Ed Owens Thinks of Florida

Ely, Nevada; January 21, 2017. 

"Together, we'll make America great again," Ed Owens said the night before.  He had been sitting at the bar counter of the Jailhouse Lounge, watching the inauguration with a couple of friends.  When he woke up he wasn't so sure of things.  He wasn't so sure of anything in the mornings, especially winter mornings.  He hated waking up to a cold house and the heavy smell of coal.  His house was an old house, a small house, along the railroad tracks.  It had no central heating.  He could have fixed that.  He could fix anything.  Except, perhaps his life.  Nothing was quite the same since Mildred had died.  There was no reason to install a furnace since then.  He had his routine.  His quiet places outside the house.  This place was simply a place to drop his head at night.  But he should have fixed the furnace for Mildred.  He couldn't imagine why he hadn't.  That had been thoughtless.  Now it was payback time.  Karma was kicking butt as some new age hippie would put it.  He looked around the room in the gray dawn from beneath the dingy pink quilt that Mildred had made long ago.  Why he was awake, he didn't know.  There was the cold and the heavy smell of coal.

He returned home from the Jailhouse Casino late.  He had convinced Dora, the bar tender, to join in and have a drink while she was on the job.  There was just the four of them--Jack Peters, Bill Mitchell, Dora and he--but they'd had a good time celebrating a new America.  Too good of a time.  His head hurt.  His bones ached, and because of that damn coal stove, his lungs hurt too.  He coughed in the early morning light.

Outside it was 10 degrees.  A thin smokey fog settled in the black rock neck of the canyon on Ely's west side. The top of the five story historic Hotel Nevada poked above it.  The lights from the giant miner on the Nevada Club lit up the dry fog as did the much brighter blue and pink neon from the Jailhouse Casino across the street.  The streetlights were still on and lit up the all but empty Highway 50.  A few stars could still be seen in the west.  Looking east, a white light slowly spread above the Shell Creek Range.  Beyond that was Spring Valley, the Snake Range, the Snake Valley, the Confusion Range, the House Range, the Pahvaunt Valley--187 miles to 1-15 in Utah, 187 miles of near nothingness.  If you were to go west, towards Fallen, it was even further, 257 miles of emptiness on this, the "loneliest highway in America".

Of course, just because it was the official loneliest highway in America didn't make it so.  There are no absolutes.  There were lonelier highways.  There were more remote places.  Colder places.  The wilds of Alaska.  Antarctica.  The moon.  And Pluto.

But that January morning, lying in bed with a hang-over, under a smoky decaying pink quilt created by his dead wife years ago, Ed Owens felt Ely, Nevada was cold enough and remote enough for anybody, even a recluse, western, old-time miner like himself.

He had a son in Florida.  It was a thought.