Virginia City

Jordan and I drove out to Virginia City today. My first impression was what you'd expect — the wooden storefronts, the saloon aesthetic, the whole cowboy-western thing. Fun, kitschy, fine.

But then I kept walking. More buildings, more bars, more antique stores, a fashion house or two. And the panels. There were historical panels everywhere, and somewhere in the middle of reading them I started to understand that this wasn't really a cowboy town. This was a mining town. The entire place was built on top of a massive underground operation — silver, opal, all of it — and the cowboy surface was almost incidental to what was actually happening here.

The museum — "This Is the Way It Was," or something close to that — laid it out completely. I saw diagrams of the shafts and pipes running under the town, the machinery that hauled the rock back up, the way people lived and entertained themselves down there and up here: the card games, the medicines, the maps. There was a whole civilization that existed mostly underground, and the town above it was just the part that got to have a face.

I couldn't stop thinking about what it must have been like to actually live there. Not as a tourist with an ice cream, but as someone for whom Virginia City was just... where you were. What that meant for your body, your days, your sense of a future. I kept romanticizing it, I know — that's the trap of a well-preserved historical town — but I couldn't help it.

Speaking of ice cream: Handal's. Four-flavor sampler. Strawberry, pistachio, mango, and oreo cream cheese, and honestly all four were good, which rarely happens with samplers. Jordan and I ate them outside and I was still half-somewhere-else, still imagining 1870 or whenever, while holding a waffle cone in 2026.

Then we drove to Katie's — Jordan's sister — for dinner. Her boyfriend Steven made ribs. They were genuinely amazing. Bob was there too, an old friend of theirs, and it was easy and warm in the way those dinners can be when you're not trying to make it anything.

But yeah. Virginia City kept pulling at me throughout. I'm still thinking about it now, what it was, what it asked of the people who built it. The town sold the fantasy of the frontier and underneath it was just labor, and tunnels, and silver.