Roland Merullo is the author of 21 novels and seven books of nonfiction. With his older daughter he writes a Substack newsletter called Hi Zan, Hi Pa. He can be reached at RolandMerullo.com.
This is the last of a four-part series. Part 1: It’s night in America | Part 2: The heroes we live with | Part 3: Searching for class in America’s promised land.
In the last leg of our 3,600-mile cross-country journey, Amanda and I traveled from Rock Springs, Wyo., through Salt Lake City, across northern Nevada, and to the Pacific Coast just south of San Francisco.
The title of our project, Night in America, has had a double meaning: We often drive at night, and we see the Trump era as a dark chapter in American history. While we were crossing the Rockies on our way toward the Golden State, President Trump was apparently panicking about the Epstein files and announcing the production of “Trump class” battleships that naval experts said weren’t needed. No doubt in order to remain in his good graces, CBS News’s new editor in chief, Bari Weiss, was throttling a “60 Minutes” story on Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportees being tortured in a Salvadoran prison.
Rock Springs, a city of 23,000 near the southwest corner of the Cowboy State, was built in part on coal mining, grueling work that attracted Chinese, Irish, Italian, Welsh, and Eastern European immigrants. A monument near the center of town displays the names of hundreds of miners who died doing their dangerous jobs.
These days, most of the coal has been taken out of the ground, and the local economy is buoyed by the mining of trona, a light-colored mineral that’s refined into soda ash and used in detergents, the making of glass, and even toothpaste. As was the case in so many of the places we visited on this trip, a changing employment picture has left Rock Springs looking haggard and poor, with boarded-up buildings, empty storefronts, and some dingy — if friendly — old bars.
We’ve always found a sprinkling of young entrepreneurs in these battered urban landscapes, a frosting of hope on a stale old cake. Mary and Cody Maynard took over a coffee shop in Rock Springs’s former railroad depot and renamed it Pinup Coffee. Before we enjoyed their excellent coffee and a delicious chicken-salad-filled croissant, Mary told me that in their younger days, the couple had worked at a unique summer job: rescuing ducks who’d landed in the trona mines waste ponds and become paralyzed by the high salt content there. “I never thought I’d be driving an airboat in Wyoming,” she said.
And we never thought we’d spend the next day in Salt Lake City without visiting landmarks connected to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, until a friend suggested we look up a locally famous character named Ken Sanders. Bearded, bald, still vibrant in his mid-70s, and a regular on the PBS series “Antiques Roadshow,” Sanders has been collecting and selling books for his entire adult life. He gave us a tour of his shop, which occupies three floors of a defunct art museum.
“It’s a hell of my own making,” he acknowledged, leading us through a somewhat disorderly collection he estimates at more than 100,000 volumes. There are rare books, used books, signed first editions, ‘novels’ filled with block prints but no words, coffee-table books, tomes in foreign languages, comic books, classics like “Desert Solitaire” written by his late friend Edward Abbey, and obscure works on one of Sanders’s favorite topics, the American West. Affable, welcoming, and unafraid to express his political views, he called the Trump administration “a [expletive] mess” and offered this deceptively simple summary: “Words can’t really capture the terrible things that are going on.”
Given his love of words — several times during our tour, Sanders opened a favorite book, thumbed the pages as if they were beloved living creatures, and read a few lines aloud — this comment seemed particularly astute. If we hear “undermining democracy” enough times, a kind of anesthesia sets in; the meaning is diluted. Which is exactly why Amanda and I made this trip, to see for ourselves, to mark the damage and search for the hope, to keep from letting the torrent of Trump’s cruel and illegal deeds sully our love of this country.
The ride out of Utah’s capital was spectacular, a flat, straight stretch of Interstate 80 with the Great Salt Lake and then the Bonneville Salt Flats to our right, and a scarlet sunset above gray-blue mountains ahead of us on the western horizon.
Sanders had told us he liked Elko, Nev. — where we spent the next night, had an enormous Basque meal, and walked the streets admiring the city’s public murals and advertisements for its famous Cowboy Poetry Festival — but recommended we “just drive right by” another Nevada city on I-80, Battle Mountain. As we approached Battle Mountain, though, the oil light came on, I needed a break from the blasts of wind pushing against our rental car, and we were hungry.
The Broncos-Jaguars NFL game was on all the TVs at Overtime Sports Bar and Grill, and the place was loud with F-bombs, groans, and cheers. Just after we ordered, a woman wearing a Harvard sweatshirt squeezed by, and I couldn’t resist asking if she was a graduate. “No,” she said, “A friend and I were in Cambridge in 2007. We tried to sneak into a World Series game, but had no luck. I’m a huge Red Sox fan.”
A Sox fan in Nevada! That led to a predictable sharing of Fenway stories, which led to something much less predictable: the woman — Stephanie McCoy — inviting us to see the wild mustangs she’d adopted at auction. This offer, made after a few minutes of conversation, seemed perfectly American. All through our trip we’d met people who opened their lives to us and told their stories.
After our meal we tried to keep up with McCoy, an attorney, as she doubled the speed limit on a gravel road in her Cadillac SUV. Her 640-acre ranch lay at the edge of the mountains 5 miles from town, but we couldn’t see the mountains and could barely carry on a conversation because the wind was gusting above 50 miles an hour, pushing dust and grit into our eyes and mouths. We worried aloud about continuing the drive in that weather. “If you get a little ways down the road, and think, ‘[Expletive] this,’ ” she yelled, “you’re welcome to come back and spend the night.”
We braved the elements and made it safely to Reno, only to find another ravaged downtown, with several big casino hotels dark and empty, apparent victims of online betting and the spread of legal gaming to Native American reservations and other venues. Nearby blocks were spotted with homeless men and women. We spent part of a night walking around handing out food and bottled water.
Then the next day, just as the visible effects of yet another economic shift threatened to cast a cloud over our mood, we stopped into the Antique Angel Wedding Chapel. “We do 30 to 50 weddings a week,” a worker there, Claudia Hinojosa, told us proudly, showing us several themed rooms — Victorian Grace, Western, and Garden. Hinojosa, another open-hearted soul, had herself been married there, having had an argument with her boyfriend and then, the next morning, given him a few hours’ notice that they were about to be wed. That was 22 years ago. They’re still together.
The next day we barely made it out of Reno ahead of a storm that dumped 5 feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains, with ridge winds reaching 100 miles an hour. We visited old friends at their organic farm in Watsonville, Calif., then drove up the coast to the beach at Santa Cruz. The day was warm, some of the amusements and rides were open, and we walked across the sand and put our fingers in the Pacific Ocean to officially end the journey.
With its rides and games, the Santa Cruz boardwalk reminded me of Revere Beach in the 1960s. I’d grown up there and watched as the advent of big theme parks sucked the life out of the place. Another economic shift: The Dodgems, Roller Coaster, and Virginia Reel closed up; the crowds took their money elsewhere.
Three weeks earlier, there in my old hometown, Amanda and I had begun our journey by dipping our fingers in the Atlantic. Behind us, new condos lined Revere Beach Boulevard, where the amusements had once stood, and the sight of them underscored both the opportunity and cruelty of capitalism, the Great American Religion. Jobs appeared, jobs disappeared. Places thrived, struggled, perished, and sometimes came to life again in a new form.
Against that background, the ordinary people we met on this trip kept living their ordinary lives, determined, brave, facing extraordinary challenges, and grasping at small pleasures, while their wannabe king enriched himself and his cronies, quashed freedoms, loosed masked thugs upon our cities, and decorated his palace with gold.
