The Crossing

In May of 1868, Myra Lake could tell by her husband's hands that the land was already sold.

Charles had always gripped things tightly -- his coffee cup, his reins, the edge of the supper table when something displeased him. But that morning he held the letter from the Central Pacific loosely, almost gently, and she knew. The railroad was coming through. The crossing was theirs no longer.

She had lived at the Truckee River ford for eleven years. They had arrived in 1857, young and optimistic in the way you could only be young and optimistic in the Nevada Territory, where everything was still an open question. Charles built the toll bridge in sections, hauling timber down from the Sierra foothills. Myra kept the account book, cooked for travelers, and learned which men were good for their word before they crossed and which would argue on the far bank.

The river was narrow there where Virginia Street would eventually run -- maybe forty feet across in a dry year, roaring and copper-colored after snowmelt. She had learned its moods the way you learn the moods of anyone you live alongside long enough. She knew when it was planning to flood. She knew the sound it made the morning of the flood of 1861, a low thrumming note a full hour before the water rose.

The railroad men came through in March, three of them in good boots, and they walked the flats with surveying equipment and did not ask her anything. They asked Charles, who said yes to everything and came inside afterward looking like a man who had just won a hand he had not expected to win.

"They're platting a town," he said.

"Who is?"

"The Central Pacific. They're going to sell lots. There'll be streets."

Myra looked out the window at the sagebrush and the river and the Sierra snowline. She tried to imagine streets.

The lots were auctioned on May 9th. She stood at the edge of the crowd and watched men from San Francisco bid against each other for parcels of desert that three months ago had been empty. The prices startled her. The town would be called Reno, they said -- named after a Union general killed in the war, a man who had never set foot in Nevada and never would. She thought it was a strange thing, to name a place after someone who had never seen it.

By June the first buildings were going up. A saloon appeared almost immediately, as they always did, and then a hotel, and then another saloon. The sound of hammering started before dawn and ran until dark. At night she could hear men talking and laughing on the other side of the canvas walls, their voices carrying across the new streets that now had names: Virginia, Commercial, Center, First.

She found herself walking those streets in the evenings, watching the town assemble itself from raw lumber and ambition. The men who built it were from everywhere -- Irish, Chinese, German, Mexican, American, a language she did not recognize that someone told her was Basque. They all wanted something. Most of them were in a hurry.

On one of those evening walks she saw a young Washoe woman standing at the riverbank where the toll bridge had been. The woman was perhaps twenty. She stood very still and looked at the new buildings the way Myra looked at them: like someone trying to understand what they were replacing.

They did not speak. There was nothing to say that either of them knew how to say.

Myra walked home and wrote in the account book, which had no accounts left to keep. The town had a post office now. The railroad was three months away. She wrote the date at the top of the page -- May 1868 -- and then sat for a long while with the pen in her hand, listening to the river and the hammers and the voices of a hundred men building something that had not existed before.

She thought: it will be interesting to see what it becomes.

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