Jaci Dawn

But I sure looked when we crossed over the Cascades south of Mt. Shasta! Trivia: most California sightings of Bigfoot take place in the northern counties around Yreka, Weed, Alturas, Mt. Shasta and the coast range.

I did see a zombie in Medford.

She was hitch-hiking and I gave her a ride. True story.

It was an adventure for the pair of us. The whole whirl-wind trip to take care of the legal end of my dad’s estate operated under a phenomenon I like to think of as “Nevada Time”. Nevada Time is a slowed-down version of life. Tasks that normally take ten minutes to complete take thirty minutes to complete on Nevada Time.

The up-side of Nevada Time is that 90% of the people are nice. They’re nice because they are operating on Nevada Time and they have all the time in the world to be nice. You might as well be nice when you’re stuck in a time warp because you aren’t going to get out of it any sooner by being nasty.

Nasty was the bank in Reno. My brother had already been dealing with them. “Bring this, this, and this and that’s all you need.” So he brought everything and they said, “Oh, your sister has to be here in person.” “She lives in Portland.” “Sorry, she has to be here in person.”

At some point, banks forget what it is to be bereaved. I’ll let you guess which debit-card-charging bank we were dealing with.

Anyway, I showed up and we sat down with Richard at the bank. And he can’t connect the dots between Jack and John. My dad went by Jack. He signed everything John. His legal name was John. No one called him John. Our lawyer filled out the Trust paperwork using the names interchangeably, but she didn’t specify it was John “Jack”. Richard, the man at the bank, didn’t even know that Jack is a common moniker for John. He wanted two pieces of ID from both of us, too, and then he refused to complete the trust paperwork.

We drove to Ely.

That’s a five-hour drive from Reno.

If you ever make the drive on US Hwy 50, stop at the Toiyabe (TOY-yah-bee) Cafe in Austin and have an ice cream cone. Austin is a pretty cool little tourist stop.

Somewhere out of Eureka, there’s a Major Deer Crossing. I have never seen the Major Deer but he must be a pretty commanding buck because there are several signs warning drivers to watch for him. There are probably some Private Deers, too, but the signs don’t say that. Just Major Deer.

We stayed at the Jailhouse and had dinner at the Hotel Nevada. No photos, sorry. I think this is a case of familiarity: these places are so familiar to me that I forget to take photos. When I was a teenager, we would sneak into the Hotel and ride the elevator. It was the only elevator in town in the early 1970’s and it had an escape hatch on the top. If you pushed the hatch out, you could set off the alarm. The elevator would stop on the third floor, we’d dash out and calmly sneak down the stairs while security tried to figure out why the alarm went off in the elevator.

Ely is a real small town.

Friday we met with the lawyer and straightened out the John/Jack business. Then we went to the small bank branch inside the main grocery story and took care of setting up the Trust Account. They didn’t ask us for two pieces of ID: we were Jack’s kids and that was all they needed to know. The gal at the bank did say, “But of course he was Jack! We all knew him!”

Gotta love small towns.

We had to go to the DMV office to take care of a vehicle title. It took us 2.5 hours to find out we couldn’t take care of the title right then, but the Ely DMV Office got my signature on all the paperwork so I do not have to return to Nevada to sign anything.

While we were there, I noticed that the stream of people lining up behind us had to take numbers. I didn’t notice that we were supposed to take a number because 1) no one was in line ahead of us when we came in and 2) there was no ticket dispenser. The numbers were written in black marker on 5×7″ pieces of cardboard: 1, 2, 3, 4 – through 30. They recycle the numbers every day. Nobody got their nose out of joint when someone mixed up the numbers: Number 7 became Number 9 and everyone knew what order they came in the door without the numbers anyway.

They were very nice at Ely Nevada DMV.

My only question is: can we transport that office to Portland? They were so NICE.

The only problem was that they operate on Nevada Time and it took all of Friday just to set up the trust account and to get turned down at the DMV office. Actually, it took 2.5 hours for DMV to tell us we couldn’t straighten out the title issue.

I could have rounded up ten Bigfoots in that amount of time.

Tomorrow: more observations on small towns and Nevada Institutions.