SAGEBRUSH APE

Thursday, May 22, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Sagebrush Ape: Birthday unloaded

By Heidi Walters

Two weeks ago, I turned that age that some people repeat for several years until the joke thins to a revealing wisp. I won't do that. But it got me to reflecting--about how, though your cells renew themselves constantly, you can never really shed your own skin or even your ancestors', at that. More specifically, I thought about how my latest decade started off with a lecture on capitalism inside Joe's Bar in Prague, and ended with the retrieval of a strange little inheritance that goes profoundly against my politics--that's right, a six-shooter. Capitalism and guns, how very American.

And then I thought about how what's really been propelling me through life isn't the lectures and the passed-down objects, but the stories--from the ones I've been hearing my grandparents tell all these years about the hardscrabble years, to the ones I'm telling now.

It's 1994. Midnight. I turn 30 sitting at a table in Joe's Bar with my oldest sister. The owner, from North America, slouches on a stool at our table and eats our chips and salsa. He says he opened the first self-serve laundry in the city and he--or was it his friend?--is hoping to do the first McDonald's. My sister and I say, how sad--about the McDonald's, that is. We've just spent the whole day tracking down some of the Czech Republic's heirlooms--old harps--which it turns out have been booted from their former museum and banished, along with other centuries-old instruments, to a musty dark garage to make way for the shiny future. Joe's Bar's owner, with that conqueror's air of cynical optimism, counters, "It's a natural progression."

Out with the old, in with the new.

We scoff. When he turns his back on us to wait on some other customers, we complain to each other about how hungry we are and how he's eaten all the chips and salsa that we paid him for. We walk out into the old city and breathe deep of the crosscurrents of old and new, of memories and new hopes. Hard to pin down that smell. Then we walk past old mural-covered walls and the Atlas who's been holding up the building on the corner across from our pension for years. I vow--feeling for the first time the speeding treadmill under my feet--to spend every birthday from then on in another country.

Fast forward to 2003. Northern Nevada. After a week of visiting family in another state, I end up at my dad's house. He lives on a creek, much like the one I grew up on, surrounded by a remnant of native high desert that is being steadily bladed under for subdivisions. I sleep out under the stars and all night the cold wind blows the scent of yellow bitterbrush blossoms and pink desert peach across my face. This is the smell, I say, that I was born into. And in the morning before I leave, Dad gives me Grandpa's gun.

Okay. All right. All right already--what's the deal with the gun? I'm a pacifist. And my people aren't gun nuts. I guess you might call it a birthright.

See, I was born in 1964, when about everyone in Nevada was whooping and hollering over the state's 100th birthday. My oldest sister, seeing my black hair, wanted to return me because she thought they'd gotten the wrong baby. My second oldest sister wanted to name me Bob Hope. My third oldest sister, formerly the darling youngest for three blissful years, took the first opportunity she could get to bite me. My mom took me home for Mother's Day. And my dad, the guy who refused to shoot when he went hunting with his buddies, went out and bought a brace of pistols made for the Nevada Centennial. He kept one, and gave the other one to his dad, my grandpa. And Grandpa got it in his head to will it to me.

For as long as I can remember--until last year, when Grandpa died and we buried him two days after my birthday--I've been hearing about "Heidi's gun." I didn't really want it, and not just because I abhor guns, but also because I didn't want Grandpa to die. But my ears would perk up whenever someone mentioned it. Like the time, after one of Grandma and Grandpa's innumerable moves from a house he'd fixed up to a new one he'd just built, Grandma--amid one of her wonderful old-time stories in the kitchen where she shelled peas and made blackberry jam and put meals together--said, "We almost forgot your gun. We hid it in the ceiling panel in the hallway, and I remembered it at the last minute!"

I put off retrieving it for a year, never even saw it until last Monday. It's not flashy. It wouldn't make a month's rent or a car payment if I hocked it, which I won't. It has a plain but pretty pearl handle and a mean-looking long black snout. It says Nevada 1864-1964 on it. And it's rusting around the screws that hold it together. Funny, that. I guess I had imagined an heirloom killing machine would be a seamless object immune to time and the normalcy of ordinary parts. Contrarily, I had also thought it would look more antique-like. Picking it up marked a turning point--out with the new, in with the old (but not that old).

I expected the damn thing to haunt me all the way back to Las Vegas. But by Fernley I'd already forgotten about it--window rolled down, sage blowing in, fresh new stories from the family visit flooding my brain. At Hawthorne Army Depot and its desert sea of bunkers on the edge of shrinking Walker Lake, though, my thoughts did turn to bigger guns. By Beatty, I'd forgotten about those obsolete weapons and was fretting about Bush's new nuclear proliferation scheme. But by the time I passed Cactus Springs, where entrails of pale dust clung to the shadows of the night-dark mountains, I was retelling Grandma-Grandpa stories to keep myself awake.