Battleborn

"That's what I prayed for then: divine preservation of something I would never understand, the safeguarding of something I'd already lost."

"Everything I can say about what it means to lose, what it means to do without, the inadequate weight of the past, you already know."

Claire Vaye Watkins

Battleborn

Nevada is a strange state. Its large and beautiful, made up of basin and range as the state is slowly stretched apart. It's dry, held in the rain-shadow of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Most population groupings are small, spread out, based on mining, with exceptions in Reno and Las Vegas. The Comstock lode put Nevada on the map, the civil wars need for silver making it a destination. It is a strange place. The Sagebrush Insurgency experiences a large amount of support, Manson was able to convince others to follow him into the hills. It is a fascinating and often overlooked state in the rush to get to booming California and whatever happens in Vegas is supposed to stay there, though it seldom does. 

Nevada is the the theme of Claire Vaye Watkins (who also wrote Gold Fame Citrus) collection of short stories, Battleborn. It is a wonderful, dark collection that speaks on themes of desperation, isolation, and loneliness.  Each story is different, some taking place in present day, either in the big cities or out in the rural wilderness, while others take place in the past, during the settling of the state when people considered it a vast and dry desert to be crossed on their way to the mountains full of gold. I loved it. Her characters are diverse, from men seeking their fortune to whores at a brothel outside of Vegas, an old rock hound to college kids fleeing Reno for the weekend. She changes voices flawlessly, and does an incredible job conveying what is happening in the characters heads. 

One of my favorite stories is "The Diggings," which follows two brothers in the eighteen hundreds as they travel west to the mountains to search for gold. It bluntly shows the hardships that they experienced, which is so incredibly different from the glorified image we have of the settling of the west today. It shows the poor living conditions, the racism (mostly against the Chinese and the Native Americans), and how the greed drove people to do terrible things. The main character, Joshua, is often the voice of reason, and his kindness and realistic view of events was a fantastic contrast to the surroundings and drove home how cruel and brutal it was.

This collection was fantastic. Every story was well done, the characters all well rounded and complex, the storytelling beautiful, and the prose fantastic and gripping. I highly recommend it.

It was strange reading, though. I lived in Nevada when I was little, and I remember many of the places she talked about, the roads over the passes, the small towns of Beatty and Verdi, the mines out at Battle Mountain. I remember the places, but I was too young to really see some of the dark things that happened, to see the effects of drug and alcohol problems, the fall out from the mining. It is a beautiful place. It still feels empty out in the middle of the state, unlike most of the rest of the country. It is fantastic.