Genoa, Nevada: 89411

One spring, many years ago, a bearded Norwegian-American known as Snowshoe Thompson strapped long, heavy Nordic skis to his boots and set off to deliver some mail. He took a route he had taken over and over again. Starting in Placerville, a mining boomtown in the California foothills, he ascended the frozen spine of the Sierra Nevada south of Lake Tahoe, then passed down the steep declivity of the Eastern Sierra into the village of Genoa, isolated on the very western edge of the new state of Nevada. He knew his route well, since he had taken it hundreds of times in the last twenty years of delivering mail. He knew the conditions. This year’s snowpack was breaking up, the drifts were turning slushy, and the spring sunshine carried no threat of even a late-season storm. He did not know, however, that this would be his last trans-Sierra mail delivery.

As usual, Thompson traveled light. Despite the blizzards that scoured the granite outcroppings of the Sierra, he never carried a blanket or a complicated travel pack. Despite the packs of wolves that prowled frozen meadows and snowpacked pine forests, Thompson never carried a gun. Instead, he gripped a long, heavy balance stick in both hands, slung his heavy pack of mail and supplies on his back, and set out into the snowy mountains.

The pack on Thompson’s back held him back as he worked up the foothill slopes, that spring day in 1876. It pressed him down into the billowy drifts as he negotiated his route eastward. It also pulled him forward, as he swept down the slopes into Genoa to the cheers of the townsfolk who expected him. It pulled him toward his destination in motivation, as well: his pack held these people’s mail, their news, their supplies, their medicine. Sometimes, it seemed, he carried their lives with him.

To travel west from Salt Lake City to Genoa in those days took months, stretched longer by the danger of crossing the Great Basin in winter. Going eastward from Placerville and the mining camps of the Central Sierra could not be done in winter; not even the Sierra’s hard-bitten mountain men dared it. Before white people overran the land, Native Americans navigated the High Sierra in winter only when it was necessary, moving out into the valleys when the passes and alpine meadows became choked with snowdrifts and serrated with icicles. But John Thompson remembered skiing in his youth in Telemark, Norway, before he and his family immigrated to the United States. On skis, he thought, he could cross the Sierra Nevada in winter - so he carved a pair of cross-county skis from memory. Thompson was right. The mountain men scratched their wiry chins dubiously at the skis – but they worked, and he delivered mail where no one else could. They called him Snowshoe Thompson after that.

Every winter for two decades, Snowshoe Thompson kept Genoa in postal contact with the outside world. Nobody ever paid him for so faithfully delivering the mail. As he strapped on the skis that spring day and prepared for the last run of the year, he was serving in the word’s purest sense. He did what had to be done, because it needed doing. Neither fame nor fortune were required. And neither came his way.

That last run of Thompson’s career went smoothly. He arrived safely, in good time – the run perhaps somewhat slower than when he was a younger man, but reliable as ever. He saw familiar faces in the crowd of Nevadan Genovese who came to meet him, old folks who he’d known for decades, fresh-faced teenagers younger than his tradition of winter deliveries. That day in 1876, he no doubt looked ahead to the next run, the first of the winter to come. But he died before the next year of delivery service could resume: appendicitis, then pneumonia. He was buried in the Genoa cemetery. Nine years later, a marble slab was erected commemorating his life. Then, more than a century later, a commemorative statue went up, depicting Thompson braced against a stiff Sierra gale, gripping his knotty balance pole, confidently set on those long cross-country skis. The town might not exist if not for Snowshoe Thompson’s quiet, selfless service.

With the passing of a hundred and fifty years after Thompson’s last ride, Genoa has changed – somewhat. These days, the town trades on its history. As a modern auto tourist whizzes down US Highway 395 from Carson City through the Carson Valley in the direction of Minden and Gardnerville, they might spot an old-timey prairie schooner emblazoned with a message inviting passersby to visit HISTORIC GENOA NEVADA’S OLDEST SETTLEMENT. 4 MILES away, the Conestoga wagon/billboard entices, are FOOD LODGING SPIRITS SHOPS GOLF. One gets an impression of Wild West laced with sophistication.

