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Happy Goldfield Days to those who observe

David Colborne
David Colborne
Opinion
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Three years ago, I wrote about going to Goldfield Days — an annual event that takes place during the first weekend of August each year in Nevada’s smallest county seat. That visit continued a tradition a friend and I maintained of participating in the parade each year.

Two years ago, Goldfield Days was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Last year, Goldfield Days came back — but I did not.

This year, I’m returning — or, more accurately from your perspective, returned, since I’m writing this before I attend, yet you’ll be reading it no sooner than as the event finishes up and my wife and I begin our drive home. Like many habits I kept before the pandemic and ultimately lost, however, I’m uncertain if this one will stick the second time around.

The habits I abandoned during the first year of the pandemic — habits which couldn’t be maintained due to shutdowns and safety requirements — remind me of a moderately popular parable about filling time that was passed around when I was younger. The parable starts with either a professor or a priest (some sort of authority figure talking to freshly minted adults, anyway) putting rocks in a glass, then small pebbles, then finishes with sand — the lesson, didactically delivered at the end, is the sand represents the limitless frivolities of life while the rocks and pebbles represent the more important parts of a successful adult life. If you try to fill the glass in reverse — if you fill your life with frivolous pleasures, in other words — you won’t have space in the glass for the important things, but if you start filling your life with the important things first, there will still be plenty of space in your life for the pleasant frivolities to inhabit.

Some of the habits I abandoned, with the benefit of hindsight, are probably closer to pebbles and rocks than sand. I visit my extended family less. I don’t go to the gym or jog as often as I used to.

Some of the habits I abandoned, on the other hand, were more like sand. Visiting Goldfield every summer may have been one of those.

What made visiting Goldfield habit-forming in the first place is its Brigadoon-ish quality — only, instead of fair maidens living in a pastoral wonderland in the Scottish moor that only appears for a single day every hundred years, it’s actually mostly Californian retirees holding an annual party in the dusty and decaying post-apocalyptic remains of the last mining boom town in the state. 

Those Californian retirees aren’t new, by the way — the Reno Evening Gazette wrote about their initial arrival in 1978, though even that “mini-boom” wasn’t enough to justify giving the town its own entry separate from Esmeralda County as a whole in the 1980 census (Goldfield’s population also wasn’t counted separately in the 1970 census, either). The appeal of the town, even during the incomprehensibly distant past of nearly half a century ago (I was born in 1980, so this statement is made with equal measures of affection and self-deprecation) is the same one that draws and keeps its residents today — it’s a place where one can get away from it all.

That, however, is just as true of every other spot in Nevada’s vast and largely empty deserts. You can take your pick — there’s no shortage of them, even if you limit yourself to moderately photogenic ghost or semi-ghost towns. Even so, being away from it all wasn’t enough to keep Rhyolite alive — there was only one resident left in 1922 and he was 92 years old. It wasn’t enough to keep Cortez alive — there was only one resident there in 1959. It probably won’t be enough to keep Ione alive, either — the Ore House Saloon hasn’t been open in years.

So what makes Goldfield special?

It’s not the “ghosts” haunting what’s left of the Goldfield High School building or the Goldfield Hotel (which is for sale once again, by the way — there are worse ways to lose $4.9 million with no chance of return, but most of them involve cryptocurrency). There’s no shortage of old, creaky buildings with colorful stories that give off inexplicable electromagnetic readings in this state.

It’s not what’s left of Goldfield’s turn of the 20th century architecture — since Tonopah, unlike Goldfield, didn’t wash away and burn down, more of Tonopah’s period architecture is intact and in better condition. That’s especially true since, at the risk of being bluntly honest, the Goldfield Hotel will never, ever get restored — it was a tired, unprofitable mess of a hotel less than thirty years after its construction and every attempt since its final closure after World War 2 to breathe some life back in the old bones has ended in failure and financial ruin. The business case for refurbishing a dilapidated and oft-vandalized century-old hotel, one which had largely been stripped of most of its original furnishings decades ago and was never refurbished with modern conveniences, has not improved with time.

Perhaps what actually makes Goldfield special, and what made visiting there so habit-forming in the first place, was what it was not. It’s not a tourist trap like Virginia City, filled with promenades of tourist-oriented kitsch — Goldfield’s lone remaining active hotel, the Santa Fe, isn’t even on the main highway. To enjoy Goldfield, you can’t just drive through on your way to somewhere else and get the lay of the place like you can in, say, Tonopah. Instead, you have to walk around a little. You have to talk to the people who live there. You have to do your own research — and also read the works of others who have. You have to fight through disinformation (no, the Goldfield Hotel did not have the first electric elevator west of the Mississippi — in fact, it might not have even had the first electric elevator in Goldfield!).

Goldfield rewards curiosity. Goldfield rewards effort. Or, maybe a bit more accurately, Goldfield does not reward incuriosity and does not reward laziness. Goldfield doesn’t care if it left an impression on you or not. Goldfield will be Goldfield, whatever that might happen to mean, with or without you or me. If you want to get out, stretch your legs, and take the time to get to know Goldfield, it won’t mind. You’re welcome to. But if you don’t, whatever, that’s cool, too.

Goldfield, you see, isn’t like other ghost towns.

Perhaps my life can use a little more sand in its glass.

David Colborne ran for office twice and served on the executive committees for his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is now an IT manager, a registered nonpartisan voter, the father of two sons, and a weekly opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected]

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