Gerlach, Nevada: 89412

The road to Gerlach is long. From Nixon, it’s 60 miles of seamed, scarred two-lane state highway. State Route 447 runs north out of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe’s reservation, past the rich aquamarine of Pyramid Lake and the white playa where Winnemucca Lake once was, between the Lake Range and the Selenite Range. It passes up Poito Valley under snow-capped peaks – Tohakum, Kumiva, Luxor. It shoots straight past Empire, which used to be a town and is now, perhaps, going to be a town again. From Empire into Gerlach is only a few miles, made shorter by the sight of the town sheltered in the southern lee of Granite Peak. Then 447 takes a sharp left across the Union Pacific railroad tracks and, suddenly, we are in Gerlach. Elevation: 3942 feet. Population: 107. Though the Welcome-to-Town sign tells a different demographic story.

Burning Man is the elephant in the room, Gerlach’s blessing and its curse. Clues scattered around town signify its status as gateway town to the Burn. Ubiquitous on signboards, mailboxes, and empty camper-vans are iterations of the geometric three-line symbol of the Man himself, Burning. Black Rock constitutes a core element of branding in Gerlach. Most businesses are closed, but bear the clear signs of seasonal opening. The fantastic aerials of art cars bristle from within open-roofed cinderblock garages. The tens of thousands of Burners who descend in late summer upon this tiny hamlet clearly account for much of its continued survival.

Yet the Burning Man/Gerlach symbiosis seems fragile, uneasy. Year after year, the Reno Gazette-Journal publishes exposés of bad Burner behavior: hundreds of bikes abandoned on the playa, or catastrophes in trash disposal. Oftentimes Gerlachites are quoted describing these behaviors with a blend of tolerance and distaste. “Population: Wanted. (Sometimes)”, on the Welcome-to-Town sign pictured above, tells the whole story.

For now, as we drive slowly past shuttered saloons, the historic water tower park, and Bruno’s Country Club (which, as its sign clarifies, also is a MOTEL CAFE CASINO SALOON), the town is quiet. In these pandemic days, many of those businesses and offices which might usually stay open in the offseason have closed for safety. There is very little traffic, which makes sense. Most folks do not pass through Gerlach, or through the Black Rock Desert, on their way to somewhere else. They come here on purpose. That sign proclaims Gerlach to be The Center of the Known Universe, but it feels a bit like the edge of the world.

Past the mostly-dormant commercial district we see the post office, the goal of today’s excursion. 345 E Sunset Boulevard, a small building with clean white siding. The sign above the door,

UNITED STATES POST OFFICE

GERLACH, NEVADA 89412

is rougher, more scuffed and weathered than the rest of the building’s fresh whiteness - salvaged, perhaps, from an older Gerlach PO...

When I called ahead to make sure that the Gerlach PO would be open, a woman named Jola answered. Yes, I’m open eight to two-thirty. She had said I, not we, and as we talk, it becomes clear why. This is her PO: Jola serves as Gerlach’s postmaster, and she’s the only full-time employee here. Monday through Friday, eight to two-thirty, for the past three decades. We used to be open eight hours, but now we’re down to six and a half. She does have a relief, who covers for her during lunch. I didn’t ask what happened when she went on vacation, though I wish I had: when the postmaster is on vacation, who relieves the relief?

Three decades? I’m impressed. Jola looks forward to retirement – she likes being the postmaster, since it’s probably the best job in town – but her husband has recently retired after a thirty-year stint with the Washoe County Roads Department. His leisure has made her eager for her own break. He sends me off to work every day, she says, which is indeed enough to make anyone long for retirement.

She wasn’t always Gerlach’s postmaster. When she started out with the Postal Service, she was the relief, covering lunches and (perhaps?) vacations. When the previous postmaster retired, the position was open for anyone around the country to apply – but, according to Jola, when folks would come out to Gerlach, they would turn up their noses at its remoteness. Finally Jola was offered the job. She took it, and for three decades she’s served the residents of Gerlach and its environs.

She likes this particular post office for its community space: there are 80-year-olds and 90-year-olds who still come in to pick up their mail in the lobby’s PO boxes. They meet there and talk, browse racks of free paperbacks – something like an informal lending library - and sometimes post fliers for community events or personal matters. These fliers are mostly serious and to-the-point, but sometimes a dry humor, desiccated by the wind off the playa, creeps in.

