The Nevada Side

By Miranda R. Carter

For some time, in an earlier America, the Sierra Nevada Mountains were viewed as the final brutal barrier to the American Dream, the skeleton key to the West. Though today’s modern passes—Carson, Spooner, etc.—are tightly wound, rimming a shale skyline, they are contrastingly travelable trails from the blue corazón of Lake Tahoe to the sun-soaked valley beyond. They behave as reminders of the death and determination of the primitive expeditionists that originally traversed them. Still, on bruising summer afternoons and empty winter nights, when there are accidents blocking the narrow roads or snowfall piling fast, black ice tripping tires or forests choking aflame, the passes maintain their identity as the West’s final survivalist checkpoints—the last hard thing prefacing California, a symbol of what it cost to get there.

My uncle Clinton, on his first date with my aunt Lisa, told her, “I want to end up in the Sierra Nevada.” They were both divorced and living in Northern Idaho at the time. They fell in love and got married in the wild backyard of an elderly local artist and her professor husband, then lived together in a blue house until Clinton was offered a position training special forces at Fort Bragg. They sold the house before they got the news that the position had been eliminated.

Both jobless, and soon houseless, they put down a deposit for an apartment near the local university and sold the majority of their belongings from their garage. They used the money to support themselves while they applied for professorships and prayed for a fast miracle. Lisa was offered a position in Oregon; Clinton was offered a position in Montana. They chose Montana.

They first lived in an old house at the base of the Rims where Clinton took students at MSU Billings to rock climb and learn survivalist strategies. A retired Marine whose more than twenty-three years of experience had buffed him into a calm but commanding leader, with soft lines framing narrow blue eyes that had seen, he said, the holy depth of friendship but also truly evil men, Clinton had a service-first mentality—for God, people, and the land.

His love for the Sierras in particular started at the U.S. Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Center in Bridgeport, California, when he was a lanky kid with a Texan drawl learning how to backcountry ski for the government. I imagine he fell for the pink dimpling of the sky over the high and rugged rock, the explosion of sunsets and shadows settling eloquently between the peaks, the squinting brilliance of bright snow crusting its steep sides. How untouched it felt as he touched it, or barely touched it, skis hovering over switchbacks fast enough to fly. Its beautiful difficulty.

But in his middle age they were in Montana living in the Beartooths, not the Sierras. They struggled with money and friendships and became unhappy in Montana, just as I became unhappy in Montana, and they moved to California, just as I would move to California.

My aunt became a leadership trainer for the State of Nevada and Clinton taught at Lake Tahoe Community College as the director of the Wilderness Education and Outdoor Leadership Program. He showed students how to survive hypothermic temperatures by camping with them in the frigid wilderness. He discussed leadership strategies in the classroom and in the field. He walked students through avalanche training, rock climbing, and of course, backcountry skiing in the Sierras.

Finally, after a year, Lisa and Clinton took up residence in the foothills of the Sierras on the Nevada side. They lived on Bougainvillea Drive in a spacious neighborhood where light peeled open and lay flatly on the sidewalk always, the sun reddening between the gigantic, jagged spine of the mountains. When I’d cut those wild switchbacks in my car all the way there to drink seltzer on the back porch with them, feet bare on the hardwood inside and sunlight falling through the frosted window above the shower, it felt ancestral and potent to be there, to be on one side of a place that had always insisted on being earned.

***

In January of 2023, I was at a park near my apartment in California when I learned Clinton had collapsed from cardiac arrest in the Sierras leading a professional avalanche certification course and was being life flighted somewhere with a bigger hospital. I heard the crack in my mother’s voice when she said he probably would not make it. 

I gathered my things and planned to leave. It was a Friday, and I was the nearest resident family member. But as texts came in from my mom regarding flights and arrangements, I realized I would not be leaving until the next day after all. Clinton had died. And my parents would need a ride from the airport.

***

Tragedy happens and there is so much to do. There are decisions to make, papers to sign, people to receive. Often, onlookers pity this reality on behalf of the person experiencing it, saying things like, “All that pain and with so much to manage.” They preface fundraisers with explanations about how they don’t want the recipients to have to think about handling various logistics amidst their grief. They express directly to the brokenhearted: “We’re so sorry you have to do all this.”

At times it was easy for me to drift toward that genre of pity watching my aunt flit around her home opening the door for my parents and her son, grabbing water glasses from the cabinets and answering the litany of phone calls about money and sympathy and memorials, but the pity was elastic. I’d snap back to what I’d come to believe about all that, which is this: It is mercy to have practical business to tend to in grief. It is only in these busy moments that there is no crying.

***

The Sunday after, snow began to suggest itself in small flakes on the asphalt in Nevada, complementing the static sprawls atop the Sierras. I had a dog and my job to return to. My little white car in the parking lot would not make it over the pass, so my father and I took Clinton’s truck, the one his colleagues had brought down from the mountain—and drove back to the valley. 

Traced into the dirt on the side of his truck were the words WE LOVE YOU CLINTON. Equipment was still strapped to the top of the truck. A bag of half-eaten jerky was tucked into the car door. A bumper sticker with his favorite phrase, “But did you die?”, made us want to laugh and cry. We parked the truck in my designated space and went inside to collect my pup from my neighbor. 

The next day the storm in the mountains was over, so my father picked me up from work in that graffitied truck with my pup on his lap. We drove back over the pass as the sun bled through the shoulders of pines. I thought of the legendary John “Snowshoe” Thompson, the man who braved the Sierras to deliver mail on skis every winter between 1856 and 1876 from Placerville to Genoa. I thought of the hundreds of years of the Washoe tribe, and the doomed fate of the Donner Party. I thought of Clinton flying on his feet.

***

I took the next day off work to spend the night in Nevada and accompany my aunt, cousin, and mother to the funeral home in South Lake Tahoe the next morning. I took my own car so I could drive to the valley once the sun had melted street snow into water. 

At the funeral home, we sat around a mahogany desk and funeral packages. We discussed urns and coffins, headstones and scattering permits, programs and special designations for military servicemen. Lisa made her selections with the gentle support of her son and then we went our separate ways.

Lifting over Lake Tahoe alone, the Sierras gleamed summer colors even beneath patches of winter white, the warmest rocks speckled orange and blinding, the sky blue and wide open. It was then I felt a familiar frustration rise: the one in which I contend with questions of fairness, and the false immunity of youth, and the borders between “then” and “now,” subtle as the California-Nevada line. He wasn’t done, I thought. Clinton had unresolved relationships with his daughters, a second marriage, a book he wanted to write. He’d planned to call Suffering is Mandatory, Misery is Optional, a sentiment that transferred elegantly beyond him to those of us earthside.

But as I crested the pass, his favorite peaks rearing like wings on either side, I experienced a calm and commanding reassurance: His life was a whole life. All lives are, length aside. I saw how amidst mastering the art of survival and imparting it to others, death had descended finally and painlessly, how perhaps there was mercy in it. And how it was all quite perfect, really—him in that coffee shop in my hometown, sitting across from my aunt saying, “I want to end up in the Sierra Nevada.” How after all was said and done, that’s exactly how it went.

Miranda R. Carter is an essayist and professor. Her work has appeared in Idaho Magazine, On the Seawall, River Teeth Journal, and more. Her first book, The World and My Body in It, released in 2023. She is from the West but currently lives in Indiana.