Life in the Slow Lane

Kimberley McGee

Monday, July 19, 1999 | 11:48 a.m.

Take a picturesque trip to nearby Alamo, where the pace is slow and the livin' is easy

After-dinner walks down Main Street are the nightly entertainment.

Breaking news is the Pahranagat Valley High School's athletic teams' triumphs, or which resident needs care and home-cooked meals.

The nearby natural springs are the favored watering hole, and boredom is viewed as an opportunity for creativity.

The daily lives of the townsfolk of Alamo -- 93 miles north of Las Vegas, population 800, or so -- would make most city dwellers sigh wistfully over its gentle simplicity and ponder if they could ever leave the rush of the city for the rush of a country creek. Some do.

Very near Las Vegas is a lifestyle very different from Las Vegas.

Alamo boasts one grocery store (its proper name forgotten or confused with past operations) and one restaurant, the Del Pueblo Mexican/ American truck stop, out on highway U.S. 93, which skims the town. The nearest fast-food restaurant is 55 miles away. There is no movie theater, no bar, no malls.

Nestled in the lush Pahranagat Valley amid sprawling farms and homesteads, Alamo and surrounding towns were home to prominent Nevadans such as State Sen. Floyd Lamb and Las Vegas Sheriff Ralph Lamb in the '60s and '70s, and Joe F. Foremaster and his son, Lamar, an early dairy family in Nevada.

Alamo, once a pioneer settlement, is now home mostly to ranchers, Lincoln County employees and, mostly, refugees of the bright lights/big city life.

"There's things you miss out on," living away from a big city, says Dee Ann Hanson, a homemaker and Alamo resident for 13 years. "There's not a lot of businesses, not a lot of 'art' " venues such as museums and theaters.

But what Alamo offers, she says, is a throwback to the good old days when life was slower, streets were safer and the family, neighbors and friends were more connected.

Hanson takes daily trips with her four young children to Ash Springs, which is technically closed for repairs, "but not for locals," she says with a wink. Although the man-made structures are dilapidated -- a concrete building sits gutted at the curve of one large pool and concrete steps descend wildly to the mossy bottom of another -- the thousands-of-years-old shallow springs are still clear and lush with life.

The Hansons step over the thick, rusty chain that stretches across the open gates of Ash Springs and the yellow caution tape skimming the top of an aluminum ladder that descends into the 102-degree water.

The quartet of children scream and giggle as they swing from a rope hanging from a cottonwood tree, and little fish in the waters nibble at their toes.

"It's great here, there (are) really good schools," Hanson says. Each Fourth of July children gather frogs from nearby Crystal Springs, to race at the annual picnic. "It's a quiet, calm life."

Hanson's 12-year-old daughter, Robin, agrees. While floating in the shaded spring, she lists the games Alamo's children play on cool summer nights to stave off the ever-threatening childhood angst -- boredom.

"We play Steal the Flag, Tag, Sardines, (a reversal of hide and go seek) ... or we just sit and talk," Robin says. "It's a great place to be a kid."

After their hours of splashing, the family goes for ice cream at R-Place, a diner just a few paces down the road.

The good old days

Dell and Marva Sullivan raised their children and grandchildren in Alamo.

"Here, when the grandkids get lost for 30 minutes, you don't worry about it," Dell Sullivan, he town's former high school science teacher -- the only science teacher in town for many years -- says, standing in his garden next to 5-foot-tall corn rows and bushy tomato plants heavy with green fruit, with which many Alamo gardens are ripe.

The Sullivans remember when Alamo's streets were dirt, there was no post office and the small store had to pick up supplies in Las Vegas and larger area towns nearby to stock its shelves.

Las Vegas dairies "would bring our ice cream because they had room in the (their trucks) and it was refrigerated," Marva Sullivan says. "But that was the only thing delivered then, otherwise we wouldn't have even had ice cream."

Marva's parents owned the grocery store in the first half of this century. She now lives across the street and watches the town go by as they buy everything from barbeque sauce to tofu.

"We see just about everybody in a day," she says.

Her grandfather, William Thomas Stewart, helped plan the town's street layout in the early 1900s, although the street signs and addresses are now mostly missing or faded from house frames and street corners.

"The Eagle Scouts had a project to get a badge and went around numbering all the houses," Dell recalls. "We never use them, though. Don't have to, I guess."

His wife chimes in as the large, golden grandfather clock slowly ticks away in the corner of the immaculate dining room. "Most people don't know their address. We have ours taped to the inside of the kitchen cupboard!"

Instead, Alamonians use post office boxes where they not only pick up their mail, but also visit with neighbors.

Electricity came to town in the early 1930s, but the area farmers were reluctant to leap into the 20th century.

