shades of gray.  That is not to say that memory is colorless.  It is just that the paper trail of the past includes books, newspapers and magazines printed in black and white.  Photography dated parents and grandparents while still young in pallid shades of gray.  In that mix fell sepia prints.  Painting in shades of photography plays into a placement of frames on a desk, mantle or shelf.  Though not portraiture, landscapes have a capacity to spark hidden bits of consciousness.  Simple sights or sounds may remind us of other times and places.  Nostalgia is a riddle of the familiar.  The frame is reminiscent of snapshots, the evidence of a planned vacation, except no happy couple stands in front of an exquisite destination.  It is the domain of place, any place that is so compelling.  Another day arises on a highway in the town of Holly, Colorado.  As dilapidated as the filling station seems to be, CLIFF’S GAS DIESEL is still in business.  I could hear work  going on in the garage as I got into the car ready to hit the highway.

Drawing US Highway 50 Historical Site Hazen, Nevada: A Southern Pacific Railroad House, Lynching, Fire, a For Sale Sign, and the Unexpected Chiming in of Dungarees



Far Right Side Detail: Hazen, Nevada; US Highway 50 ( The Loneliest Road in America)

Left Side Detail



Right Side Detail

HAZEN WAS NAMED FOR WILLIAM BABCOCK HAZEN, WHO SERVED UNDER GENERAL SHERMAN IN HIS “MARCH TO THE SEA.” THE TOWN, ESTABLISHED IN 1903 TO HOUSE LABORERS WORKING ON THE NEWLANDS IRRIGATION PROJECT SOUTH OF HERE, INCLUDED HOTELS, SALOONS, BROTHELS, CHURCHES, AND SCHOOLS.

IN 1905 THE FIRST TRAIN CAME THROUGH ON THE NEW ROUTING TO TONOPAH. IN 1906 THE SOUTHERN PACIFIC RAILROAD BUILT A LARGE ROUNDHOUSE HERE AS WELL AS A FINE DEPOT.

IN 1908 HAZEN WAS NEARLY DESTROYED BY FIRE.



AS A TOUGH TOWN, IT HAD NO PEER IN THE STATE. NEVADA’S LAST LYNCHING OCCURRED IN HAZEN WHEN “RED” WOOD WAS TAKEN FROM THE WOODEN JAIL AND HANGED ON FEBRUARY 28, 1905.

I saw no reason to rewrite this statement.  What I know, you just read, and it comes from Historical Marker No. 178 and the Nevada State Park System.  Anything added is from memories of a small town, a railroad crossing, and a journey into darkness.

Hazen was the first town after the interstate.  When we left, the sun was low.  The land flattened out in advancing shadows, a thunderous freight train beside the highway churned past the last bit of daylight.  In the evening mist, every little insect seemed to hit the windshield, sweet smelling alfalfa whistled through open vents and windows.  Cool twilight unfurled a canopy of stars, and although others rode inside the car, darkness was my only companion.

I always like the H for Hazen on Black Butte.  Although the drawing is a depiction of heat, travel from Reno across the state often began late, Friday after work was the first chance to get away.  Hazen on a slight rise divides alkali from alkali.  Nevada is an array of drainage basins that never link up to the ocean.  Rivers like the Carson, Humboldt, Walker and Truckee die in isolation.  By the time trails were blazed for what became current day U.S. Highway 50, The Loneliest Road in America, it was known that none of the rivers of the Great Basin, lead the way to the San Francisco Bay.  Gravity frequently failed to take creeks and streams even as far as the next valley.  The landscape is a place of names dedicated to ancient lakes like Bonneville and Lahontan.  Springtime sometimes tries to fill the remains of vanquished lakes, now an ethereal ice age of sage assaulted by hail and rain, and the rage of thunder and lightening.  Here along much of this paved and rolling highway, the Pony Express made its way to the next station.

It had been years since I worked in charcoal.  Shopping for a sponge to cut up and dip in a new jar of powdered charcoal was fun.  Sitting at a table with familiar materials at hand was bit like slipping into a pair of old dungarees.  Although I never use the word, I thought I heard dungarees in the sound of musical phrasing and jotted it down.  It was like striking a match and I struck many of those while making this drawing, only I don’t know what to do with the words lyrically.  Perhaps the previous sentences should be scrubbed, edited, erased, but I think I will leave them in anyway.  The burnt end of a matchstick leaves a nice trail, a warm residue when pressed to paper.  Drawing can be thought of as a collection of pressure marks.  Defining a trailer house, gravel and weeds as a matter of record is just hand adjustments made with charcoal and an eraser.  Although I love listening to lyrics, I don’t know how to compose words into song.  Charcoal more fluid than paint is well acquainted with the atmospheric light that pigment often denies by relying too heavily on texture, the pasty state of style.  By the way, the charcoal and carbon rich matchstick scratching was enhanced a bit with color from water soluble crayons and a damp brush.

                                   

I stopped and read a sign

About a lynching in 1905

Instead of crying,

People seem to sing

Poor Red Wood,

Imagine the irony

Taller than any tree

Strung up and hung

From the lowly bough

Of a drought ravaged elm.



Standing in the sun,

I imagine dusty men

In old dungarees

Sipping chicken brothel soup

No longer offended

After crashing the wooden jail

Haling a man free

From justice and a judge

To twist in the middle of a crowd,

A lynchpin righteous with delight



I take history in with a smile

And leave with a breeze.

Poor Red Wood

Imagine the irony

Taller than any tree

Strung up and hung

From the lowly bough

Of a drought ravaged elm.









Hazen, Nevada; US Highway 50 (The Loneliest Road in America)
charcoal, burnt matchstick, drawing pencil, water soluble crayon
9 1/4 x 52 1/16 x 1 5/16 inches including integral frame