Head into town and you’ll get the same thing. Genoa, by dint of its age, its proximity to sites of early Nevada Territory power, and a bit of happenstance, had more staying-power than most other early settlements; stability meant wealth and political clout. Well-built old homes, now painstakingly restored, line the streets of the city center. A few still house Genoa residents, but many of these dwellings have been renovated into bed & breakfasts, cafes, event spaces, or inns. The Pink House, from which Lilly Finnegan directed her last Candy Dance (more on that in a moment), now purveys twelve-dollar salads and wine by the glass.

The downtown maintains this aesthetic – we might call it Tumbleweed Chic – but introduces the bitter note of the boarded-up historical building. The Genoa Town Hall (Est. 1885) may be undergoing renovations, or it may no longer be open to the public; either way, its windows are secured, and notices proclaim the building Private Property and warn against trespassing. Some historic structures are more accessible and operational, housing another café and (oddly) a shop selling alpaca-fur items to tourists. Some buildings are preserved but closed-off, something akin to the state of arrested decay one can see in the state-park ghost towns in the mineral country of Nevada and California.

We have been to Genoa before, seen the restored stockade of Mormon Station State Historical Park, watched herds of black-tailed deer browse the incongruous green lawns of the SHP, read plaques about the area’s history. But we have not yet visited the post office; it’s our first stop, though we park downtown and walk the half-mile to its location on the outskirts of town. Perambulating along the well-maintained walkways, we pass old house after old house, most renovated, most gleaming. Old-growth lilacs fountain their reedy stems from the earth and splash in fragrant purple cones against the blue April sky. A gusty wind sweeps down from the snowy ridges west and south of town and sets the lilacs dancing. One could get used to Tumbleweed Chic.

The Genoa Post Office, established years before Snowshoe Thompson’s first delivery, has an air of solidity. Perhaps it’s the dull gleam of the sheets of corrugated metal that roof the building. Perhaps it’s the mature pine trees that crowd around the parking lot, sprinkling it with their dried-orange litter of dead needles. Perhaps it’s the building’s sturdy, sensible red-brick exterior. A well-kept brass plaque intimates that This Building was Dedicated to Public Service in 1999. This date precedes the passage of the financially catastrophic Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which in 2006 plunged the USPS into a spiral of lost revenue, skyrocketing debt, and deep cuts to service and collection accessibility. How many post offices have been renovated since 2006? We imagine that the number is low.

We have six postcards to mail, to addresses scattered across the West and Midwest. I buy stamps and talk to Greg, the postmaster. Do you sell many postcard stamps? I ask. Some, Greg replies. More during the summer. He talks with that peculiar Nevadan blend of taciturnity and geniality. He’s been in Genoa for sixteen years, and he likes it pretty well. Better than retirement, for sure. He’s a Postal Service lifer: more than 45 years in post offices. Before Genoa, he was a postmaster in northern California, but he shakes his head when he talks about it. Not his favorite spot, apparently: there was trash everywhere, and folks slept in his lobby. The airy interior of the Genoa post office contrasts sharply with his descriptions of Chico.

Greg agreed to take his mask off for this portrait; we followed social-distancing guidelines throughout our interview.

In a way, Greg has retired to Genoa, even though he’s still working hard at the post office. He certainly likes Genoa better than Chico: the town has great customs, the people are friendly and generous. There’s no crime to speak of, he notes, but the down-side is that if you want a gallon of milk after 6, you have to drive to Minden, and gestures south-west. The town has grown while he’s been here, but it’s a good rate of growth, he says – not too fast. How long will that steady rate of growth hold? On this excursion, we’ve noticed housing developments new even since our last visit, a year and a half ago.