"The farmers were afraid of it," Dell recalls, smiling. "They didn't want it, but once they saw what it did, they said 'Yeah, I'll try that.' "

Two telephone lines were set up in the late 1940s -- one for the sheriff at the time, Ainslee Sharp, and the post office -- and one for the hotel, which had been the previous sheriff's office. But by the 1960s Alamo was catching up in technological sophistication, with televisions, phones and electricity in nearly every home.

In the last decade cable television came to the three-channel town.

"Cable, now that was a real (big) deal when that came in, oh, about eight years ago," Dell Sullivan says.

But the temptation of television doesn't keep this town from indulging in life's little pleasures that make the most memories.

"If the streets are empty, well, then there's got to be a wedding, or a game or something happening," he says.

Not all fun and games

But there are a few boiling issues behind the lace curtains of Alamo's homes, mainly regarding the water on which the town depends.

Thirst-starved California and growing Las Vegas are poking around the rich water wells of the Pahranagat Valley, which could dry up Alamo like so many other pioneer towns of the past.

"Everybody wants our water," Dell Sullivan says. He also operates the area radiation monitoring station, which sits in the northeast corner of his green lawn. The government installed the white and gray, 4-foot square station to monitor radiation fallout from above-ground nuclear tests conducted in the 1950s at the Nevada test site just 50 miles away.

"It's to let people know what the radiation levels are," he says in a slow drawl. "But, it's not much radiation to worry about."

The only convenience that is really an issue in Alamo is the lack of nearby medical assistance.

"We are at a medical disadvantage," Dell Sullivan admits.

A practitioner's assistant cares for Alamo's immediate medical needs in a small blue building near the original schoolhouse, built in the early 1900s.

Many in Alamo, although concerned about the lack of readily available health care, say Las Vegas' Flight For Life helicopters, well, with a little help from their friends usually gets them through any hard times -- although plenty of the area's babies have been born on U.S. 93 on the way to the hospital.

Keeping the faith

The remote town has a very strong support network of people, made stronger by the sense that they depend on each other for their health, well-being and quality of life.

"We all know just about everything that goes on in everybody's life," Judy Spencer, Alamo's librarian, says. "If somebody is sick or if something has happened to someone in their family, we go over and bring them something to eat or make sure they were OK."

But the town is growing, much to the quiet chagrin -- and curiosity -- of some locals who have seen more unknown faces at the football games than in the past.

"We have, oh, 20 new families that have moved here," Spencer says. "I don't recognize some faces. But it's definitely grown some."

Her daughter, Jaclyn, 13, who helps out at the library, tired of moving books and happy for the rest, moves to the television and briefly watches her younger brother's cartoon videotape.

"We only get three channels and they are fuzzy," Spencer says. "So we have a lot of videos."

The town does have a one video rental store that doubles as a pizza place, The Center. Anja Bastian works at the quaint storefront eatery with three small white tables crowded by the window and rows of videos lined on metal shelves behind them.

"I am the resident alien," she says in a thick German accent, joking about the town's proximity to the Nevada Test Site and alleged alien site, Area 51, and the beginning of the "Extraterrestrial Highway," 30 miles north on U.S. 93. "I am from Germany, that's where I met my husband who is from here.

"It was quite a culture shock," she says about moving to Alamo a few years ago. "But I'm not a city girl. ... It reminds me a lot of small towns in Germany."

She wears heavy brown hiking boots to work and after she closes, around sunset, usually hikes to the popular Box Canyon, 30 minutes away on foot, which keeps her living happily in this western hamlet.

18-year-old Kayla Davis, one of the grocery store's checkers, says hiking and picnicking the canyon is one of many activities area teens do to keep them occupied on long summer nights.

"We get bored, sure," she says. "You have to be creative."

The pioneer settlement still shares wares -- medical needs, clothing stores, restaurants -- with nearby towns Pioche, Caliente, Panaca and Hiko. "But (for movies) we usually go to Vegas," Davis says.

For area entertainment, -- "We would have scavenger (hunt) dates, go fishing. One time we buried a time capsule -- we gathered magazines, a newspaper, gas receipts," she says. "And sports! Everybody here is into sports."

The blond-haired blue-eyed recent graduate of Pahranagat Valley High School plans to attend college in Cedar City, Utah, in the fall. Although she likes small-town life, a career and a "good-paying job" are not necessarily available in the Pahranagat mountains.

"Once you graduate, you've got to get out," she says. Davis plans to come back one day -- after she has made her mark in the world. Until then, "I don't know, I'll probably go whereever (a) good-paying job takes me."

And she knows she will be welcomed back with open arms to a town that never forgets.

