“Expect to find the worst desert you ever saw and then find it worse than you expected.” —John Wood, 1850

I’m in a room with two queens on the 14th floor of the J Resort Casino. Connecting to the WiFi, I see a network called BitchesMakeMyMoney. Apropos of Reno. I flew in to pick my dad up from the emergency room, where he was transported from Winnemucca to undergo emergency dialysis. Earlier in the year, DaVita, a company that posted a profit of three billion dollars, closed their dialysis center in Winnemucca. In doing so, they cut off access to the only dialysis machines in a 130 miles radius.

My 76-year-old father was given three options, move; drive; or hook up to a machine at home. He chose home but fumbled with the machine. He couldn’t get the help he needed. He called 911. The Director of DaVita’s Home Dialysis Program called to tell me he’d taken over my dad’s case. He spoke softly. Used the plural pronoun “we” to avoid personal responsibility. He said, “We don’t think your dad’s going to be successful on home dialysis.” Home wasn’t the best option, now it wasn’t an option at all.

“When you closed the Winnemucca facility, it meant my dad would die sooner than he had to.” I told The Director, wanting him to carry some of the weight of my family. “I know,” he said flatly. I felt that low buzz of desperation in my body. A familiar feeling of there being nothing left to do but expand my already overstretched life and take another shot, which I did. And the Director knew I would because he has a degree in economics and he knows that poor people from places like Winnemucca are the bitches who make his money.

I brought my dad to our room. He put on a fresh shirt and we went to dinner. He could eat through any tragedy, especially his own. Before the food came, things got tense between us. We hadn’t talked in a year. I thought he might throw his cup at me. He thought I might storm off and leave. We didn’t, even though we wanted to.

Back at our room, the smell of the freshly remodeled casino, once a local’s favorite, rebranded for Bay Area tourists, was an overwhelming mix of solvent, paint and cheap carpet. In the middle of the night, I woke to my dad sitting on the edge of his bed, crying. If I go home to die, will you be there for me at the end?” He asked, with the voice of a child. “Of course dad,” I promised.

The next day, I turned the car East on I-80 and drove my father home to Winnemucca. Out of Reno, the interstate is a four-lane divided highway, full of haul trucks and warehouse workers winding through the Truckee Canyon to USA Parkway.  There’s traffic until Fernley, then the blacktop opens up for impossibly long stretches of flat barren land, ringed by towering mountains. The wind can be so strong it blows cars out of lanes and tips semis over on their side.

It’s not a long drive, just a lonely one. The road follows the path of the California Trail, where hundreds of thousands of people traveled through the desert on their way to California. My father loved trail history. Beyond the glitz of the Donner Party cannibals, he loved the stories of sacrifice and misery. And so much was sacrificed in The Forty Mile Desert, which is not a real desert, but the distance it took to walk to the next potable water. A highway marker commemorating it calls it “a barren, waterless stretch of inhospitable alkali…”

Thousands died in The Forty Mile. People abandoned their belongings to lighten their loads. Lost in desert blindness, madness and death surrounded them. They hallucinated elephants. My dad looked out the window, holding these histories and his own, the son of a used car salesman and casino worker, who worked every day of the week and never got ahead, and said to himself as much to the desert, “It was the worst part of the trail.”

He lasted a week. A sheriff’s deputy came to mark the official time of death., T: 00.36, December 15th. The same day as my sister, three years before him. I was standing at the foot of his bed when a young woman from the funeral home knocked on the door. She was alone and not strong enough to lift my dad. Without speaking, my niece and I jumped to help her. There wasn’t enough room to put the stretcher parallel to the bed, so we drug him up and over onto it. I held his head to protect it from the railing. Together, we zipped him up, wheeled him out the door, and into her van.

As I waited for her to drive away, I looked up at the amber-colored utility light that gently warms my parent’s property from the penetrating darkness of rural life. A frayed American flag left in its pole too long, hung tattered in the wind. Desert dogs barked off beat in the distance, interrupting the silence of early morning. I thought about the hardships of the trail. The long history of my family trying to love each other through impossible circumstances.

Before I left for Reno, I wrote a message to myself: Don’t seek love…Be it. I didn’t want to. I had many grievances and I could have justified giving less. It wasn’t my intention…but I grew up when I took my dad home, put myself aside and loved him the way he needed me to. I lightened my load. Like my dad, I used to think the worst part of the trail was the desert. The barren, shadeless, sun burnt stretch we call home. Now I think it’s all the love we have to give, and don’t.