History of Ring Around the Basin

I'll celebrate my first anniversary on Substack next week. Here's a bit of history about my newsletter.

Next week, I'll be celebrating my first year on Substack with Ring Around the Basin. The title goes back over a decade to a website site I produced beginning in 2010. I did it the hard way, by learning HTML and writing the code myself. I know. Anyone reading this is gasping in horror that I didn't use one of those click-and-drag website builders.

My programmer husband, Jeff, lifts his nose at people who are too lazy to write code from scratch. Rather than devouring gigabites of memory piecing together elements written by someone else, a web designer ought to take ownership of their work, writing elegant, functional code. Thus, they truly earn the title Web Master.

Yes dear.

It wouldn't hurt to expand my brain and control my destiny, right? Soon, I found basic HTML was actually fun. I could type a line of code placing a bold-faced, italic headline followed by perfectly justified text, then size a photo to fit squarely and neatly amidst the text. Taking advice from the instructor, I didn't bother with tables that scroll separately from the rest of the page. Keep it simple, Sweetie!

After several weeks of this process, ringaroundbasin.com was born. This title was a pun referring to the focus on the Great Basin where I've lived most of my life.

For five years, Ring Around the Basin pulled people into the quirky world of Nevada. Granted, it wasn't a huge following. Only about 250 clicks turned up consistently in the stats. Somebody out there was interested.

While one section of the site toured the Eastern Sierra Nevada along Hwy 395, another introduced readers to our earth-bermed Hobbit House in Truckee, CA. There was even a group of articles about how we succeeded, or not, at vegetable gardening at nearly 7000 feet. That section proved to be one of the more popular.

Another page, Nevada, was visited even more frequently. These articles shared our explorations of America's Outback and the people we met along the way.

Most of these pages were fairly static, not changing much after they were written. My Raves page, however, was a weekly journal where I wrote about an event or some idea the came to mind that showed positive happenings. Mainly I wanted to feed the right wolf and not dwell on negatives. It was a gift I wanted to give to my readers … and, truth be told, to myself.

Born in Salt Lake City before spending thirty years in California, I spent most of my life on the fringes of the Great Basin. I discovered that Nevada is filled with people who also live on the fringe: ranchers and buckaroos, indigenous tribal people, industrialists and miners, Burners and desert rats, wild horse advocates, California refugees, and Basques who still bridge between the Basque Country and their home in the U.S.

Nevadans, we soon learned, also cherish the values of the Old West. A yearly rendezvous in Carson City celebrates mountain man camps and crafts, Civil War weaponry including a very loud cannon, and local tribal dancers and artwork. Cowboy Fast-Draw competitions attract contestants from Europe and Australia once a year. The longest and toughest stretch of the Pony Express Re-Ride takes three days to cover the state every June.

It seems that if people have a special interest, they start an organization to foster a calendar of activities. Hot air balloonists, classic cars, racing plane and glider pilots, all have special events and/or businesses. Then there are the quilters and knitters, welding sculptors, painters, amateur radio operators, you name it, all find friends to keep them company. Many of these groups raise funds to support community needs or projects to improve life in general. Nevada is a state that supports its own. And the yearly event calendar often hosts several big events every weekend from April until the snow flies in December.

Strangely enough, this fly-over country is a yeasty place for writers, too. Robert Laxalt put Carson City and Basques on the map with his charming books. Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain while writing for the Territorial Enterprise and members of his family are buried in a Carson City cemetery. Painter Lee Deffebach appeared in my story about Tuscarora and Substacker Deon Reynolds displays his photographs taken throughout Nevada.

If you've ever visited Virginia City, you'll notice a distinctly libertarian aura. Their July Fourth parade celebrates lots of military groups, equine lovers, Old West re-enactors, and a plethora of quirky locals. Speaking of auras, this 19th Century mining town boasts an abundance of ghosts. Nothing better than a ghost tour to learn about the history of a town.

Many of these people and their activities filled the pages of ringaroundbasin.com and honed my writing skills over the years.

Fast WAY forward, Tonya Morton of Juke set up a Substack page for me after I sent her my story about Tuscarora. Over this past year, Tonya has included any of my works on her page along with other brilliant writers. Thank you so much, Tonya. I am forever in your debt.

Once I figured out how to post on this new publishing adventure, I decided to glean from my past works. That old website alone furnished tons of material for this new version of Ring Around the Basin. Memories flooded back as I reread the old stories. Tonya's generous gift jump-started my life. At 73, I was groping for purpose. Substack energized my waning ambitions.

In the stories I've posted this last year, you've met an artist whose summers of intense painting included dips in the Glory Hole; a young girl who rode her horse into the darkness for the Pony Express Re-Ride; and a little old lady shopkeeper who regaled us with stories about some of her ethereal customers. I've also posted a lot of my poems, some, such as Ladders: A Poetry Lesson inspired other writers to play with a form of poetry.

Ladders: A Poetry Lesson

Taking the original website off-line, I copied everything to my laptop where it languished for years. Reviewing this treasure trove, I found one of the first essays explained why it's important to journal about our lives.

Many of my Substacker friends encourage journaling as a means of collecting our thoughts and assessing our values. It's a method of therapy, a way to meditate upon what gives us joy and meaning. Journaling and sharing our writings speak to a need to record our lives for our own benefit as well as for our progenitors. Nobody wants to be invisible. And we want to tell our side of stories that may be misunderstood if retold by others.

Both versions of Ring Around the Basin have aided me in all these ways. Telling one's story is therapeutic. It forces the writer to look deep at old injuries or happy events. How did our family dynamics affect our personalities. How do the environment and social structures around us add to the information that bombards us daily from various media platforms?

That said, I hope my readers will take pen in hand or keyboard on lap to record their stories. Look around and see the beauty even in the ugly spaces. Focus on the tiny, wild world, the patterns of land and sky, the animals and the invisible people that brush our shoulders each day without notice. It's all quite fascinating.

A comment on a story series I recently posted, one reader said he had focused on his life of surfing in Santa Cruz and didn't know anything about the people who lived totally different lifestyles. I thought that was the best review of an article I could get. I achieved the goal of exposing life to others. That, to me is the point of writing or any kind of artwork: uniting us with stories.

As for revealing the Great Basin to others, most people believe to their cores that Las Vegas IS Nevada. In fact, a map of the lights across America at night will show this huge hole in the West. A Best Western desk clerk in Eureka told us that when she sent photographs of the local mountains and pinion forests to relatives in New Hampshire, they scolded her for deceiving them. "This can't be Nevada. It's too … pretty."

Indeed, it is. Nevada has many well-kept secrets tucked between the mountain ranges. Where there's an artesian spring or a streak of gold, someone may be living there. Or some remnant of American ruins can be found inside a circle of cottonwoods. Why were these people drawn to this bleak and formidable sink where the rivers disappear under the desert?

I strive to share some of these stories as well as others taken from along the Wasatch Front in Salt Lake City or Santa Cruz and Truckee in California. These are life stories, a memoir, written to record what I see or celebrate events and people who have taught me so many things during my seven decades. I hope I succeed at showing my readers there is really no such place as The Middle of Nowhere.

All photos and the watercolor in this piece are from Sue Cauhape.

If you enjoyed this essay, feel free to explore other essays, poems, and articles in the Ring Around the Basin Archive. Also, I really appreciate my readers’ comments and, if you really like my work, please upgrade to a paid subscription. Thank you.