6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org     NONFICTION  · 37 MIN READ Nevada By Daniel Lanza Rivers APRIL 29, 2022  Share     Nevada is a strange and brittle artifact, both seemingly alive and thoroughly dead. 00:00 00:00 for JMP https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 1/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org 1.    9  The house looks plain enough from the street. The façade is a little worn, and the yard is overgrown. This view gives no hint of the life spent there or the archive that oods through its rooms: the newspapers and books and surges of dust-laden errata that snake into corners and spill out into the back yard. My mother’s father guides us through the interior, leading us along paths worn in rust-colored carpet. Like so many bachelors of a certain generation, he seems to have experienced his own aging as a kind of winnowing inward, a solitary nesting that stuffs its corners with the debris of time. I cannot say that I have ever felt close to this man, though we share the same birthday. In my young adulthood, his ex-wife, my grandmother, had a habit of pointing out our similarities: our introversion, and our love of books and learning and the outdoors. My earliest memory of him comes not as a moment but indirectly, through the subscription to the National Geographic he gifted to my brother and me one Christmas. The ensuing ow of magazines continued for years, substituting lush photography and ethnographic glimpses of a wide world for his presence. Upon entering high school, this subscription was eclipsed by a yearly birthday card with a half-dozen words and a photograph slipped inside. The photos often felt random and obscure—a ower, a line of ridge—but the backside always cataloged their place and date of origin. Despite his reticence to share his life or the stories held in these pictures, his practical notations suggested a muted desire to communicate, to be understood. One such photo has sat on my desk for years now. In it, an antlered buck stands atop a snowdrift, staring directly into the eye of the camera. Part of me thinks I held onto this picture because I decided one day that it must be signi cant, must be given signi cance. Another part of me wonders if I didn’t keep it for reasons that remain elusive, deeply felt but dif cult to put down in words. Being young and self-involved, I never thought to send him a birthday card of my own. Instead, I returned his yearly gestures with phone calls that would last for four or ve minutes. We’d stumble through a brief exchange of updates until he pitched his voice upward, saying, “Well, okay…,” giving me the signal to let him go. https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 2/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org Standing in his house on the day we arrived to help him move out, I was struck by the sudden presence, the thickness, of his evaporating world. Within days of this rst    9  glimpse, his house would be surveyed and scoured: its contents would be cataloged by professionals who would decide nally what was salable, what might be donated, and what would become garbage. In the ensuing years, I would think back on this lost archive with a kind of mourning. “ It is hard not to focus solely on the guns, which we unearth from corners and piles. 2. These days, my parents have a good relationship with this man, my mother’s father. It feels important to make that clear at the outset. He has lived a long and seemingly lonesome life, but no more. The day of our arrival marked a turning point when my parents’ support and his Veteran’s bene ts delivered him from a neighborhood whose changes he experienced with a mix of futility and racial anxiety. Once his things were charted and sold, he was moved into a Veteran’s community on the other side of Fresno where he enjoys regular meals, in-house care, family visits, and the company of other vets who are similarly tucked away in the corners of a changing world. My parents look out for him now, attending to his nances, his health, and his spirits. He and my mother talk often. She tells me that he is a changing man, maybe even a changed one. He has long disdained authority and been uncomfortable around women, but my mom tells me that he is kind and grateful to the Center’s workday staff, many of whom are Filipinas and Latinas who live in communities that resemble the one he wanted so badly to leave behind. She says that he calls her often now, especially during the weeks leading up to a visit. He makes sure to offer some pretense, of course—an urgent clari cation or a reminder of something to be discussed in person. Really https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 3/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org though, it seems that he calls just to talk. To hear his daughter’s voice and to be assured that she and her husband will make the ve-hour round trip to see him. That they will    9 arrive at the appointed time to take him out to lunch and into the circle of their company. It seems that he has nally made space for this kind of love, has grown accustomed to its constant and patient presence, even if he hasn’t yet learned to trust it. https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 4/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org 3.    9  The day of our visit, we are tasked with a hasty clearing out, a combing for documents and items he would need for his new life. For my brother Matt and I, today marks the longest continuous stretch of time that either of us had spent with this man, or will likely spend with him in the coming years. It is our rst and last chance to claim a talisman or two of his life, something we might one day remember him by. My memories of the search are a patchwork of objects and sensations: the signed headshot of Ronald Regan perched atop a kitchen shelf; the precious stones that lined windowsills, jasper and amethyst and quartz and pyrite. In a ling cabinet, we nd some settlement papers, detailing the accident and lawsuit that ended his career as a big rig driver. We come upon the carcass of a black bear, rendered and transformed into a throw rug with a red felt trim, which has lain folded and stuffed into an anonymous pile on the living room oor. It is hard not to focus solely