Home at Last

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

I’ve thought a good deal about what it means to be ”home” over the years. My parents always called Las Vegas “home,” though most of their more than 50 years of marriage was spent in other parts of the country at one military base or another. But both their extended families were early settlers in Southern Nevada, so at least every couple of years when my dad had leave, we loaded the car and headed for the southwest to see grandparents, aunts and uncles, and my favorite—a dozen cousins near the ages of my siblings and me.

I’ve lived in the forests beside Lake Michigan, the plains of Texas, the fertile lands of Central California, the arroyos sheltering the rich cultural heritage of New Mexico, and the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. All of them are beautiful beyond description. But when I come home, I still come to the red dust of Southern Utah and the deserts of Nevada.

My dad’s mother, twice widowed before she was 40, was the local midwife for the small towns in Moapa Valley. When her four sons outgrew the local elementary school, she moved to a little house in the growing community of Las Vegas, where they could get a high school education. My dad’s oldest brother married my mother’s aunt, a complicated relationship which, when my parents married, made that aunt and uncle’s six children both my first and second cousins!

Eventually, Uncle Earl–and a couple of my mother’s uncles (confused yet? Imagine me as a six-year-old trying to figure out those relationships!) brought a cattle ranch on the outskirts of town. It became tradition that whenever our family was in town, my brothers and I headed to the ranch for a few days of unfettered freedom from the rules of military life. We rode horses at breakneck pace between the giant cactus, played “Kick the Can” under the light of a million stars till the wee hours of the morning, did chores I never even knew existed till I spent time on the ranch, and talked and teased until the sun rose over the mountain. Halcyon days, indeed.

One afternoon when the temperature was over 100 degrees again, we complained to my uncle that it was hotter than an oven (his son actually used the forbidden word “hell”) outside. My uncle grinned and said, “Well, fix it.” So, we went to work. With the 12 kids who lived on the ranch, my brothers and I, and a couple of town cousins, there turned out to be quite a labor force. We laid out a rough rectangle in the dirt behind the two houses (the only grass for a couple of miles being the two patches on the front lawns of the houses, which overlooked the valley); then we started to dig. I was not particularly helpful. Spending a lot of solitary time reading does not build work muscles, but I remember hauling dirt and scowling at my cousin Mike, who was bossing us around.

If memory serves, the boys finally got annoyed at the hard labor and brought in the ranch backhoe. It took a couple of days, but the hole turned into a 4-foot-deep, 12-foot-wide by 16- or 18-foot-long trench, which we filled with water and dubbed a “swimming pool’. We let the hose run into it for a couple of days, but as soon as there was an inch or two of water, we were wading and splashing as if we were playing on the shores of the Pacific. Now, considering the scarcity of water in the desert, I am astonished at the generosity of the adults around us who must have exhibited extraordinary self-control to allow us to “waste” so much of the precious commodity on such frivolity.