The storm billowed and boiled ahead of us as we drove north on U.S. Route 95. By the time we reached Hawthorne in parched Mineral County, snow-shrouded Mount Grant loomed like an ice fortress above tempestuous Walker Lake.

With its jade shallows and angry blue depths trimmed in whitecaps, the lake made a spectacular sight. My wife, Sally, and I travel this road often and never cease to be wowed by the ever-changing panorama of the ancient reminder of Pleistocene-era Lake Lahontan and the receded inland sea. Every time we skirt it, we are reminded that the driest state in the union continues to deplete and poison its own precious water resources.

Flanked by the Wassuk Range, Walker Lake is stunning, shrinking — and very near dead. It is fed more in theory than reality by the Walker River, which winds from the Sierra Nevada east through some of the state’s increasingly corporate farming communities. Thanks to more than a century of over-appropriation and ever-increasing demand, the damaged river exhausts itself in what’s been described as “an ooze of mud” as it seeps into a terminal lake whose waterline has dropped more than 150 feet in little more than a century.

Rumors of its death aren’t exaggerated, but this generational tragedy implicates many co-conspirators.

As we were passing through, we were so distracted by the lake that we nearly missed the turn for The Bighorn Crossing, a sagebrush café and convenience store that serves the best food for many miles in every direction. It is there we met its proud proprietor, Tony Ruse, who just may be the most optimistic man in Nevada.

After all, Ruse believes woebegone Walker Lake, as beautiful as it is biologically bereft, can make a comeback. He appears to be betting everything on that long shot after turning a shuttered bait and tackle shop into the Bighorn, which has been celebrated for its remarkable cuisine.

Many environmental scientists might not agree with Ruse’s heartfelt hunch. Nevada’s own history of resource exploitation stacks long odds against such an ecological feat. A newcomer to this fight, Ruse has kindred spirits in the members of the Walker Lake Working Group, addressing the outsized problem since the 1980s, and the Walker Lake Paiute Tribe, witnesses to the depletion and desecration of its sacred waters for generations.

Ruse took a circuitous route back to Hawthorne after graduating from Mineral County High School in 1986. He traveled widely in Europe and Asia, where he studied and worked with hotel and restaurant operators in Switzerland and South Korea. (That explains why the café’s menu includes Korean barbecue and grilled salmon with wasabi aioli along with its formidable burgers.)

When Ruse returned, he saw much had changed, but not for the better.

“I graduated from this area and had friends and family here,” he says. “I was dismayed at how poorly Mineral County was doing compared to the rest of Nevada, and also how Walker Lake had shrunk. The fishing was gone, and the boating was gone, and the economy was gone. I remember restaurants being here, motels being here, fishing and boat races being here. All of that was here and it was all gone now. … To see this place run-down as much as it was, I just felt really bad.”

He converted the careworn former tackle shop (which he recalled opened the year he graduated high school) into the Bighorn, and these days his activism includes a seat on the Mineral County Commission. After a recent conversation with him, I suspect it’s Walker Lake that’s always on his mind.

“Walker Lake is a million-year-old native lake (that’s) absolutely … part of Nevada, part of our identity and nobody seemed to care — especially on the state level,” Ruse says. “Like, why do we not have a license plate? … We’ve lost over seven species of fish, is my understanding. … The loons are gone. Many species of birds are gone. We have no idea, actually, what we’ve lost. Nobody here is taking an account of the situation from the state.

“People consider this just a Hawthorne or a Mineral County problem. I say it isn’t. It’s a state of Nevada problem.”

Ruse and others like him believe Walker Lake needs the support of those with the political clout and social conscience necessary to resuscitate it. That’s a lot to ask in Nevada. Even with such an unlikely confluence of like-mindedness in polarized times, it would take many years to nurse back to health.

But, he asks, if a precious water resource in the nation’s driest state isn’t worth preserving, then what is?

“You come over and you look and you see that Hawthorne is doing so poorly,” he says. “The village of Walker Lake is almost nonexistent. We are the only business on the lake and we are struggling to stay here because of just the lack of reasons to stop. But I’m going down with the ship.”

Some will write off the plight of Walker Lake as another poisoned waterhole in a land that can ill afford the loss. I’m on the side of those who believe there must be a way to balance the interests of a greater good with expanded farming and long neglect.

Nearby Hawthorne has long been known for its patriotic celebrations and behemoth U.S. Army ammunition depot. A healthy Walker Lake would rejuvenate more than water and wildlife; it would recharge a windswept county in a place that fast-growing Nevada has largely forgotten.

Surely posterity would smile upon a town that one day celebrates the return of Walker Lake to an ecosystem that supports fish and migratory fowl, a place we cherish as more than a dazzling still life in the cold Nevada desert.

John L. Smith is an author and longtime columnist. He was born in Henderson and his family’s Nevada roots go back to 1881. His stories have appeared in New Lines, Time, Reader’s Digest, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, Reuters and Desert Companion, among others.