on the guns, which we unearth from corners and piles. Some of them are so old that they were manufactured without safeties, and all of them are loaded in anticipation of a day of violence. Later, Matt will tell me about nding a list of names as well. In a series of tight rows, my grandfather has cataloged his neighbors: their height and perceived race and gender, the length of their hair, their routines. I follow up with Matt about this document once again, and his recollections are mostly the same except he reminds me that our specs were in there too, just a few pages further in. Under each of our names there was a list of details: graduation dates and birthdays, the year my brother started dating his wife and the year they married. My partner Rowan and I had only just met back then, but we were already living together. Matt can’t remember if his name was on the list, but it seems unlikely. I had been out to my family for half of my life by then, but it wasn’t something I had ever discussed with this man. We’d only ever talked politics once, back when I was in college and he’d forwarded me a few chains letters about “Hanoi Jane” and the damage tree huggers could do to a mountain. I wouldn’t say that we argued—we didn’t know each other well enough for that—but I’d made my disagreement clear. https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 5/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org Re ecting on his notebook now, the coincidence of the two records seems freighted with signi cance. I can imagine him sketching my updates on a yellow legal pad while    9  we talk on our birthday, but of course I have no clue what this document actually looks like. Like so much of my knowledge about his life, it too has come to me secondhand. “ Rowan and I have taken to calling the bear skin Nevada, after the mountain range where the creature lived and died. 4. Leaving my grandfather’s house that day, I take his service pistol home with me—the one that sat on his hip during his years with the National Parks Service. I came upon it in a pale leather holster, and found it loaded with hollow-point bullets that I emptied into a zip loc bag and got rid of. After that, the gun stayed empty for as long as it was in my care. I can’t say for certain what drew me to the item. My parents had forbidden toy guns when my brothers and I were growing up, and I had never before felt a desire to own one. I hadn’t even held a handgun before that day, and even now, I have still never red one. But there was something about the weapon that was suggestive of this man, whose presence was for the rst time available to me for more than an hour. The pistol felt like the kind of thing that could pass between us, and that passing between felt somehow private and diagonal, like glimpsing a neighbor under the crack of a lifted blind. Rowan, a trained actor, tells me of Chekov’s conviction that a gun that’s introduced in Act One needs to go off before the end of Act Three. This is a ne rule for theater, but I should tell you now that this is not a story about a gun that goes off later. The gun that ends a life in this story has already done so by now. My grandfather red it in order to end the life of the black bear whose rendered and folded body I stow away in my trunk that afternoon. https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 6/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org 5.    9  Rowan and I have taken to calling the bear skin Nevada, after the mountain range where the creature lived and died. Nevada is a strange and brittle artifact, both seemingly alive and thoroughly dead. Laid out on a rug or a table, their body remembers the places where it has lain folded and tends toward that fold. Their glass eyes and rubber tongue suggest a kind of frozen animation, while their preserved claws and teeth signal the danger my grandfather sought to prove himself against on Nevada’s last day. The story of Nevada’s death begins years after my grandmother has taken her daughter and left her marital home. In the years following the divorce, my grandfather purchased a mining claim up in the Sierra and spent many weekends up there—sometimes alone, and sometimes, one assumes, in the company of friends. On the day we arrive to help him move out of the Fresno neighborhood he has begun to fear, he tells us about his encounter with the bear up in the mountains. Given the ri e he carried that day, I assume he was hunting, though this is not a part of his telling. Instead, he says that the bear charged him on the trail and he defended himself, shooting it twice. I don’t have a rm reason to distrust his rendering, but I also hear it while I’m in the early stages of a years-long research project on the extirpation of the California grizzly. I have come to know something about bears, and I know that black bears (Ursus americanus californiensis) scare relatively easily. Being smaller than grizzlies, they rarely maul humans unless they are protecting their young, lacking a clear escape route, or are otherwise provoked. Food motivation can bring them into human-dominated environments, but this tends to happen more often if they are under duress, or have become heavily socialized to an easy food source. It’s possible, of course, that Nevada was feeling territorial that day, or that they were living through a drought or some other scarcity. They were still a juvenile, so it’s doubtful they had cubs nearby. Whatever the case, Nevada was shot twice by my grandfather, and they did not rise again under their own power. After they were skinned, their meat was buried and cooked with coals. The meal was shared with some neighbors, and I’m told it tasted quite good. https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 7/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM “ Nevada - Terrain.org The ‘California Republic’ ag, and    its many afterlives, have 9 long positioned the grizzly as a romantic symbol that both embodies and obscures these histories of violence. 