“I wasn’t sure what I had found, but I knew it was
Nevada,” says Jon Christensen, as he drives the so-called
Extra-Terrestrial Highway in eastern Nevada. The road flanks Area
51, the top-secret military facility where scientists are rumored
to be studying captured aliens.
Originally a series on
Nevada Public Radio, Nevada Variations is a collection of 17
eight-and-a-half minute audio profiles from each of the state’s
counties. Christensen, a longtime HCN contributor and former Nevada
resident, says he wants to portray the land beyond the cities as
something besides a “great, black void.”
With each story,
Christensen touches on a larger issue for the Silver State and the
West as a whole. He literally gets down to the bottom of Yucca
Mountain, the slated burial ground for the nation’s high-level
nuclear waste. Christensen also explores historic mining towns that
are reinventing themselves, visits the Burning Man Festival site in
the Black Rock Desert, and meets the oldest-known living tree on
the planet, the bristlecone pine.
The best segments
introduce us to places we normally rush by, such as Rachel, Nev.,
where Christensen downs an “alien burger” while listening to
locals’ spacecraft stories. With every interesting local and
landscape he encounters, Christensen shrinks “the void” for his
listeners.
Listen to Nevada Variations on
www.knpr.org/nevadavariations/list.cfm, or link to it from
www.hcn.org/radio.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Hit the audio road in Nevada.
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