"The land of peace, love, justice and no mercy."
Ever since I read about Bruce Springsteen flying out to Utah, buying a car, and driving around in the desert to take photographs with Eric Meola, I wanted to do the same thing.
I wrote this back in 2014, before embarking on a 3,000 roadtrip beginning in Los Angeles and following as much of the old Route 66 that still exists as far as Amarillo and the Cadillac Ranch. None of this ended up fitting into that trip, but I wrote about it anyway because I was happy to have the information and suspected other people might as well.
I'm publishing it here and updating it now to add a more recent investigation, because the kind of deep web searching I used to be able to do to dig these things out is no longer possible, and back when this post was on my old website, at least once or twice a year I'd get an email from someone who was planning their own roadtrip and was looking for these locations.
Ever since I read about Bruce Springsteen flying out to Utah, buying a car, and driving around in the desert to take photographs with Eric Meola, I wanted to do the same thing: fly out west and drive around with a camera to these kinds of places. I wasn’t nuts about the idea of sleeping on the hood of the car in a small town in the desert, but the idea of just showing up somewhere and driving around to see what was there was undeniably attractive. I wanted to see the same things that artists I respected were inspired by.
Fast forward a couple of decades. I’ve driven cross-country three times and seen a lot of these United States. But that trip Bruce and Meola took through Utah and the desert still loomed large in my legend. This would be stoked by the release of the Promise box set, and then Streets of Fire, Eric Meola’s book of photographs about that trip. I promised myself that one day I would sit down and put it all together and try to plot out their itinerary. In the winter of 2014, I began planning my own western roadtrip and wanted to see if I could get to any of these locations.
Bruce and Eric started in Salt Lake City, and drove across 80 to Reno. So most of the iconic locations of these images are actually in Nevada and not in Utah, as I originally had in my mind from the bits and pieces that had been told in stories over the years. I am not going to take you through my entire research process, but just some of the highlights:
VALMY AUTO COURT
This has been replaced by Valmy Station. Here's what it looks like today.
How do I know it’s the same place? I looked up the addresses of both the old and the new one and they are identical.
Here’s another great image of the building in the 80s, in daylight and in color, not long before they tore it down.
BRENDA'S CAFE
I did a lot of web searches and was able to find a Brenda's Cafe in Lovelock, NV. That fit in with the basic routing of the trip. Knowing the city helped me find this photo, which is obviously the same place.
So now that I knew what it looked like, I needed to somehow find an old address record. In the course of my relentless online research, I found a comment thread under a photograph in which someone who claimed to be the daughter of the original owner of Brenda’s Cafe commented that it was now a Mexican restaurant.
Then, I looked up Mexican restaurants in Lovelock, NV and using Google Street View, compared these two photos with every address until I found this location. (You are either very impressed at this point or very frightened.)
THUNDER MOUNTAIN
“Along the highway there was this house....that this Indian had built from stuff he'd scavenged off the desert and out in front he had this big picture of Geronimo and over on top it said ‘Landlord’ and he had another sign, this big white sign painted in red, it said, ‘This is the land of peace, love, justice and no mercy’...it pointed down this little dirt road that said ‘Thunder Road.'”
The photo above was taken from an early version of the website for a place called Thunder Mountain Monument that I found at some point in the late 90s/early 00s when I randomly (as one does!) did a web search on the phrases in that intro. It popped up and my eyes got very, very wide. How many times have I listened to that intro? IT WAS A REAL PLACE.
The website for it is gone, but it's on the Wayback Machine and you can still poke around. I had found this image ages ago, back when you could find weird and cool stuff all over the internet, and that's how I even knew this place existed. Now there are tons of articles about it and the University of North Dakota has a collection of original photographs online.
In 2014, I literally went through every photograph I could find of Thunder Mountain and at least in 2014 the sign was no longer there or my trip would have had a much different routing.
In 2019, I had to go to Jackson Hole for a conference for my day job at the time, and I flew into Salt Lake City the weekend before, rented a car, and went to visit Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty and Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels. But what I also really wanted to do was go find this location.
In Eric Meola's introduction to his book Streets of Fire, he talks about how he and Bruce flew into Salt Lake City, rented the car you see in the photo above, and drove 80 towards the Salt Flats. After Spiral Jetty, I drove 80 towards the Salt Flats, planning to overnight in Wendover, UT, and drive to the Sun Tunnels first thing in the morning.
We had come to a place in Nevada marked Unionville on the map, just to the west of Battle Mountain. Nearby, there was an abandoned one-room schoolhouse and a cabin where Mark Train had lived while writing Roughing It. I took some photographs of the dirt road, and of Bruce driving towards the camera as the sky began to darken. But Bruce was restless, so we left the road at Unionville and grabbed a bite to eat at a nearby roadside cafe.
When we got back on the road, the sky had gone black and the wind had come up. I photographed some more, including a shot of Bruce in front of the car, leaning on the hood--a long, thin, dusty dirt road going off in the distance behind him, disappearing over Battle Mountain. - Eric Meola, Streets of Fire
If you look at a map, it's not that far (when using the Western US definition of "far") from Wendover to Valmy, UT, and you have to pass through Battle Mountain to get to Valmy. And to get to Unionville, you're going to pass through Imlay, which is where the Thunder Mountain Monument was located. (Because I am deeply unwell, I have all of this still saved in a Google Map, and it's apparently now called Lightning Mountain Monument and a lot of the buildings are still there.) I had done my research and knew that the one-room schoolhouse and the Twain cabin were basically piles of boards at this point but man, I just wanted to stand on that road in that shot above for a little while. (Still do.) But I couldn't do everything, so I made some choices. I'll get back there some day.
