Hi, I’m Sasha. This is the 27th short travel story I’ve written since I lived in an RV for 2+ years. New here?
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The desert is vast and expansive.
Lays before me,
folding out on itself repeatedly.
Sand. Rocks. Prickly plants of various varieties competing for the minimal rainfall that drops each year, then hunker down to turn brown as the snow covers them with blankets to brace against the cold.
Western Nevada: images of high desert: CTRL+C, CTRL+V. Over and over.
The desert on the Loneliest Road in America is nestled between nothing and hundreds of miles of nothing. The desert is always a reminder to me how I simultaneously want more and less.
Less stuff. More adventures. More figuring things out as we go.
And more nights sitting outside, waiting for bats and stars to come out. Evenings watching the sun set above the glittery pavement. Days seeking out weird things that we’d never otherwise see. The middle of Nevada is absolutely a place I never thought to care about. Then suddenly, I cared.
I cared enough to seek out the Shoe Tree, to prolong our visit to the desert.
Before you guess what that is, let me tell you: It’s a tree filled with shoes. Sorry, should I have let you guess? Next time, I’ll let you.
It doesn’t smell as bad as you would think.
No. It does. I was trying to romanticize the memory but it smells like sap and worn canvas shoes, and when I find it 8 miles from nowhere, it is mid-afternoon in August.
There are many shoes. Hundreds of pairs. Tied together with their own laces and thrown over branches. Some are so high that I know someone must have scaled the tree, or planned in advance. Who has so many extra pairs of shoes? Do they travel with an extra pair of old chucks?
Why?
The desert is vast. Expansive. It unfolds in front of me. Everything repeating. It could lull me to sleep. Until the shoe tree arrives along the 2-lane road. And maybe that’s just it. The views are largely uninterrupted until the shoe-decorated tree appears. Someone decided to alter the desert, just a little.
On the loneliest road in America, there’s a shoe tree surrounded by nothing but sand and spiky plants.
Perhaps you should drive past.
Most people do.
Instead, perhaps the best thing to do is just pull over on a gravel spot a few miles further and listen for the song of the coyotes, and watch common nighthawks dipping into the sky. Or, if you’re lucky, maybe a hare will run beside you as your feet hit the pavement over and over, your lungs burning at the sudden elevation increase, and then, very suddenly, he will laugh at how slow you are as he races away down a dirt road.
Thanks for traveling with me,
Sasha
Down the Rabbit Hole
I recently read Ivy Pochoda’s Wonder Valley and in the first part of the book, there is a shoe tree. I was so smitten with the image because I had had such a strange experience prior to reading it. I crave the desert when I’m gone from it, and Wonder Valley is a good book to read if you need to immerse yourself in a dry landscape.
US Highway 50 through Nevada was declared by Life Magazine to be the Loneliest Road in America back in 1986. It is, quite honestly, devoid of everything, including traffic. That means star gazing is wonderful there; Great Basin National Park is right off HWY 50 and takes their dark sky seriously, employing Dark Rangers to keep the light as low as possible for stargazers.
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