The next day (Tuesday) we had the second memorial for Dick, this one being his military funeral, out at the Northern Nevada Veteran's Cemetery near the town of Fernley, east of Reno.
I knew Dick had bought his plot out there. The last time I saw him he had told the story of making his daughter take him out there to check it out.
I drove there by myself in my rental car on Tuesday morning, arriving in Fernley almost two hours early. I wanted to make sure to get out there and have some time to unwind before the funeral started. I turned out to be a good decision.
Fernley is about forty five minutes on the Interstate east of Reno. In the old days of my college-era travels, this is part of the Interstate where you realize you are heading out into the vast barrenness of central Nevada, where the population centers are small and far from each other. Driving there always brings back primal memories from those days.
Fernley is now about as far east as the greater Reno orbit now extends. One feels one is at the edge of the earth. As I came off the Interstate, I recognized the Wal-Mart where seven years before, Ginger and I had parked in our rented truck, waiting for Okki and the others to arrive from the East, before cutting up the backroad to Burning Man. All of that seemed so far in the past.
My early arrival gave me a chance to park the car out where the road turns to dirt, becoming public land where I could stretch by legs. It was sunny but windy. I realized I had left my sunglasses in Arizona. I would probably be the only person there without sunglasses, I thought.
Out where I parked, on the north side of the interchange, past the truck stops, I could see about half a dozen other vehicles further along the road, a few them being RVs, and one being a sedan car with the windows all taped over. A couple women walked with their dog. I had stumbled into one of the outposts of the Nomadland world of America. It was not the first time.
After stretching my legs in the sun and the wind I drove along the paved road and found the veteran's cemetery, which was a little outpost of grassy-lawn civilization in the scrubland, sheltered by trees as a palisade windbreak.
In a way it looked terribly lonely, all by itself in the barrenness. But in a few minutes, after parking my car along the back part of the looping road, behind the memorial wall, I would change my mind. My early arrival gave me time to walk along the memorial wall, and see the names, vital dates, and service details of the men whose remains were interred there.
I didn't think it would affect me so much. I'd seen many war cemeteries. But knowing that they were about to put my great-uncle's remains in this place changed my perspective. I could see why he wanted to be here, amidst all these other men, with whom he shared the bond of being a veteran. He'd earned his way into here.
"These were the lucky ones," I thought to myself. All the dates here indicated men who had served in World War II or Korea, and who had survived, and been able to come home and have families, like Dick.
The cemetery is not big. It did't take long to walk up and down the wall, and feel the weight of the lives that were lived, and which were commemorated there. Soon I meandered down to the entrance and saw the people I had recognized from the day before, my extended family--Dick's family, as well as some of Dick's former employees at his court reporting firm, a couple women who loved him for the friendship he had given them over the years, and for whom I was a stand-in for Dick, offering my arm to both of them, one on each side, as we walked over to the ceremony.
They gave him the customary salute by salute. I felt such love towards the guys that were out there doing that for Dick, dressed up in their uniforms. What a privilege to get to do that.
Then we put his ashes in a box in the ground where there was a temporary marker where the stone would go in the lawn. I had thought things would be over then, and I was sad to see it all ending. But to my delight, Dick's son in law, the new patriarch, said we would all be meeting for a meal in Reno, at their favorite Mexican restaurant.
I was delighted to eke out some more fellowship. As I drove back to Reno, joyful at the thought of spending more time with these people I came to love so quickly, I could see the Sierra, snow-capped through the gorge of the Truckee River. I wondered what they looked like to Dick way back in 1957, when came out here by himself, and founded a life and a family. For a moment I forgot all about my own failures in life, to live a life anything close to that, and felt the beauty of it all.
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