Thinking of Names

“It’s never inappropriate to name a house.”

Martha Stewart “Ask Martha” Living, June 2001

The summer of 1993, my mother, sister, and I spent $15,000 of Mom’s money on a piece of property in Tuscarora, Nevada. We purchased a small, unlivable adobe house and a large shop

building recently tenanted by a mining crew who left garbage, old boots, and stacks of girlie magazines. The deal also included ten wrecked cars and trucks strewn on an acre landscaped with sagebrush, four struggling lilac bushes, and a noxious weed called whitetop. We, the proud new owners, saw nothing but possibilities. Immediately, we agreed that this impetuous result of our bonding and Mom’s spending should be called something. What do you call a dilapidated piece of property located in a desolate part of the country?

I have lived in two places with names: the Last Resort and T’wern’t Easy. The summer I was four, my father finished his job as manager of a small cow calf operation near Lee, Nevada. At the end of August, we were moving across the county to Starr Valley, where Dad would be in charge of a larger outfit. However, Dad was obligated to put up the hay before we could leave. We had to vacate the ranch house, so our family camped in a hay meadow for July and August. Mom and Dad called it The Last Resort.

Over the years, I have heard fond stories of The Last Resort. Not afraid of having to “make do,” my parents pitched a roomy canvas tent and built a makeshift outdoor kitchen. During a visit, my grandpa Joe framed a two-holed outhouse and covered it with corrugated tin. My mother likes to recall young Bill Kane, the neighbor who rode horseback past camp on his way to irrigate his hay meadows. “Every morning without fail,” she laughs, “Bill heaved a big old dirt clod at the roof of the tin privy, hoping to catch somebody inside.”

The second place with a name happened much later in my life. In 1985, my husband and I and our two children made a major transition from the Mendocino Coast to the inland town of Ukiah, California. We rented a house on the outskirts of town from retired acquaintances who were ready to travel full time in their Airstream. I can still see the wooden sign dangling from their mailbox, “T’wern’t Easy.” After a couple of months, we referred to the place as “Twernt.”

As I look back on The Last Resort and Twen’t, both were humble excuses for home and each represented an adventure. When I reflect on our purchase of that acre in Tuscarora, I wonder what the three of us were thinking. It was an adventurous decision, but it gives me pause that the three of us chose a place filled with refuse and devastation.

There is logic. My mother was on the move all her married life. Camping by a creek in northeastern Nevada in the early years was nothing. Living in a place that was forlorn was also something she had done before. Whenever the subject comes up of the many moves in her marriage, she says, “That’s right. As a matter of fact, on our thirty-fourth wedding anniversary, your dad and I were at a golf tournament in Twin Falls. That night the two of us went to dinner and got talking about all the places we’d lived. I took a pen from my purse and we listed them on a napkin. After thirty-four years of marriage, we had already moved forty-three times.” Always, she left places cleaner, nicer. Always, she made a home.

In 1993, the year escrow closed in Tuscarora, my sister’s personal life was a wreck. She never did go home to California that summer. She and my mother hired a carpenter and the three of them tore out some walls and stripped others of layers of wallpaper, newspaper, and cheesecloth, leaving shreds of the Salt Lake Tribune dated 1886 fluttering in the breeze.

Her husband was first amused, then tolerant, finally furious. She had been communicative with Mom and me, voicing doubts about her future, joking that she could always move to Tuscarora. Once she returned to the Bay Area, I didn’t hear much from her for a while. Her participation in the Tuscarora project never again reached the exuberance and camaraderie of that first summer.

I have always been attracted to the offbeat, the marginal. Tuscarora has a tradition as an artists’ community and vestiges remain of its glory days in the 1880’s as a silver mining boomtown. Now, the dominant impression is of shacks and double wide trailers, car parts, piles of rusted metal, and shards of broken glass twinkling in the dirt. The eleven full time residents are an assemblage of allegiances and resentments. The town has character. No one denies that. I immediately loved everything about it.

All three of us felt a renewed kinship with the high desert landscape: the immense sky, the dry clear air, the delicate light at sunrise and the long purple shadows in the evening; the way you can see a high white arc of truck dust, a good seven miles from the Taylor Canyon turn-off, across the hay meadows, and up the gentle grade that leads to Tuscarora.

During the time we were prospective buyers in Tuscarora, locals called the property, “The Old Caldwell Place,” referring to Tom Caldwell, who sold the property in 1986 to Horizon Mining Company. Horizon gutted the house in preparation to bulldoze it, used the shop for storage and temporary quarters for miners. When Horizon went bankrupt, they put it up for auction, which was how we acquired it.

We never learned much about Tom Caldwell. I know that he and his wife lived on an acre littered with car parts, rusty metal, stack of tires and corrugated tin, and those ten junked vehicles, hoods up, headlights smashed. After countless trips to the dump situated on old mine tailings above town, we had no sentimental attachment to “The Old Caldwell Place.”

