It's desolate, arid country out here. Nothing much to see. Nothing much to do. Scrubby little knots of bone-brown brush and tufts of spiny desert thistle dot the landscape, which rises in slow-building slopes before descending down to flat patches of silty
playa. All around are the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and above that, like whitecaps on a dead blue sea, are sprawling puffballs of cumulonimbus clouds, still and magnificent. One of them takes on the form of a rampant Chinese dragon, belching fire from a toothy maw as the scorching, 90-degree sun punches through it like the atom-splitting white flash illuminating
Frenchman Flats, circa 1951.
According to my GPS, I'm standing dead-bang in the midst of Misfits Flats, Nevada, just outside of Silver Springs, six miles off IH-50 down a haphazard hardpan nightmare of a trail that barely earns the name Break-A-Heart Rd. ('Break-An-Axle Rd." is more apropos.) I'm roughly 30 outside of Reno, Nevada, proper, but it resembles nothing so much as
Cormac McCarthy's
The Road, minus the dread. In fact, it's almost peaceful.
This is where director
John Huston, during the summer and fall of 1960, shot several key sequences of his dead-or-dying-in-the-west masterpiece
The Misfits. There's nothing whatsoever to mark the historic cinematic event; no plaque, no signs, not even a calcified hoof-print in the dirt thin, shifting sands. But a sudden whip of nowhere wind bears silent testament to the ghosts that haunt this particularly uninviting stretch of Nevada range:
Clark,
Monty,
Marilyn,
Thelma Ritter,
Kevin McCarthy, and Huston himself.
