Well acquainted with addiction, I avoided the casino for the first few months I was in Susanville. People mentioned it whenever the power went out, as though Diamond Mountain were the only thing in town anyone could count on. “The casino has a generator” was something I would hear often during the year I lived in Susanville. The subdued complex was perched on the ridge outside town, where the tall pine trees of the Sierra Nevada fade into the sagebrush of the high desert. The casino was the Diamond Mountain Casino, which looked a little like a roadside chain hotel. “The casino is the only place in town with power.

“We won’t have power tonight,” she said to me as she wrote down my credit card number. The desk clerk was registering guests-mostly firefighters from the state forestry department and from around the West-by candlelight. I pulled into the parking lot of the first motel I saw to ask about a room. People were walking the streets with camping lanterns. The fire had taken down the power lines that brought electricity through the mountains, and the town was completely dark. When I arrived in Susanville, late at night, the sky was raining firebrands and ash from a massive wildfire.

The only job I could find was teaching developmental reading and writing in Susanville, California, a remote mountain town in the Eastern Sierra that is known, if it is known at all, for the state and federal prisons nearby. Classes began in just a few days, so I threw clothes and a few books into my car and began the long journey that took me through the mountains and high desert of Nevada and California. As I drove the desolate stretch of Highway 395 that carried me north out of Reno, I tried to convince myself the isolation would prove restorative. Martin Hyers and William Mebane, Vegas 009904, 2008, color photograph.įor three humiliating months, I lived in a yoga studio behind my parents’ garage, in Los Angeles, while I was looking for work.

Susanville casino gas station