6. Though they are (and were) a bear with brown fur, Nevada is not a grizzly. Along with being smaller than a grizzly, Nevada lacks the telltale hump that rises between a true brown bear’s shoulders. Instead, they are and were a black bear who was killed during their short-lived “cinnamon phase.” Biologists note that the cinnamon phase occurs during adolescence, when young bears of the americanus variety wear brown drag to reduce heat stress in direct sunlight, allowing them to feed longer in food-rich areas. There are an estimated 25,000 to 35,000 black bears in California today, giving the state the largest concentrated population in the contiguous U.S. (Canada has more, as does Alaska.) At a glance, Nevada’s visual similarities to a grizzly are so striking that you could be forgiven for confusing them. In fact, friends and family members who see Nevada often mistake them for that other eradicated Ursus. And as I have come to learn in conferences and classrooms, most Californians don’t properly realize that we live in a state without grizzlies. Instead, we live under a ag that is haunted both by the creatures’ absence and by the specters of settler violence that propelled their eradication. 7. https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 8/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org Though the California grizzly (Ursus arctos californicus) is now an extinct subspecies, the region we call California was once home to an estimated 10,000 of the creatures.    9  it is This population accounted for one- fth of North America’s brown bears, and believed to have once been the densest spatial concentration of the creatures in the world. These grizzlies were a favored food source for colonial travelers, but their populations remained steady through Spanish and Mexican colonization. This is due, in part, to the vast reaches of land that remained unenclosed during the hegemony of these two empires. It is also a consequence of the global production of leather and tallow that ourished in the region, bringing butchering seasons that buoyed grizzlies’ population growth with heaps of discarded meat. Grizzly steaks were a favorite dish among gold miners in the 1840s and 50s. These newly minted Californians often signaled their claim to the region by wearing the creatures’ body parts as boots and coats and hats. These arrivals, most of them white men and city dwellers with little experience outdoors, so loved the thought of a dead or dying grizzly that they devoted a few hours each week to watching them ght to the death in wooden arenas. They smoked and drank in the stands, shoulder to shoulder with other men, while a captured grizzly was staked to the ground and made to duel a bull whose horns had been blunted to slow the killing. One assumes that the sight of blood got their blood up. That these men experienced the inevitable death as something of a palliative for their homesickness, their loneliness, and the doubt-laden enterprise of mining the earth and planting their future generations on stolen land. The story of the regional extermination of grizzlies is broad and various, of course, having something to do with agriculture and something to do with white settlers’ love of property and the ring of a gun. If the archive they left behind is any indicator, the extinction of Ursus arctos californicus cannot be meaningfully disentangled from the genocidal violence that these white U.S. American men brought to bear against the region’s Native people. After 10,000 years of cohabitation with the region’s many and various indigenous societies, wild grizzlies were exterminated from the state within 60 years of U.S. conquest. Within these same decades, white U.S. Americans hunted Native people with militias, stole an estimated 4,000 of their children, and entrapped their labor and mobility within a legal system that refused to recognize their humanity. https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 9/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org White journalists and creatives represented both Native people and grizzlies as violent and inhuman impediments to the benevolent work of empire. The “California Republic”    9 ag, and its many afterlives, have long positioned the grizzly as a romanticsymbol that both embodies and obscures these histories of violence. It seems certain to me that the many slippages among these histories and species are part of what drew me to Nevada, and part of what draws me to them still. When I consider the morbid artifact of Nevada’s body in tandem with my grandfather’s revolver, the objects feel loaded with meaning. They have become clues to a life whose shape I’d never seen in full light. In taking them with me, I became the next link in their histories of violence. I invited their haunting into my home. https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 10/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org    9  8. To this day, Rowan and I can nd no practical use for Nevada. It has never felt right to hang them on a wall where their eyes would point forever toward the ceiling or the ground. Their hair is brittle and prone to shedding, and it clings to the soles of your feet if you walk over it. In the early years of our stewardship, we mostly kept Nevada in the walk-in closet at the center of our apartment. We were still living there, with Nevada nestled on a high shelf, when the moth infestation took hold. There is a kind of poetic resonance to the idea that I brought the moths with me from Fresno, hidden in the folds of Nevada’s rendered body. But the more I press this theory, the less certain I become. It’s just as likely that they came to us by another route: through an open window or a shared laundry unit or a box of mementos brought home from a family garage. Regardless of their port of entry, the creatures came to live alongside us for years, evading our passive attempts to expel them without using insecticides. Throughout that time, they always found their way back to Nevada, whose hair and felt fringe nourished generations. Whatever their story, Rowan likes to say, “We got Nevada, and the moths got us.” 9. As far as I can tell, webbing moths (Tineola bisselliella) have nested in humandominated spaces as long as such spaces have existed. Like other so-called pests, they have coevolved with us across deep time, adapting to our attempts to exterminate them with smoke and cold and detergent. The creatures prefer soiled fabrics and natural hair, https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 11/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org