Greg asks me a question: what's this project associated with? I give him the standard reply – it’s personal interest, we want to see Nevada, I know that post offices close permanently. Not often, he shoots back. Last one to close in this district was down in Topaz – more than three years ago. More frequently, he says, hours contract – from being open all day to only six, or four, or two hours a day. This matches what Jola told us about the reduction in hours at the Gerlach PO. Fluctuations notwithstanding, Greg appreciates the small-town nature of the postmastership in Genoa. The office doesn’t have any routes or deliveries; everyone in town has a PO box. Everyone in town passes through his lobby to get their mail.

Greg generously agrees to answer a few more questions, so I ask about the Candy Dance, which first happened more than a century ago as a fundraiser for local urban development. (Which is to say: Genoa needed streetlights.) He likes the festival. It’s unique, he says. It does what it needs to do. Eighty-five percent of the town’s operating budget comes from that. He asks me if I’ve seen the statue downtown – designed by a local, he adds with a touch of pride. It’s bronze, life-size, and depicts Lilly Finnegan, Genoa matriarch, architect of the Candy Dance, and resident of the Pink House, holding a plate of candy. While the festival began as a stately affair with dancing and candy, it’s pivoted more to the craft-fair scene in recent years. Greg doesn’t mind the Candy Dance; it’s only a single weekend in September, after all.

All this talking has given us a powerful thirst: I thank Greg, we slide the postcards in the out-of-town mail-slot, and we walk back into the town center for our last stop: a drink at the Genoa Bar and Saloon, which is – ostentatiously – Nevada’s Oldest Thirst Parlor. It’s a fine bar, with plenty of historical charm; my father-in-law, along for the day, points out a window with a carefully-preserved crack. The dust on the hanging lamps is real dust; but it’s also permitted to linger.

The inside of the Genoa Bar is its primary draw; the walls crowd with an overwhelming welter of witty signs, ancient license plates, farm implements, historical posters, and various artifacts. In a non-pandemic year, the indoor room would be crowded to overflowing. These days, though, most folks prefer outdoor seating. There’s an awkwardness to social distancing in this particular place, though. Genoa in general, and this bar especially, have a reputation for friendliness, bonhomie, conviviality. It’s hard to be bonhomous from six feet away, but folks try their best: while I order beers, my neighbor at the bar asks me, grinning, whether I think he should have another. Later, as I crouch by the men’s room to frame the long bar-space through a low doorway, another fellow blunders past, then immediately apologizes – profusely – for ruining my shot. (He didn’t ruin it.)

Outside, we sip our beer in the spring sunshine. Spun-cotton clouds lollop across the blue expanse overhead; nearby, more old-growth lilac nods in a freshening breeze. Elsa points to rusted S-shapes high on the bar’s external (brick) wall: fasteners, she tells us, holding long support-rods inside the building, a system that prevents old brick walls from slouching outward. We speculate on the age of a dead tree out in front of Nevada’s Oldest Thirst Parlor, then notice the far older cottonwood stump next to it. Likely neither one is as old as the Candy Dance, much less a witness to Snowshoe Thompson’s alpine mail-delivery exploits.

As we drain our beers and prepare to head back out of town – past the boarded-up historic buildings, past the alpaca shop, past the green lawns of the State Historic Park, past the kinetic statue of the mail-carrying hero holding his thick balance pole in front of him – the wind turns chilly. A late-season storm rolls over the crest of the Sierra Nevada; snow will fall tonight on US Highway 50, which follows Thompson’s old overland route. The cars and trucks rolling up the Kingsbury Grade, just south of here, are warned to carry chains. This wouldn’t have bothered him, of course. Fresh snow just meant a softer run through the mountains. Snowshoe Thompson would have bent to strap on his eponymous skis, slung the heavy pack of outgoing Genoa-postmarked mail on his back, and smiled at the storm. Perfect weather for another run.

***

For more information about Snowshoe Thompson, you can start at the Friends of Snowshoe Thompson website. Then, if you can find a copy, read Adrien Stoutenberg and Laura Nelson Baker's book Snowshoe Thompson (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1957).