by Susan Clark

Created on: April 17, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

My story is two stories really. Two stories that collided with each other, as fate would have it.

I am a Californian who grew up hearing nothing but negative things about our neighbor to the east, Nevada. "It's ugly." "It's nothing but desert." "It's hot and dry, with no trees, no people, nothing to do but gamble." Truthfully, I didn't even stray across the border until I was in my 30's, and my husband and I took a cross-country motorcycle trip. It was then, that I completely unexpectedly-fell in love. It was springtime, and the mountains were awash with wildflowers. I loved the way you could see dirt roads scratched into the earth, winding into infinity, I loved the highs and the lows, like a Hudson River painting-the mountains so high, and the valleys so low, I loved being two hundred miles away from any settlement, and hearing ghosts and spirits whispering to me from the trees, I loved passing the markers of the "Pony Express Trail" and still seeing the faint path through the sagebrush, stretching to the horizon. It felt ancient to me, pure, undiluted, beautiful, and existing in an entirely different dimension than California.

When we traveled the winding one lane road for miles into the mountains, hovering above gaping precipices, a sense of excitement like none other, filled my soul. When at last we arrived in the quaint, dusty little town cradled by the hills-I truly felt I had come home.

Virginia City was the icing on the cake for me. To the untrained eye, it might appear to be just another old western town, preserved for the tourist trade. But it was so much more than that. The Opryhouse, in all its tattered splendor, the 4 stories tall, foreboding, 4th Ward School, the ramshackle houses marching up the steep hills, then, barroom after barroom, each a museum in itself, packed with dusty photos, mementos, and voices, the cemetery out on a point, windblown, filled with dead trees, bent iron, and history. And the surrounding hills dotted with the cavernous holes of long dead silver mines. I am not ordinarily a spiritual person, but here in Virginia City, I felt ghosts-EVERYWHERE.

My second story is that of a little family living in Daly City California in the 1920's. The parents, John and Frankie, Archie 9, Cheerie 7, Jack 6, Leroy 5, Robert 2, and Pearl 1. Diphtheria claimed the lives of Frankie 28, and her daughter Cheerie, 7. Robert was my father.

My father never talked about his childhood, and we kids knew better than to ask about it. My Grandfather remarried,

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