but they’ve been known to subsist on materials as various as snake skin, beef, cheese, ngernail clippings, silk, carpet, leather, cork, dry pasta, bees wax, and little    9  tumbleweeds of cat fur. Their stomachs possess an enzyme capable of breaking down keratin, and they spend their larval stage accumulating a lifetime’s worth of moisture and sustenance from these substances. A webbing moth’s life begins as a microscopic egg, roughly 1/24th of an inch long and all but invisible to the naked eye. Brooding females tend to lay these eggs in dark, soft places away from direct light, where their larva will have ready access to nutrition. Though the brood has some sensitivity to heat (the arrival of which will quicken their hatching) they can survive extreme lows of -23° C (or -9° F) and highs of 49° C (or 119° F), and they are secured in place with a glue-like excretion that resists the pull of even the strongest vacuum. Upon reaching the larval stage, the hatchlings spend between two months and two years eating all they can, and will become mobile if necessary, favoring the undersides of baseboards and hand-made rugs. In my experience, these larvae delight in spilled cat food and will congregate around it, especially if it rolls under a storage unit, where it can rest undisturbed for months at a time. After they have eaten their ll, the larvae will pupate into moths using a gauzy white material called frass, which is delicately spun from the dehydrated regurgitate of whatever they have spent their infancy consuming. Moths of both sexes are known to spend their brief, 30-day adulthood courting and mating, but female moths rarely y, preferring to nd a suitable nesting site and stay put. This means, of course, that most of the moths you see out in the open are males, uttering bachelors searching for a mate. If both parties are successful in nding a mate, they’ll die soon after consummation, but not before the brooding female lays a few hundred eggs she won’t be around to rear. If you live with moths, you may grow used to the sight of the uttering males, cascading down from the ceiling and disappearing on a wall or a lampshade. They are between a quarter- and a half-inch in length with wings the color of sun-bleached sand, making them well-suited to hiding in plain sight. If you aren’t alarmed by your early sightings of them, you might nd them charming. You might invest them with the romance of https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 12/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org night or transformation and let them pass for a year or more, ignorant of the silent damage they can bring to the corners of your home, or the legion of eggs that lay    9 to life.  invisibly waiting for a warm day to bring them “ I’m told that my grandfather resented the frequency of my infant mother’s crying, and asked whether her crib might be moved into the garage. 10. I’ve heard the story of my grandmother’s divorce a handful of times now. Like the breakup of any life, it seems to have had many causal factors. I’m told that my grandfather resented the frequency of my infant mother’s crying, and that he asked whether her crib might be moved into the garage. I’m told he was not interested in intimacy, that he could be cold and distant. My mother was still very young, a toddler, when she poisoned herself with a handful of pills. Her father had a chair where he liked to sit at the end of his day. This act seems to have been something he looked forward to very much. He kept his pills on a table next to his chair, and he would not hear of moving them, not even after my mother began toddling around the house. One day, she got her hands on his pills, and my grandmother found her and rushed her to the emergency room. Her life was spared by this act, but my grandmother’s worry and sense of helpless overwhelm were not. When she tried to discuss the incident with her husband, he told her that their child needed to learn to leave well enough alone. Decades later, my grandmother tells me that her father accompanied her to the courthouse, ostensibly for emotional support and to serve as a witness for her divorce. I’ve always assumed that he needed to come along because it was the 1960s, because it https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 13/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org was the Central Valley, and because she was a woman. Looking back now, I’m less sure about these details. Rather than needing his help with a legal hurdle, it seems more    9  likely that she wanted him near as she sought, nally, to put an end to a relationship she could no longer endure. Though she secured her divorce and moved away, this was not as neat an ending as she’d hoped. Instead, her memories of her rst marriage followed on, trailing her like a specter. 11. I can’t accurately say how long we lived with our moths before we realized we had a problem. My partner and I have been vegetarians as long as we’ve been together. And when they appeared, we were practicing a kind of selective veganism that was strongest at home. “Vagueinsm,” one of our friends called it. Living in a temperate city with unsealed screens and cracks around our windows, we were accustomed to the uttering of small wings. We’d already had Nevada for a year or so at this point, having moved them from one apartment to another and then nally to a third- oor walk-up in Oakland. And by the time we realized that the moths had laid claim to their corpse, a tiny horde had overtaken the house as well, materializing in a marvelous riot of wings. The rst time I tried to quell our infestation, I was home alone, giving our apartment a long overdue deep cleaning. Rowan and I were split in age between our late 20s and early 30s back then, and our notions about household maintenance were still fragmentary and divided. What began that day with vacuuming and laundry and the good old spray-and-wipe soon spiraled out into a urry of futile maneuvers. After this discovery, I found myself battling the creatures for months at a time and scouring the internet for tips on how to eradicate them without resorting to chemicals that could threaten our cats. Given the uneven temporality of Tineola bisselliella’s life cycle, those living with infestations will often mistake the disappearance