AUSTIN, NEVADA

By Walter Kirn

In Austin, Nev., a rickety mining town whose gold ore was exhausted years ago, junk-shop proprietor Leo Wolfers is sweeping up a pile of window glass shattered by a mysterious sonic boom. Wolfers is used to the screaming fighter jets that take off from nearby Fallon Naval Air Station, but he says the plane that smashed his windows was no ordinary craft. "It was diamond shaped. It could rise straight up and hover. One of those planes they aren't allowed to talk about. Their pilots crash into mountains all the time, but the Navy just covers it up. It's all hush-hush." A hundred miles east in ("The Loneliest Town on the Loneliest Road in America"), Walter Cuchine heard news of the loud booms and set out a coffee can to collect donations for an antiaircraft gun. "Last year one concussion knocked a Senator off his podium here, but whenever you call the commanders to complain, they say, 'Did you get a tail number?' Of course not. Maybe if we were able to shoot one down, though..."

Mapped here under the big bold sky is America's Geography of Conspiracy. If Disney were to create a theme park celebrating American paranoia (Suspicionland U.S.A.), it might want to base the design on central Nevada. Tumbleweed stretches of empty highway roller-coaster over mountain ranges and down into salt flats, past ghost towns, federal prisons and legal brothels surrounded by barbed wire. In the sky, fighter-bombers execute mock dogfights and shoot laser-guided munitions at dummy air bases built from bales of hay. Gold mines--some old and haunted, some new and bustling--dominate corroded mountainsides, and the land in between is sagebrush open range populated by scrawny cattle and dotted with eerie bunkerlike structures with names like "U.S. Navy Centroid Facility." From the south, near the infamous secret air base known as Area 51, talk-radio guru Art Bell spreads news of UFOs and sunken continents. To the northwest, in the Black Rock Desert, hippies and cyberpunks gather by the thousands for their annual Burning Man Festival, an orgy of punk rock, spontaneous gunplay and off-road motor sports.

Nevada's Great Basin is a paranoid Holy Land, and no place is better suited for the job. Topography is destiny out here. It is the only region in North America where falling water has no outlet to the ocean (it lies trapped, then evaporates back into the atmosphere). The thin, spreading crust of the valley floors is notoriously unstable, agitated. Hot springs steam up through faults and fissures. Whirling dust devils dance across the flats. The mountain ranges are new, still rising, alive; perched on top of this tectonic tumult, the structures of civilization seem to teeter. The schools and supermarkets are surrounded, as often as not, by fresh-dug earth, and what's not being built is being shored up or razed. Just off Highway 50 the settlement of Frenchman--once home to a diner, a gas station and a motel--was purchased by the Navy several years ago and leveled to make a bombing range.

Sociology repeats geography. The Great Basin does not just trap precipitation; it is also a sinkhole for curious ideas. In the Salt Wells brothel outside Fallon, a group of buzz-cut Navy buddies are swigging tequila around a blazing fireplace. They narrate the day's maneuvers with swooping hand gestures while a giggling, shirtless young prostitute looks on. She seems unimpressed by the flyboys' classified briefing. At the bar, a middle-aged cowboy quietly raves about a plot to swamp Nevada in methamphetamine ("crank"). The cowboy doesn't want his name used (few people do out here), but he does want the alleged drug ring to know he's on to them. "I have a friend who personally knows the retired politician who's behind all this. And believe me, this politician's not some small fry. He's a national figure. That's all I'll say."

Manipulation by distant Mr. Bigs is an obsession here. Almost 90% of Nevada's land is owned and managed by the Federal Government--a distant imperial power to many locals. Ranching and mining are major industries, and both are feeling persecuted lately by certain cosmopolitan outsiders. In Eureka the taverns sell a T shirt bearing the words WRANGLERS: WESTERN RANCHER AGAINST NO GOOD LIBERAL ENVIRONMENTALIST S___HEADS. The pickup trucks sport a proud, defensive bumper sticker: IF IT WASN'T GROWN, IT HAD TO BE MINED. In a region where people's lives are dominated by forces beyond their power to influence--the swings of the metals market, the grazing policies of the Bureau of Land Management, the caprices of the U.S. military and the earth's seismic churning that underlies everything--paranoia may be not a pathology but a rational coping mechanism.

John Balliete leads the Eureka chapter of People for the West, a group whose aim is to open federal lands to ranching and "multiple uses." Balliete is fed up with Washington. "What it all boils down to is, Who controls my life--somebody from back East or someone like me from around here? Joe Blow from the city comes in here to 'preserve' things, and he ends up destroying the culture I grew up with."

Jim Gibbons, Eureka's Republican Congressman (his district is the nation's third largest and includes the whole state except for central Las Vegas), feels a little alienated himself. In town for a make-your-own-sub-sandwich get-together, he characterizes his job on Capitol Hill as a "David and Goliath" situation. "There's a cynicism about government out here because it's so far away," says Gibbons. "Every state has its believers in black helicopters, but our real problem is that the rest of the country sees us as a solution to its problems. Everybody wants to dump their waste here, but Nevada is not America's wasteland." When Gibbons half jokes that his district represents "the hub of the world, the middle of everywhere," a nearby constituent nods with no apparent sense of irony.

This double sense of remoteness and self-importance--of living simultaneously on the fringe and at the center of things--pervades the local mind-set. One explanation might be all the gold--gold, the traditional hedge against inflation, the currency of fear. As anyone who has seen The Treasure of the Sierra Madre knows, gold tends to fuel a peculiar cycle of euphoria, panic and suspicion. In Eureka, where a new mine is opening up, the hills around town are being graded and bulldozed in preparation for dozens of fancy new homes. Eureka's Cuchine fears the houses are a rip-off, a scheme by the mining conglomerate to sell real estate that it knows will be worthless when the mine's exhausted. "Seven years from now that whole hill might be deserted."

So much empty space to fill. Along Highway 50 the distance between towns is bridgeable only by marathon road trips and the most powerful AM radio signals. The big station out of Reno is KOH, which promotes itself with the slogan "From the High Sierra we take down the High and Mighty." The drive-time talk jock (out here it's always drive time) is the inflammatory Brian Maloney, who makes Rush Limbaugh sound like Alan Alda. Maloney tends to open his monologues with the question that prefaces most conspiracy rants: "Don't you find it interesting that...?" For Maloney, who preaches that President Clinton is an "agent of influence" for the Chinese, there seems to be no such thing as a meaningless coincidence or a truthful politician. When a caller nominates Charlton Heston for Speaker of the House, it is not a joke.

Back in Austin, surrounded by rusty mining tools and curling 1950s girlie calendars, Wolfers sweeps up the last few splinters of glass. "This is their playground." He looks up at the sky. "They come in here from out East, all full of beans, and do their loop-the-loops and smash things up, and then their superiors cover up for them. They don't want bad news to get out. We locals know, though." Presumably Wolfers is talking about the Navy again, although he never specifies who "they" are. In central Nevada, "they" might be anyone.