During Thanksgiving Break 2024, I traveled with my partner at the time to visit her family in Gabbs, Nevada. Leading up to the trip, I told my friends and family where I was going by saying the name of the town, waiting for a second, then dramatically saying "population: 58." This usually got a bit of a puzzled reaction, but I felt it effectively conveyed my bewilderment. It seemed like an impossible place to me, far more remote and isolated than anywhere I had been.
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A faded sign outside of Gabbs with a list of obsolete churches and social clubs, November 2024 |
I was perhaps too unbothered by the isolation, as I neglected to fill up my car at the gas station at our last stop at the Walmart in Fernley, Nevada. As Interstate 80 changed to US 50 which changed to NV 361, the setting sun cast a lovely red glow on the desert, before turning into a pitch darkness that properly spooked me. I love a good country drive in pitch darkness, but the lack of trees or any shapes for my headlights to bounce off of was causing a low-grade panic to set in. My paranoia about running out of gas certainly did not help.
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| NV 361. I swear this was terrifying at night. November, 2024 |
We did arrive safely, not quite sure if we were going to spend that night with our hosts or at a local motel that one Yelp review referred to as "Norman Bates scary." We thankfully did not have to find out what that meant, and spent the night on the couch after some stargazing and exploring our hosts' underground library. As always, I was stunned by the view of the night sky when there was no light pollution.
Our hosts were my partner's great uncle and aunt, we talked with them quite a bit about life in Gabbs. They were constantly on the road spending about half of the year driving to visit friends. They preferred to hole up in Gabbs in the more temperate seasons, leaving mainly during winter and summer. For them, the remoteness was peaceful, and there was a family tie. My partner's great aunt and grandmother grew up there.
Gabbs was founded around a magnesium mine in 1941, when demand for the mineral was high due to World War II. Though demand dropped off sharply after the end of the war, operations in the mine continued, and the town was built up with a library and a K-12 high school, where my partner's grandmother attended while growing up there through the 1950s. She mentioned seeing nuclear blasts on the horizon, likely seeing explosions from the Nevada Test Site, which operated continuously through the 1960s.
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Wide-Lens Shot of Gabbs, a view from the desert. November, 2024. |
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| An abandoned pool in the center of town, November, 2024. |
On the drive back home I appreciated the beauty of the desert a good deal more. I am also happy to report that I did not run out of gas, though it got a bit too close for comfort at the end there.
6 comments:
This post reminds me of the road trips I have taken with my family, where we would constantly drive through isolated areas. One memory that comes to mind was when we were traveling to Kernville, CA. As we drove on empty roads, I would always say to my brother "I wonder where kids go to school here," because we had not passed a school in hours. Similarly, we would also have to plan our gas station visits in case there would not be one available for a long time.
Gabbs sounds like the same type of boom and bust town that was populated during the extractive phase of its development, but for one reason or another, was abandoned after not making the economic transition to other economic sectors. I remember seeing abandoned gas stations on the way to Nevada or Arizona and immediately getting scared that my car would break down in the desert. 70 miles is a really long way from a gas station. I know AAA has a mileage limit in some circumstances. Anyway, in some research I've been doing on another topic, I noticed that geographically isolated communities have a harder time coming back from depopulation. Villages closer to metro areas, on the other hand, have a greater chance of tying itself to the economy of that metro area and surviving. Nonetheless, maybe another valuable resource can be found near Gabbs, and the town can make a comeback. Never say never.
My understanding of the Nevada Test Site is that the downwind effects of its various nuclear tests affected many communities in rural Nevada. Many people were exposed to fallout with limited disclosure or compensation until the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990 [https://armscontrolcenter.org/fact-sheet-radiation-exposure-compensation-act-reca/]. I wonder whether this history influences how residents of places like Gabbs view their relationship with the federal government: simultaneously dependent on federal projects for their town’s survival and harmed by federal activities nearby. This might complicate the narrative of rural decline as simply economic or due to isolation. For some communities in the Pacific, like those near mine, the state is not absent—it’s present in harmful ways.
I love stopping in places like these whenever I am driving interstate, and I find that they are very common in the desert areas on exits off of the 15 or the 70 moving east from California. Some of your pictures look exactly like the 110 mile space of no services on the I70 in Utah between Salina and Green River or any of those rarely used exits on the way to Las Vegas. Many of these surviving small towns arose out of mining settlements, whether gold in the 1800s, or rare earth metals from the later 1900s to today. Due to the boom and bust nature of mining and the discovery/expletion of profitable ore veins, there are usually structures and machinery locked in time from when the town was founded. I wonder if in the future, people will go to Gabbs to see what a ghost town that was built in the 1940s looks like, in the same way we go to Bodie, California or Bannack, Montana to see Gold Rush era buildings.
Like many of the comments already posted here, I too have found myself fascinated by these types of towns as I traversed America’s various highways through road trips with family and friends. There is something devastatingly poetic about how towns such as Gabbs serve as a sort of palimpsest for their history, the various economic trends that communities thought might be their big break. A magnesium mine. A test site. A school. A community pool. I was particularly struck by your closing sentiment and its mournful tone, about how strange it might be to live your life in a town that comes and goes without anyone “out there” ever noticing. Makes one want to pay a bit more attention.
Places like Gabbs, Nevada always leave me with more questions. As other commentators point out, fascination with small towns while traveling is not uncommon. However, rather than finding beauty in these places, I usually wonder who stays in these places and how inconvenient it must be for them. Your visit to Gabbs reminds me of the small town in which I lived as a child, Dos Palos, California. While not nearly as rural, the failing infrastructure of small towns seems to be a constant.
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