Like Tara Washburn, who recently worked in Las Vegas as a certified nursing assistant until earlier this month when she came back to her roots in Lincoln County in which Alamo is situated.

"I left," she says, adding that most who grow up on Nevada's backroads usually return at some point. "But I came back. I think they all did."

Washburn says she doesn't miss the rush of the city. "I like the slow life, you don't have to worry about anything. You can take a walk at night and not feel (unsafe).

"I guess it's in your perspective of the word fun. I like just sitting in the yard with my (five-year-old) daughter."

She worries about a good-paying job -- she recently started waitressing at the Del Pueblo Mexican/American restaurant on the edge of town -- but for now she feels secure in what the future holds in a place where she knows family doesn't stop at the front door.

Many town folk say the town and its people are an extension of their family.

City dwellers may have other conveniences and freedoms -- rain or shine, any time, they can work, shop and dine. But the residents of Alamo say they enjoy a greater freedom: to feel safe and secure and to enjoy the finer details that make life worthwile without being distracted by superstores and megamalls.

"Sure, you are away from the malls, bigger business and all -- you can't just run to McDonald's with the kids," Tracy Clark, a new resident of Alamo who has lived in small-towns throughout Nevada, says. "But it makes you more family oriented; in a lot of ways you just have to be. You have to be together, you have to get along together."

The lifestyle is not for everyone, she says. The city amenities most take for granted are in short supply. That means just calm, easy living that "gears you towards family," Clark says.

Recently Clark's 9-year-old son, Joshua, wanted to take martial arts classes, but the questions "Where?" and "How?" arose.

Not a problem.

"I asked around and found somebody who knew self-defense (moves) and said they'd teach him what they know," Clark says.

JoAnn Able has returned to Alamo after many years in bigger cities, including Minneapolis and in Indiana.

She now lives in a travel trailer next to the home where she was born "right there on the living room floor," in the 1930's she says. Although the home is dilapidated, and the wood-slat floor now leans toward the cream-colored kitchen, it stands as a reminder to Able that this is her history.

"Oh, I've been all over but I came back here because people know me," she says. "I can live here, it's cheap and I will probably live here the rest of my life."

And the aging retiree knows if anything happens, the townspeople will be there to help her.

Nice and easy

On a typical day in Alamo residents talk to one another as they go about their business, not too worried about the time of day or where they have to be.

Two young men in ties and slacks take time out to shoot some hoops on a muggy afternoon at the high school.

"It's a lot like the South," says Elder Kenlon Clark, a Mormon missionary currently assigned to the Pahranagat Valley as part of his church mission. "Quiet, more polite, slower paced."

Knocking on doors in Las Vegas, he says missionaries are subjected to obscenities and hasty retreats. But traversing Lincoln County's small towns, they are waved in from the heat and offered cool beverages and polite chats.

His partner, newly transplanted North Carolina native Elder Jonathan Brunjes, agrees. "People here are nice, they invite you in. There's not so much rushing."

Overlooking the town, the old high school -- with it's large cottonwood trees out front cradling the 1920's brick building -- has been renovated as "The Annex," where any legal dealings within the Pahranagat Valley are taken care of, including for the towns of Hiko, Caliente, and Rachel.

Nola Holton was recently elected as the justice of the peace for the area. She doubles as the highway postal contractor for the State, driving 128 miles a day in her roundtrip trek to deliver mail to area ranchers. While most ranchers have cable and Internet access, sometimes the mail carrier is the only human contact, besides family, they have.

"They come out to meet you to mail packages, pass the time and visit," Holton says. "Sometimes (the towns are) so small they don't get a chance to have people stop over."

Holton has another postal contract out of Las Vegas which her husband runs during the week. On weekends he joins her and their teenage daughter, who still lives at home in Alamo.

As justice of the peace, Holton is in court one day a week and sets her own schedule the rest of the week -- something she couldn't do in Las Vegas.

Jim Michael, next-door neighbor of JoAnn Able, found Alamo when he helped friends move to the tiny town from Las Vegas. He retired there four years ago, "because it is quiet, friendly and peaceful."

The former casino worker lives a few doors down from the three-aisle grocery store and spends his days walking around town with his black mixed-breed dog, Goofy, who gets some attention by all who pass.

"It's a nice little community and they are putting in all kinds of new things," he says, pointing the cane he walks with to the top of the street where what's considered one of the largest buildings in town is under construction next to U.S. 93.

"We've got a grocery store coming up there and some (new) things along the highway," he says.

But as the sun goes down and Michael and Goofy head for his one-bedroom mobile home, he isn't concerned with the growth.

"It's a small town, (with) good people," he says. "It won't get too big."

And that's the way they like it.

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