My sense of time and history rose and fell as I stood with Donna Cossette deep in the desert outside Fallon, Nevada. The flat, hard-packed landscape spread out before us, just as barren as it was 3,500 years ago. In the distance, mountains stood like sentries, keeping watch, as they have for centuries over this sacred basin between the Rockies to the east and the Sierra Nevadas to the west.
Only the wind and our own voices broke the silence. “Out here, I hear stories, I hear the songs, I hear the families,” said Cossette, a member and former chairwoman of the Northern Paiute tribe and registrar of Fallon’s Churchill County Museum. As we looked out on the expanse of rocky brown terrain, she told me some of those stories, which transported me back thousands of years. Cossette choked back tears as she talked about all that has happened since then, how traditional ways of life have been discarded, people have been displaced, ancient spiritual sites have been destroyed. It was a somber, heartfelt, powerful moment.…
… Then fighter jets, practicing maneuvers from nearby Naval Air Station Fallon (home of the real Top Gun) roared overhead and yanked us right back to the present.