of adult moths for a hardwon victory. And throughout my many attempts at elimination, I learned that a vacuum and a dryer can kill a larva but will leave a clutch of eggs unscathed. I spent days https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 14/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org routing pupal cocoons from storage bins and abandoned shoes and the fabric underside of the sofa. And I found curls of frass in each of our paternal grandfathers’ wool coats,    9 and nestled in the folds of an heirloom kilt.But no matter how diligently I set myself to the task of cleaning and sealing, and scouring—or how many rolls of quarters I sacri ced to our laundry units—the moths always returned, always coming home to Nevada. “ After completing his tour, he shares his certainty that the moths will follow us to Ohio, that there is no possible route out of our mess. 12. I sometimes wonder how my mother’s father might have reacted to the moths’ arrival. Perhaps he was like us, amused by the novelty of nature moving indoors. Perhaps he regretted this softness once the infestation took hold. It’s not hard to picture him stalking through that little house, a rolled magazine in his hand as he knocks them from the sky. Of course, he’s a man of ef ciencies, a bachelor who never shared his home with any pets, so I’m inclined to think that he wouldn’t have hesitated to use a chemical solution. And yet, if we inherited them from him then they survived whatever gestures he made toward their elimination, so maybe the chemicals are an unfair turn. Maybe he was too tired to handle them the old-fashioned way, became overwhelmed by their many returns, and eventually resigned himself to their presence—the generations nursed on memories and cloth and fur, and the uttering males puncturing the stillness of his solitary nights. https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 15/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org 13.    9  Rowan and I hold out on chemicals for years, relishing the tranquil bouts of hibernation. Then a turning point presents itself in the form of a visiting professorship in Cincinnati. During my phone call with the exterminator, he counsels me to wash all of our fabrics on hot, and to dry clean whatever I can’t run through the washer. He sends me a prep sheet that directs me to seal away food, to empty all closets and bins, and to cover any sh tanks with blankets that we can wash afterward. The process will only take 20 or 30 minutes, but the cats and Rowan and I needed to vacate for at least four hours, ve to be safe. When the promised day arrives, I am exhausted and hopeful. I have spent the weeks leading up to the visit throwing away whatever clothing we can spare and washing the rest at my parents’ place 40 minutes east of us. The exterminator’s manner is brusque on arrival, and out-of-step with the genial phone call we’ve shared just a few days before. I follow him through the apartment as he surveys his task—taking in the furniture we’d pulled out from walls, the gutted closets, and the shoes arranged with their mouths open to the fumigant. As with so many household visits from male strangers, I am unable to parse whether we are not getting along, or whether he has become uneasy upon stepping into the home of a couple of weird queers. After completing his tour, he shares his certainty that the moths will follow us to Ohio, that there is no possible route out of our mess. He has me sign a document to this effect, and I do so, stunned, before offering some futile, passive-aggressive thank you as I ferry our cats out the door. https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 16/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org    9  14. The scientist and philosopher Jakob von Uexküll has written at length about the perceptual worlds, or umwelt, of nonhuman animals. His most famous work, A Foray into the Worlds of Humans and Animals, opens with an oft-quoted re ection on the umwelt of a tick, which will wait days, even weeks, for something warm to pass below it, triggering its impulse to drop and burrow and drink. Students in my animal studies classes tend to remember Uexküll best for the colored panels he uses to show the ways the same room can harbor different perceptual worlds for a human, a dog, a cat, or a y. https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 17/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org Though his writing can at times feel mechanistic—with its clinical jargon and its lengthy mapping of triggers and re exes—Uexküll argues persuasively for a    9 the human. In one memorable  passage, consideration of animal worlds that decenters he discusses the ways that trauma can spatialize itself in the memories of a chicken, imbuing certain locations with the psychic weight of an unhealed wound. I thought a lot about Uexküll in the years of our infestation. I grew accustomed to snatching moths from the air and washing their down off my ngers. I meditated on their preferences, reminded myself of their longing for shadow and moisture and comfort. In my pursuit of their destruction, I was sometimes stunned by the quiet drama of their lives. I would come upon a pupa or a skein of frass nestled in the folds of a winter coat, and the creatures’ worlds would shimmer before me, puncturing my desire for a swift end to the whole sorry cycle of violence and return. The parallels between my attempts at eradication and my grandfather’s decision to pull the trigger on Nevada carry their own harmonies. I often return to the image of him standing on the trail: a miner and a white man, aiming his gun toward another brown bear on stolen land. I think of the satisfaction he might have felt at the kill and his enjoyment of the taste of Nevada’s esh. It reminds me of the satisfaction I came to feel upon routing my own creatures from their nesting places. The drive that overtook me to end so many lives for no other reason than that I’d encountered them and found them inconvenient. As we prepared for our move to Ohio, Rowan and I conceded to sealing Nevada in a plastic vacuum bag with moth crystals. Being believers in portents and spirits and signs, this concession was dif cult and slow in coming—though it likely should have been our earliest move. There was then, and still is now, something within me that revolts at the thought of chemicals working their way into the deepest layers of Nevada’s rendered body. It is the same part of me that reads the moths’ presence in our home as a kind of indictment—a re ection of an unresolved history of violence that traces its line of descent down to this author. https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 18/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org 15.    