The Exodus

Claire Fitzgerald drove north out of Reno on the Monday of Labor Day with a notebook on the passenger seat she was not sure she would fill, because the whole world already had this story and did not need hers. She took the interstate east to the Wadsworth exit and turned north onto the two-lane, up along the Truckee where it ran out of the mountains toward the desert, through the Paiute reservation, past the great pale sheet of Pyramid Lake lying still and strange under a sky finally scrubbed clean, and on north toward Gerlach and the playa beyond it, where seventy thousand people had spent three days stuck in the mud and were now, this afternoon, at last being let out.

She was thirty-eight. She had wanted to be a newspaper reporter since she was a girl watching her father leave for the city desk in the dark, and she had gotten to be one just in time to watch the thing itself come apart in her hands. Her father Kevin had covered the city of Reno for the Gazette-Journal for thirty-five years, the council and the mayors and the bond fights, back when the paper had a newsroom of a hundred people and a building of its own downtown and landed on half the porches in the county before six in the morning. They had sold the building a few years back. The newsroom now was a handful of them in a rented office, and above them a chain that owned hundreds of papers and squeezed each one a little thinner every quarter, and that spring the reporters at two dozen of those papers had walked off the job for a day over the cuts, and Claire had walked with them on the sidewalk in the heat and then gone back inside because the alternative was nothing at all. She was one of four people now doing the work her father remembered thirty doing.

Her family had been in this town since before it paved its first street. Bridget Fitzgerald had come from County Clare in eighteen seventy-four to cook in a railroad hotel; her boy Patrick had walked a police beat; his people had riveted the Riverside and poured the WPA walls along the river and clerked in the courthouse through the divorce years, and one of them, her great-aunt Nora, had come out for a divorce in twenty-nine and stayed the rest of her life. They had been, in one way or another, always in the business of watching the town and writing down what happened to it, and Claire had inherited the watching just as the writing-down stopped paying for itself.

The mountains fell back and the basin opened out, enormous and flat and rimmed with dry ranges, the emptiest country she knew, and then near Gerlach she came up on the tail of it. The cars came toward her in a slow brown river that had no end. They were caked to the windows in gray playa mud, dried and cracking, every one of them, RVs and box trucks and rental sedans that would never be clean again, art cars trailing bent steel, bicycles lashed to hoods, and the people inside them mud to the elbows and burned and grinning and hollow-eyed all at once, hanging out the windows in the good clean air, some of them shouting to nobody just to be shouting. They had waited hours in a line ten lanes wide out on the desert to reach this one road, and now the one road funneled them all down toward her and past her and south, back toward Reno, back toward the airport and the motels and the showers, the whole strange muddy city of them draining out through the neck of the valley the only way it had to go.

She pulled onto the shoulder where a county deputy was waving the traffic through and she got out with her phone and her notebook and stood in the warm wind and did the work. She talked to a man from Berlin who had eaten nothing but crackers for two days and could not stop laughing about it. She talked to a nurse from Sacramento who had walked five miles through mud carrying her boots to reach a shuttle. She talked to two kids barely out of college who had sheltered under a tarp with strangers and said, in the flat awed way of the young, that it had been the best thing that ever happened to them. Nobody had drowned. Nobody had starved. The rumors that had gone around the world all weekend, the fences down and the sickness and the bodies, had come to almost nothing. One man had died out there, she knew, a young man, but the coroner would say in time that it was not the storm that killed him, that it would have killed him anywhere, and Claire wrote that down carefully because getting the one true death right in a flood of false ones was, she believed, close to the whole of the job.

That was the thing the chain did not seem to know it was throwing away. Anybody with a phone could shoot the mud and the grinning faces and put it up in a minute, and a hundred thousand of them had. What was getting harder to find, what was going quietly extinct while she stood on this shoulder, was somebody local and paid and stubborn enough to drive a hundred miles up a two-lane to count the real number, to know that the lake to her south was Paiute and not scenery, to be able to tell the town afterward what had actually happened in its own backyard instead of what had gone viral about it. Her father’s whole career had been that. It was becoming a thing a town simply would not have anymore, the way a town stopped having a train station or a downtown department store, without ever quite deciding to.

She got back in the car with her hands smelling of dust and she typed the story out on her phone against the steering wheel, the caravan still grinding past her window, and she read it once and fixed the number and sent it up the wire to the website, where it would sit under a national wire photo somebody in another state had chosen, and be read by she did not know how many people, or how few. She sat there a moment after it was gone. Then she looked back up at the road, at the mud-caked river of them still coming down out of the desert with no end in sight, and she opened the notebook again to a clean page, because whatever the thing was worth now, it was not finished, and she was still the one out here to write it down.

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