The Last Calls of Virginia City
I took a walk through Virginia City today, with Buddy leading me as though he were some canine tour guide and I, a gullible tourist who’d just discovered he’d left his sense of direction at home. Eighteen months, they say, can change a town, but I hadn’t expected Virginia City to rearrange itself like a pack of cards tossed into a cyclone.
The Old Corner Bar, once a holy shrine for Mark Twain himself, had vanished. I imagine Twain turning in his grave, muttering something about the indignities of progress.
At the other end, the Firehouse Ice Cream Shop has followed suit, taking with it one of the last respectable reasons a man might have for behaving himself in public. But the cruelest blow, and I swear I felt it like a punch to the liver, was the Tahoe House.
My favorite watering hole, the place that had tolerated me with all my foolishness, was preparing to close its saloon doors at the stroke of midnight. A final curtain call for liquid courage.
What remains is a different sort of population. I saw two, maybe three people I knew.
The rest were strangers, and not the friendly, curious kind, but the sort who look like they’ve already judged you and found you lacking in some important but undisclosed category. The town doesn’t feel like a meanness has settled over it.
Not loud, not dramatic, just a quiet meanness that goes about its business like a clerk who’s tired of customers. I tried to tell myself it was a cycle, that it would come back, but Buddy gave me a look that said, “Sure, and pigs will sprout wings to fly over the Comstock.”
So there I was, a lone soul in a town that didn’t know me anymore, staring down the last night of my favorite saloon, trying to convince myself that history would come back around. As darkness cast its lot over C Street, I came to suspect Virginia City will brighten up someday, but for now, it seems to be keeping its kindness to itself and offering the rest of us only what it can spare.
