Since we drove into Tonopah in the dark, after checking out the Mizpah Hotel – restored by the Cline Family of Sonoma and voted # 1 haunted hotel two years running – we drove down to the local Standard Station that had a view towards the area that we had just driven through in the dark. Tonopah is a mining town, starting in 1901, it produced gold and silver through the depression. Now the big money is in mining Lithium and tourism.
Then we wandered over to the local cemetery where we agreed the saddest identification tag we saw was a grave marker that said; At Rest – Laura Smith – Died September 16, 1906 – A Kind Lady – Life Became A Burden – R. I. P.
On a bluff overlooking the cemetery, are new manufactured houses that don’t have the charm of the old houses but are much, much, easier to live in. Outside of the town, is another cemetery of sorts, a World War II airbase used to train B-24 pilots.
Driving from Tonopah to Cedar City, Utah is all in the Great Basin. It’s called the Great Basin because no rivers in it flow out. Because it is in the Sierra Nevada’s rain shadow, there is not much rain so the rivers never had enough water to cut their way to the sea. But a bigger force is at play in the creation of the Great Basin; the land between Reno, in the west of the Basin, Salt Lake City, in the east of the basin, is pulling apart. 15 million years ago, they were about 250 miles apart and now they are about 400 miles apart. When they were 250 miles apart, Nevada was a high plateau – like the Tibetian Plateau today – but, as the land pulled apart it dropped, breaking into small blocks that tilt as they drop. The high side of a block is a mountain chain running north-south, the low end, a valley (or a graben, if you want to be technical). As we drive east, we drive across a valley on a straight road, then up and through the mountains on a winding road. We repeat this several times and it is great driving. We even pass a small heard of horses with a couple close enough to photograph.
We left home about eleven and traveled on freeways through the Coast Range and across the Central Valley on freeways. Then it was up the gradual sloping alluvial plain to the Sierra foothills on California 120. Tioga Pass, through Yosemite, is closed for the season, so we went over California 108, Sonora Pass, which was closed yesterday because of a storm – the same storm that caused PG&E to shut power off in the North Bay – but was reopened the next day (seemingly for us because we saw no other cars). We drove through the remains of the storm in flat light that faded as we drove by the Marine Mountain Warfare Training Center – greatly enlarged from the last time we drove by – joined 395, headed south past the Mono County Courthouse – built in 1880 – then it was east in the dark.
Tomorrow we are leaving for Albuquerque to see my sister and her husband for Thanksgiving. Our plan is to spend the first night in the historic Mizpah Hotel in Tonopah Nevada.
Leadership contains certain elements of good management, but it requires that you inspire, that you build durable trust. For an organization to be not just good but to win, leadership means evoking participation larger than the job description, commitment deeper than any job contract’s wording. Stanley McChrystal
We saw two – slightly fictionalized – biographical movies the last couple of nights; one on a black icon, Harriet Tubman, and one on a good ol’ boy white icon, Carroll Shelby. The movies couldn’t be more the same in many ways or more different. Both movies are true stories of the American journey, slightly fictionized for more drama, and both used actors that bore a resemblance to the real people, other than that, they are as different as their black and white characters.
Harriet, the Tubman movie, was good but not as good as I had hoped, more like a very good classroom film for social studies class than a rip-roaring thriller (although her life was a real rip-roaring thriller). Part of the problem is that we know the ending, part of the problem is that the movie is much more subtle than Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave – and I, we, have become jaded –and part of the problem is we saw it in an almost empty theater. Still, it is a movie I recommend if not super enthusiastically.
For starters, Harriet Tubman is a real American hero. In General Stanly McCrystal’s book, Leaders: Myth and Reality – which the quote at the top comes from – Tubman is one of the examples he uses. She not only escaped from slavery, but she also went back into slave-country to help others escape. Over and over again. Most of the movie takes place before the Civil War and, while many owners saw the war coming, the slaves really had no idea, they only knew that trying to escape was a high-risk venture, a risk that most men wouldn’t take. In many ways, this is a more revolutionary film than it will get credit for, this is a black film with a black sensibility and, while there are white people involved with the Underground Railroad, Tubman is clearly responsible for her own manumission (or emancipation, if you prefer).
Ford vs. Ferrari, the Carroll Shelby movie, is really a movie about friendship, between Carroll Shelby and Ken Miles. They, along with a lot of other people not in the movie, built a racing car that became its own American icon, the Ford GT40, that went on to beat the Ferraris at Le Mans. Michele loved this movie and when I asked her why she said that it had everything; a friendship story, a father-son story, and a rivalry story between Henry Ford the Second and Enzo Ferrari. Like Harriet, I liked Ford vs. Ferrari but not as much as I had hoped. I think that might be because I am too close to the subject. Michele thought it was terrific and, while she is a car person, she didn’t know much or particularly care about the GT40 story. One rave review I read referred to the Mustang as a sports car so I’m inclined to think that even though the movie has lots of cars and racing, it isn’t really a car person’s movie, it’s just a good people movie. Sitting here, thinking about it, there is a lot of good car stuff in this movie, not the least of which is Matt Daman driving around in a 427 Cobra with its almost orgasmic V8 bark.
As an aside, when we first planned to go to Harriet, it was playing in San Mateo but a week later, it was only playing at 10:30, so we went to the Century Theater at Tanforan in San Bruno, where it was playing three times. As an aside to the aside, Tanforan was a horse racing track when I was a young kid and, during the early stages of World War II, it was used as a holding area for Japanese-Americans being rounded up before they were sent to more permanent Concentration Camps in the boondocks (like Manzanar in the Owens Valley or heart Mountain in Wyoming). Now it’s a shopping mall. End aside to the aside. San Bruno is not as wealthy an area as San Mateo and it is disturbing that the people of San Mateo lost interest before the people in San Bruno. There were a lot of trailers before Harriet and all but one were for black movies I hadn’t heard of. That makes me a little sad. End aside.
