During our weekend stay, and in the true Nevada spirit, we drove out to the desert to shoot guns and visited the swarthy old Comstock (silver mining) mecca of Virginia City. Even more than a hundred years after it's decline it's still a cool relict of the old west with places like the Silver Queen Saloon, with it's creaky old floors, and supposed resident ghosts!
It was my idea to go there (and everyone else was kind enough to humor me) not because I have a love of silver mining, or old western towns for that matter, but rather because my beloved Mark Twain once walked those very streets as a reporter (and then later as editor) for the local Virginia City newspaper The Territorial Enterprise! Can you believe it?!? Isn't that so cool. I read all about that part in his biography, and it was so neat to be able to see all the places that he actually spoke about.
Not only that, but there is a small museum in the basement where the newspaper was published, and where Twain actually worked, ate and slept (among other things)! I had to go by myself because no one else was interested (I think they hit up the saloon:) but I didn't mind at all.
I normally am not one to get all excited over celebrities (alive or dead) but I will always and forever make an exception for Twain. Besides being my favorite author (along side of Ayn Rand), I also admire the sort of life he lived, the examples he set forth publically (equality for all races and women), AND his sense of humor and irony, which I find match my own perfectly. For all these reasons I was SO excited to see where he worked (for a short time), to walk down the streets that look very much the same as they did when he himself wandered them.
I don't understand believing in God or gods, but I do understand the idea of a pilgrimage, to a special place. For some it's Jerusalem, for me it happens to be Virginia City, Nevada. I guess I've always been a little quirky like that.
I'll never really know Mark Twain of course (Samuel Clements actually), but much like I felt when I was in France visiting my grandmothers childhood home, I feel a little closer to him anyway now that I've been where he once was, now that I've seen what he once saw.
He feels a little more real, a little more like a real man and that makes me happy.
Here are a few photo's from around Nevada City, some from inside the Mark Twain Museum, and some from the cemetary on the edge of town.
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