Jola also likes the Gerlach PO for the ancient potted plants by the entryway, a few hardy-looking geraniums with perfect pink flowers, and a sprawling, leggy Christmas cactus. They’ve been here longer than Jola. I don’t know, she says, they just like it right there. We discuss Christmas cactus blossoms: this specimen blooms twice a year, with fragrant, deep purple flowers.

A Gerlach native, Jola has no problem with living here, having to drive a hundred miles to town. The older she gets, the more she likes living out here – city life just isn’t her speed. But she acknowledges that things are changing in Gerlach. For one thing, the citizenry is getting older. She doesn’t mention the changes in Empire, but they no doubt have played havoc with the community in the last decade. Neither does she mention Burning Man’s year-over-year growth; in fact, she only mentions the festival once, when she’s describing an uptick in summer traffic. The Gerlach we visit today is definitely not the Gerlach of her childhood. She wonders whether, once she retires, another postmaster will be installed, or whether she will be replaced by a full-time clerk. They’ll put out another nationwide call for applications...but thirty years ago nobody was interested in the Gerlach postmastership. Will anyone be interested in the job, whenever Jola retires? If not, this might initiate the winding-down of the Gerlach post office, an excuse to eliminate a rural postmastership. But who can say? Perhaps the relief will take Jola’s post, the way Jola got the job, and this clean little building at the southern tip of the Black Rock Desert will keep its postmaster for another three decades.

Jola is polite and friendly, but as the sole full-time employee, she has a lot of work to do. We thank her and head to the PO box lobby. During our brief conversation with Jola, I’ve seen more people pass through the lobby than I saw in the whole town. White-haired senior citizens, most of them; a late-middle-aged man with a goatee and wraparound shades, wearing a Friends of Black Rock hoodie; a younger man accompanying him. Most get their mail and leave; a few browse at the racks of books. The Friend of Black Rock places a copy of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers with the other paperbacks. A return? A donation?

It’s time for us to roll out. I have two postcards to address: one the Postcard of Record, to get that all-important Gerlach postmark, and the other a one-off, a thank-you to Cameron, the talented designer who created the Nevada Postal Project postcard design and logos. Addressed, stamped, they slide into the Out-of-Town slot, and we leave the Gerlach post office.

We lunch on the playa, crusty bread and olives and chocolate-covered knobs of crystallized ginger. I point the nose of the CR-V into the steady, warmish southerly wind and open the back hatch; we devour our meal with a hundred-mile view. Up that way, if our eyes could pierce the haze of playa dust, we might be able to see the heights of King Lear Peak far to the northeast. But the combination of dust and mirage lakes limits our vision. Elsa insists that the playa is bouncy like the surface of the moon; Ian doesn’t feel it.

Homeward bound. We cruise slowly past Empire. United States Gypsum sold the mine to the Empire Mining Company, which has resumed gypsum-extraction operations. Coming from the north, we get a clear view of a huge, powder-white pile of...gypsum, probably? The wind catches the substance and billows it in snowy whorls off of the massive conical piles, obscuring the arcane superstructure of the mine which looms behind. The scene is otherworldly. This frenetic bubble of extractive activity contrasts weirdly with the stillness and the patience of the sage-carpeted desert mountains. Sooner or later, the desert swallows everything. It started to swallow Empire, before USG sold the operation and the new owners plucked the town from the brink of neglect. But perhaps the desert knows that no mine will last forever. So it waits, patiently.

We pass the mini-storage featured in Chloe Zhao’s recent film Nomadland (a Best Picture nominee, and a great film) and stop at the Empire Store. The building’s exterior has seen better days; the inside has been recently remodeled. It’s very clean, spacious – one might even say empty. A young boy sits at a table engrossed in a book – coloring, or perhaps schoolwork. A flat-screen television in the corner plays kids’ programming. In one corner stands a gleaming deli-style counter with empty metal trays behind clean glass, a chalked menu offering sandwiches for sale. Coolers in the back stock basic drinks. Necessities, dry goods, condiments, and snacks stand neatly on large shelves. A can of Coke is fifty cents. Another quiet place which probably comes alive during the Burn; I’m just grateful for the brief cash-register conversation. The remoteness of this place makes humanity all the more precious.

Clouds ambulate across the snow-capped peaks, casting late-afternoon shadows on the dusty floor of old Lake Winnemucca. We set the cruise control at 75 and begin to unreel the miles back to Reno. The road from Gerlach is long.