Earlier this year I drove through this area. Which is a big wad of nothing. I stayed overnight in Beatty, NV, a town of empty businesses, mobile homes, unpaved streets, a couple of small stores and the saddest excuse for a "casino" I have ever seen.

(After being treated less than indifferently by the employees of this place several times, I commented to a cashier that this was the rudest establishment I had ever been in. She said, "I don't have to take this!" and stomped off, leaving me trying to cash in my meager winnings at an empty window, staring at her back as she did something about 20 feet away. After a little while a man came over and took care of it. And out to my car I go.

I cannot find my keys. I look everywhere, I almost crawl around the entire goddamned place and I cannot find my keys. I sit in a chair for a while and ponder my options, which are down to one - go ask that dragon at the cashier's window.

I steel myself and walk up to the window and ask where the lost and found might be. "Here". Didn't look up. Have any keys been turned in, I enquire obsequieously? "No."

I stood there for a second, and the same guy appeared from a back room and said they had just been given to them, and handed them to me. I tipped him generously and slunk out.)

Anyway, I stopped in at one of the small stores. It was pathetic, but I bought some crackers and peanut butter. I asked the clerk what people did for a living around there.

She said they used to work in the mines, but they were closed. And then she added that many of the people in the area were single mothers. I didn't figure out until later what that meant.

They were refugees from bigger cities and other states where housing was far more expensive. They could live in Beatty relatively inexpensively.

I'll tell you how remote this place, which is near Yucca Mountain, is. To get a prescription refilled I had to drive 70 miles to the nearest pharmacy, in Pahrump. That's remote.

I think you could head 5 miles off the main road and leave all manner of nuclear waste on top of the ground and no one would ever notice it or come to harm.

Arf