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About The nugget. (Sisters, Or.) 1994-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 10, 2018)
12 Wednesday, January 10, 2018 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon The Bunkhouse Chronicle Craig Rullman Columnist Black Rock blues I admit to a conserva- tive streak in my nature. One problem with that is a tendency to paint the past in golden hues and promote a world that never really existed. And it’s probably accurate that if we are ever to learn anything, and carry that knowledge forward, we can’t do it by living too long in the rearview mirror. This was brought home to me recently on a visit to Bruno’s Country Club, in Gerlach, Nevada. I was by turns outraged and appalled to find it had undergone a severe modernization. Honestly, the end result was a wholesale ransacking of memories I’ve cherished for a very long time. There were still some deer and antelope mounts on the wall. There was a faded picture of Scottish speed freak Richard Noble, look- ing admirably composed after surviving a 633 mph jet-car ride across the Black Rock playa, and there was still a dusty old pheasant flushing forever beside the new digital jukebox. But the frontier flavor of Bruno’s was erased, replaced by an absurdly modern bar — a kind of characterless theater in the round, adorned with flat screen televisions and ergonomic barstools, and worse — a faux granite bartop that released a sicken- ing odor of scented bleach. That was new, too. Bruno’s idea of cleaning the bar was rubbing his shirt- sleeve down the length of it, which somehow defeated dangerous microbes for about 40 years. But Bruno is gone now and the remodel, I suspect, was an effort to appeal to the start-up unicorns and ecstasy executives who’ve turned the yearly Burning Man party into a grinding expres- sion of self-indulgence tai- lor-made for YouTube. Those modernist types have a problem too, it turns out, which is opposite of the one I have: they don’t seem to appreciate anything that is more than 10 minutes old. Don’t get me wrong. I root for hippies, or hipsters, or whatever reluctant capi- talists are called when they grow beards and man-buns and adopt that snarky mil- lennial je ne sais quois, but who nevertheless can’t quite change a tire, scramble an egg, or find Kansas on a map. I really do root for them, because dancing around a dry lakebed with hockey pucks in their earlobes is probably, in the end, an inexpensive vote for human- ity and our shared karma. And, no doubt, the world needs more angry middle- class white kids wearing dreadlocks and denounc- ing privilege while praising the divine rights of Haile Selassie and chortling arti- sanal bongs in a Nevada sandstorm. And certainly — I can’t resist — no lasting harm is done when a gentrified baby boomer tries to rediscover his glory years by fabricat- ing a street-legal steam cal- liope, and then drives it from Portland to Gerlach with a backseat full of vaping tat- too artists and a jockeybox stuffed with Viagra. I root for them because it’s clear to me that we need these people now more than ever. Especially after the city of Chicago managed to clock out of 2017 with only 650 murders, which is per- haps an encouraging sign that meditation gardens and Saturday drum circles are finally having an impact on world peace. But did they have to destroy the last good cow- boy bar for a hundred and fifty miles in any direction? I wonder this in light of Kerouac’s aging but accu- rate diagnosis of so much that is wrong with humanity — which is the collectively desperate effort to appear cosmopolitan. Granted, I was in a bad mood when we finally made it to Bruno’s. That mood was born far out on the desert, around midnight, with the noisy braying of wild bur- ros — mean-spirited little animals who wrecked a per- fectly good dream featuring Raquel Welch in a deerhide bikini. And, soon after, my com- panion and I were treated to a deluge of wind and freez- ing rain that drove us out of our bedrolls and into the cab of my truck, where we sat like pickled vagrants for six hours, listening to Burl Ives sing “Go Tell Aunt Rhody” on an endless loop. We were only 60 miles of washboard road from Bruno’s but I remained optimistic. In the morning we had planned to scout Little High Rock Canyon, where Shoshone Mike and the last free natives killed four sheepherders in 1911. Like Bruno’s, that canyon is part of my own history in the region, but I’d forgotten Shop Like a LOCAL Sisters is a tourist town. When youʼre a local, shop like one. Bring your own bag! 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There was an old line-shack near our camp, a sad and gutted thing leaning over in time, harried by the elements. I had known that shack in its prime, long before it fell into disuse. But the shack was still there, and looking back now, I realize that in its own way, that old cow camp was both a warning about what we would eventually find at Bruno’s, and an excellent reminder about living too hard in the past. It reminded me that nothing ever stays the same, and that the gift of grace is perhaps best real- ized when we honor all that has gone before — by learn- ing to embrace the future that history made possible. • Kn o • Ca wledgabl ring e •Com p e t iti •Clos e to ve Hom e • Competitive prices • Personalized service • Most insurance accepted • Pet prescriptions. 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