9  After keeping my grandfather’s gun for a few years, unloaded and tucked away in a drawer, I sell it for a $100 bill. We are living in Cincinnati and navigating the early months of my visiting professorship. We are also trying to affect a frugal cross-country move while we wait for my rst paycheck to come through at the end of September. I’ve been adjuncting for years now, so the no-man’s-land of debt and credit is familiar enough. And it’s an easy decision when I catch sight of the gun store’s banners, waving across the street from the thrift store where we are trying to out t our new home. Entering the store a few days later, I interrupt three older white men in deep conversation. Their manner is clipped and cautious, and I experience a sensation that will become familiar during my time in Ohio. Rowan and I have moved in haste. We have left most of what we owned behind, and we are coming to understand that we have relocated to a place where we stand out: as queers or Californians, the distinctions are never very clear. In the eleven months we spend in Cincinnati, we are hollered at by men in cars. This happens when we are together, and it happens when we are not. I seek out other queers on campus, colleagues and students who tell me about the cars full of U.S. American boys who yell at them on the streets of the small town where I work. Cars full of students who throw drinks and slow down and trail behind. Hearing these stories, I wonder about the people who see this happen—who must see, must hear, a car full of young U.S. American men following a furious and frightened 19-yearold. And who stand by, pretending they aren’t implicated by what is unfolding before them. I wonder if my mother’s father was ever in a car like that. It’s easy to imagine him noticing some vibrant young queer and remarking on them, on their too muchness, to a friend, to a clutch of young U.S. American men with a car. I think back to his signed photo of Reagan: a man whom I cannot think of without thinking of death, and of years of institutional menace that stole a generation, an overstory, of people like me. Months after our move back to the Bay, a news update on my phone informs me that some of my former students are facing criminal charges for the hours they allegedly spent torturing the pledges of their fraternity. The article draws on ER reports and https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 19/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org survivors’ testimony to detail the ways these young U.S. American men used deprivation and noise and disorientation and humiliation and physical violence to craft    9  their boundaries of belonging. Walking into the gun store that day, I did not haggle. I submitted my weapon and left with a $100 bill, which Rowan and I spent on a couch and a kitchen table. We did not yet know that the moths were gone, but we were hopeful. We viewed the new species of ying insects surrounding us with a guarded collegiality. Nevada spent this year wrapped in the same vacuum sealed plastic they inhabit today, moth crystals dissolving where generations once nested and mated and ate themselves to adulthood. This continued entrapment feels wrong in an intimate way, but we cannot come to a workable alternative. “ In those years, I used to assume that all the humans we call men were inwardly lonesome. Sometimes I still do. 16. At one point in her life, my grandmother attended a Baptist church in Bakers eld whose elders encouraged her to repent for her decision to divorce a man who refused to keep his pills on a shelf. She told me about calling him one day and asking for his forgiveness. She didn’t go into the details, but I know that he did not return her apology with his own. I can picture him answering the phone, surprised at her voice, perhaps startled. I think of him listening while she speaks her piece, rehearsing the guilt she’s been taught to feel over their inability to make a life together. I imagine him waf ing for a few minutes, following her lead until an opening comes and he can pitch his voice upward, saying, “Well, okay.” https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 20/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org The years surrounding this apology were not an easy period for my grandmother. The same institution that provided her a sense of community also felt entitled to steep    9  By the tithings from a woman subsisting on an elementary school teacher’s pension. time my parents and brothers and I arrived to move her out, her mortgage had been underwater for years. The move north was good for her, though—was a kind of homecoming. But after our trip to Fresno, she struggled with her ex-husband’s sudden reentry into the orbit of her family life. In her nal years, she would continue to tell me about her wish for an apology, a reckoning of the kind she had to nally come to on her own. 17. Eight months after we moved my grandfather out of his house, I make the trip to Fresno with my dad. We are visiting the Vet’s home for lunch, and then we’ll retrieve a dusty SUV that I’ll drive home to the Bay, where I’ll clean it and sell it. We nd the vehicle sitting out in a khaki-dirt parking lot, surrounded by a horizon of farmland and patches of residential sprawl. Climbing inside, I realize that it is a family car, a kind of truck with two rows of seats that fold down and a built-in DVD player. Cleaning it out a few days later, I unearth a new archive of notes and receipts, a pocketknife and a bevy of tools and camping gear and a DVD wallet. I realize that I have become the one who will decide what to keep and what to throw away. These decisions will stay with me, becoming the locus of another series of regrets. As I work through the car, I realize that my grandfather must have had friends—I have even heard about a few of them in an