We heard that the owner before Caldwell was a Frenchman, Louis “Soleil,” but we had never seen the name in writing. As we watered the struggling lilac on the southeast corner of the adobe house or stared at the front window boarded and covered with a Keep Out sign, my sister and I imagined that Louis Soleil was a small, dapper Frenchman. We could see him in a clean white shirt buttoned at the collar and suspendered black pants, sitting in his living room in Tuscarora, thinking of his village in France. “Probably in Provence,” said my sister. We weren’t sure how he got to Tuscarora, but we enjoyed inventing this figure, a cross between a Provencal villager from Manon of the Spring, one of our favorite movies, and Henry Harris, our dearly departed grandfather, a fruit farmer in northern Utah.

We even imagined hosting an annual picnic in his honor, perhaps in July on Bastille Day. Sitting in the shade, pulling nails from usable boards, my sister and I discussed the baskets and platters of food on a weathered plank over sawhorses covered with a white linen tablecloth shaded by the dappled light of a lilac, filled with blossoms, and tall as the eaves of the house.

One day that first summer, I asked the Tuscarora postmistress, Sharon Rhoads, about “Louis Soleil.” Sharon was born and raised in nearby Independence Valley. “I knew the Caldwells,” she said. “And the Caldwells bought it from a nice old gent who'd been around the valley forever,” she said, as she sorted the Independence Valley mail into large canvas waysacks. “His name was Louie Sal-lat,” which, as she said it, rhymed with “that’s that.” There went our grandiose picnic notions.

Later that summer I asked Lee Deffebaugh if she remembered Louie Sal-lat. “Sal-lay,” she corrected. “Sure, I do. He was a nice old guy. Nona Trembath called him “Louie Slats.” I encountered Lee during an early morning hike in the hills east of town. She was collecting rusted tin cans for her found art sculptures. Lee, an abstract expressionist painter with a national reputation in the art world, leaves her studio in Salt Lake City to spend from June first to September first at her house in Tuscarora.

Lee came to Tuscarora in 1962 and has a wry view of Tuscarora real estate. “The concept of ownership was a little different in those days,” she said as she kicked loose a half-buried Lucky Lager beer can. “Nona Trembath, who had lived in Tuscarora forever, just divided lots and sold them as she saw fit.”

Lee’s comment reminded me of a conversation with James, a ceramic sculptor and our best friend in Tuscarora. I asked him, “How do you get a plot in the Tuscarora cemetery?”

“Dig a hole” was his reply.

Not only were my sister and I putting sweat equity into making a livable place in Tuscarora, but also we were spending more time in Elko than we had in years. Although Elko is our hometown, both of us moved away after high school. An hour’s drive from Tuscarora, Elko has Builder’s Mart, WalMart, the Liquor Barn, Raley’s, three great Basque restaurants, family friends, old friends from high school, and our mother’s apartment, where we could get hot showers and sit at her kitchen table making plans for the often overwhelming cleanup and remodeling project we had undertaken.

Sometimes I believe we were intent on thinking of names because we didn’t really know why we bought the place. If we could name it right, we would know what it was supposed to be. In the beginning, we had the courage of our convictions: Helen, our widowed mother, could spend weekends and summers there; it would be a fun place for family gatherings; it was reclaiming our Nevada roots; it could be a refuge, a safe house; an artist's retreat. We would spend more time together; it would be a positive project to work on and to talk about during the year, when Mom was in Elko and we were in our respective homes in California.

It has become my place, not theirs. My sister wants nothing to do with it. She is busy dealing with her life. She hardly speaks to me, and if I were to tell of her grief and disappointments, she’d never speak to me again. My mother, now eighty-nine, lives a few blocks from me in Ukiah. She misses Elko and likes to hear about my trips to Tuscarora with my husband or with my artist friends. What she doesn’t say is how sad she is that it is no longer a joint venture for the three of us.

Yet, I love remembering the morning during that intense, “What shall we call it?” phase, when my mother, my sister, and I were having breakfast at Toki Oni, a Basque cafe in Elko. In the family tradition of ballpoint pen and paper napkins, we started thinking of names.

“Helen’s Hunch” was a quick reject, although Helen, our mother, did get the credit for acting quickly when the property came up for auction. “Raging Hormones” was the suggestion of a menopausal friend, implying that our real estate deal was consummated in a hot flash. A smart-alec acquaintance had suggested “Helen’s Used Cars and Beach Front Property,” alluding to the ten wrecked cars and to our proximity to the Glory Hole, a spectacular body of freshwater that has existed since the 1800’s but was widened and deepened during Horizon’s gold mining operations.

As we were having a last cup of coffee, an old friend from high school came over to greet our table of laughing, animated women. He pulled up a chair and we told him the whole story. He chuckled, shook his head, and said, “I don’t know about a name, but I think you should build a big plywood screen, paint it white, and line up your junked cars, like a 1950-s drive-in movie. You know, with the sign across the bottom, ‘Coming Soon.’”

We settled on calling our place the Adobe House, which is how it is listed in the phone book.

However, driving back to Tuscarora that cloudless summer morning, we laughed until our sides hurt, wondering if my friend had truly christened our crazy enterprise. The fifty-two miles went quickly as we thought aloud about our hopes, dreams, and schemes embodied in this light-hearted venture, all Coming Soon.

September 7, 2024. Tuscarora

I wrote this piece in 2004, roughly a decade after we bought the property. Tuscarora is still my heart’s home. Mom died in 2013. My sister and I are best friends. The place looks pretty good.