Silence and Sagebrush
ALONE IN A CABIN IN NEVADA
Read time 6 minutes
After five days at the cabin, I cycle to a hill that has a mobile signal, and pick up an email from Phil, my emergency contact in Wells:
'Nick, If you see this, leave the bonnet on the car raised, and with the car facing towards the north. The pack rats can build a nest in your engine compartment of about one cubic foot in about 24 hours. They are also adept at chewing through wires'.
Having spent the last few days hanging out with the wild community of animals around my temporary home in the Nevada wilderness, this news prompts amusement and alarm. As I hightail it back to the cabin, I wonder if the gang of cute kangaroo rats watching me from under the shade of my hire car had been plotting my downfall.
I have been lured to Nevada by an offer to be an artist in residence at the Montello Foundation, which has built a cabin on a remote parcel of land in the Nevada Desert.
The cabin is thoughtfully designed and has a wood-burning stove, a shower, a kitchen, a fridge, a well-stocked library, and a verandah that looks across ancestral Shoshone Land to the jagged silhouette of Nine Mile Mountain on the horizon. In the afternoon, warm winds whip up out of nowhere. At night, Coyotes howl under dense constellations of stars.
Whilst I am hardly living like a hermit, the cabin does offer a taste of embodied American solitude – a place where I can live out my Walden/Desert Solitare dreams. I have no wifi, no TV, and no distractions. A Cottontail Rabbit sits by me as I drink my iced coffee in the morning. I can feel my mind un-muddling.
I am in the Great Basin, an area characterised by its open plains of Sagebrush, described by Barry Lopez as 'one of the least eulogized of American landscapes’. There is less American myth here to get in the way of a direct experience of nature than in an iconic location such as the Sonoran Desert. Though I still wear a cowboy hat.
My days are structured by the sun. I might walk at 4 am through the Sagebrush when the air is cooler and the silence is palpable – trying (failing) not to destroy the delicate patchwork of cacti, flowers, and assorted animal burrows that quilt the valley. During the day, when the temperature might reach 100F, I lounge on the verandah – watching the critters, reading, listening to birds shuffling around on the roof – slowly moving around the perimeter of the cabin to stay out of the sun.
On the drive back to civilization, I leave the car to move a rock from the track. An eagle swoops close to me. I am hit by a wave of emotion. With my head clear after weeks away from the influence of news, social media, and people, I respond spontaneously to this encounter without a self-conscious screen: a mark of my experience in the Nevada wilderness, in the silence that underpins everything.
Photography notes: Rolleiflex 3.5f film cameraPRACTICALITIES
The cabin at Montello is an artists and writers residency in Nevada, USA.
Apply to the Montello Foundation here
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