off-hand way. But I have always imagined him as a solitary gure, by which I mean a person who is lonely. Of course, this conviction is colored by my own experience—and my own thinking about white U.S. American men and the social protocols that enfold them from an early age. Though I navigated the social worlds of straight men during my teens and 20s, I have always equated masculinity with a network of lonely postures: the inner self held up and back—which is https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 21/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org to say my inner self held up and back. In those years, I used to assume that all the humans we call men were inwardly lonesome. Sometimes I still do.    9   Cleaning out the truck, I feel another window into my grandfather’s world creak open. Without access to his history, I have come to think of the objects that pass between us as further points in a constellation of inference and imagination and loss. When I chart this constellation, the pro le that comes into view is based in no small part on our similarities: our shyness, our shared love of books and solitude and the outdoors. When I infuse this pro le in with the generalizable characteristics of men of his generation and demography, the something that emerges is at once alienating, elusive, and somehow achingly familiar. It is true that part of his body lives on in my own, but it is a truth I have to remind myself, and it has always felt alien to me to look for it. Much as my grandmother reminded me about our similarities of character, she never pointed out the shadows of his face that grace my own. Even now, I wouldn’t know how to look for them without a reference—a photo of him standing somewhere, animated by some public emotion. When I reach for his features, my thoughts drift back to the buck standing alert, maybe stunned, in a drift of snow. https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 22/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org    9  18. There is one more object that I have not yet mentioned. A photo glimpsed once and then lost. Its import is almost too precious to put to paper. A few years before her death, my grandmother produced an album with a red cover and a binding that allowed it to ip upward like an old stenopad. I was visiting her, as I often did after her move north, and we were alone. The album was dedicated to her wedding day. In it, she looks vibrant and beautiful. She is surrounded by family and friends whom I have only heard about in stories. In one picture, her husband sits at a table looking wooden and young and nervous. As we study him together, she tells me https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 23/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org that things between them were awkward from the start. He never really showed an interest in sex, and he retreated at the suggestion of it. She says that they were just 24    9  she would and 31 when they split. As she prepared to leave, he told her that he was sure nd someone else, and that he didn’t want to hold her back. Looking at that photo of him, at the startled inwardness on his young man’s face, I feel a soft owering of recognition. Even before she tells me that she believes that he was attracted to men, I have begun to wonder. 19. When I think of his truck now, of him camping out there with the seats folded down and a movie on, I wonder if he ever shared that space with someone else. I imagine he must have had someone with whom he went camping—an old friend, maybe, or a coworker from the national parks. I wonder what they might have meant to one another, what intimacies they might have shared. Even if it was furtive and shrouded with selfrecriminations, I hope that he felt the promise of sharing his life, his shy self, with someone after my grandmother. I know that this vision of his life has either happened or it hasn’t. And I know, too, that the truth of it rests beyond the pall of my archive, or what I will learn in my lifetime. Whatever my grandfather’s failings—his politics, his violences, and the postures he struck for the wide world—I hope fervently that he was once in the cab of that truck with someone else, nested together in the closeness of that space. I can see the night surrounding them, the constellations hanging unseen overhead. The silence and shadows wrapping themselves around two bodies, lingering at the edge of sleep. I have always longed to bury Nevada. https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 24/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM 20. Nevada - Terrain.org    9  Rowan and I have moved Nevada ve times now. They are no longer tucked away in a “ closet, watching over our conversations at feeding time. Instead, they rest in a vacuum sealed bag, in an opaque bin, on a high shelf in our garage. They are a nest to hundreds, likely thousands, of sterile eggs. Their skin, their felt, and their face are scored and saturated with naphthalene, a toxicant used in moth crystals that has been known to induce cancer, vomiting, kidney dysfunction, and confusion in humans and other mammals. Though they are sealed, it is likely that Nevada radiates a muted toxicity into the atmosphere of our garage and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Romantic as it may sound, I have always longed to bury Nevada. To put them into the ground somewhere close at hand, maybe at the foot of an old oak tree where they can decompose as the years pass. But now that I have toxi ed their body, I can’t in good conscience put them into the earth. To do so would be to bring chemical harm to the teeming worlds of roots and fungi and bacteria and insects that make life underground. To burn Nevada would similarly release chemical violence into the air. Years after our move to Cincinnati, I am no closer to nding a tting end for them. To do so would feel like a deliverance, an exorcism. But reckoning with ghosts is rarely easy. So Rowan and I wait and carry Nevada’s body with us and lay them down in dim corners away from the light. Much as I found them. 21. The same day we moved her father out of his home, my mother and I found a kitten in his back yard (Felis catus). Jasper was a tiny thing then, just a few weeks old. His eyes were still gummed closed and his white fur stood out against the scrap metal. My mother and I heard the trill of his nascent voice as he wandered among the soon-to-be trash. After some failed grabs, we coordinated our movements and came at him from https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 25/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org both sides. My mother scooped him up in her arms, and their lives merged. Within an hour, Jasper’s fur was clean, his sight was restored, and his namelessness was banished.    9  It was hard not to feel then that he too wascharged with story, that he became a metonym for the new world that awaited my mother’s dad on the other side of town. The regular meals, the company of others, the unfamiliar rhythms of daily life. “ There must have been a moment when their gazes met. I can see them pausing together—two mammals caught on opposite sides of a mirror. 22. I made a point of calling my grandfather on our birthday this year, and we spent 20 minutes or so catching up. We talked about our routines during the Covid shutdown, and the hike I’d just nished. He was surprised to learn of the redwood park perched in the hills above Oakland, and he asked about the landscape and the wildlife there. A warmth spread between us then, leaving a depth of feeling that lingered the rest of the day. He called me back the next day to apologize, saying he’d been so carried away by our conversation that he’d forgotten to wish me happy birthday in return. We chuckled, and I tried to draw him back into conversation. Maybe he was busy, or maybe something in my tone spooked him, because he withdrew into himself again and the conversation ended like so many before it. He and Nevada are entangled in my memory these days, and this encounter stirred a new realization: there must have been a moment when their gazes met. I can see them pausing together—two mammals caught on opposite sides of a mirror. Interrupted by a https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 26/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org harsh turn as my grandfather snaps inward and lls the forest with the sound of air being torn asunder.    9  23. The male cat who lives with Rowan and me is a rescue named Bucket, and he is a skittish, loving creature who spent his early life outdoors. He has the wide jaw of the males of his species who reach sexual maturity before being neutered, and he has a tendency of lashing out in response to a rude or unfamiliar touch. My mother’s cat Jasper, by contrast, has the sleek face of a male kitten who is rescued young and spade in short order. Like Bucket, his physical body is forever shaped by his circumstance. Jasper is a joyful presence in my parents’ home, sometimes shy and other times playful in the chaotic manner of a creature who feels utterly safe. However hidden he may be before my arrival, he will always emerge to greet me. He dives into my shoes and bathes himself in my smells and my history. Often, he will linger about my feet until I pick him up and sling him over my shoulder. Once aloft, he will bend his head backward to rub his face against my own. If my father is around when this happens, he’ll remind me that he and my mom and I are the only people Jasper does this for. Jasper was a few weeks old when we found him, and he is nine years old now. When I look at him, at his thin jaw and sleek face, I am reminded of his quick deliverance into comfort. Within hours of being found, his little body was cleaned and fed and secured in a cat carrier in the booth of a restaurant. I don’t remember much of the meal that day, but I remember my mother’s father sitting with us, quiet but seemingly content, rmly in the grip of an unexpected care. https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 27/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org Rivers (they/them) is assistant professor of Daniel  Lanza  9   American studies and literature at San José State University, where they serve as director of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies. Daniel teaches courses in environmental humanities, U.S. literature, cultural studies, and animal studies. Their research explores the ways that settler notions about California’s “natural” state have shaped the region’s environments, economies, and social politics since colonization. Daniel’s writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Apogee, Joyland, American Quarterly, Boom: a Journal of California, The Steinbeck Review, and Women’s Studies, where they edited the special issue “Futures of Feminist Science Studies.” Header photo by Millenius, courtesy Shutterstock. # BE A RS # CA L IF O RNI A # D I VO RC E TAGS # ED U CAT I ON # G RI ZZLY BE AR # G U NS # MO UN TAI N S # OA KL A ND # S I ERR A N EVA DA MO U NTA IN S  Share   # CAT S # FA MI LY # C I NC I NNAT I # F RE S NO # HI GHE R ED U CAT IO N # OHI O # P ES T IC I D ES # S OL I TU D E  # CO MMU NI T Y # DA N GE R # G RA ND FAT HER # HI KI NG # TOXI C C HEMI CA L S # G RA ND MOT HER # HU NT I NG # P IO NE ER # DA N IE L L AN ZA RI VE RS # QU E ER # LG BTQ # G RA ND PAR EN T S # MOT HS # RE LAT I ON S HIP S # RI S K # TOXI NS  Recent   https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 28/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org    9  Kintsugi: Art of Repair https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 29/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org    9  Albino Deer in the Jewish Graveyard https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 30/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org    9  The Perils of Indolent Lesions https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 31/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org    9  Tahuayo https://www.terrain.org/2022/nonfiction/nevada/ 32/33 6/12/24, 11:59 PM Nevada - Terrain.org INDEPENDENT, PUBLISHING READER-SUPPORTED ON PLACE   For 25 years, Terrain.org has published SUBSCRIBE  9 TO TERRAIN.ORG   Enter your email address: essential literature, art, commentary, and design on the built and natural environments —all at no cost to readers and without advertising.  SUPPORT TERRAIN.ORG I agree to receive emails, and I may easily opt-out of these communications at any time after signing up. 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