Our country is still amazing

A 10-day road trip through western U.S. states revealed the surprising, the familiar and the satisfying.

Holly, proprietor of the now-shuttered Silver Sage Saloon in Wyoming, has a family connection to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I’m on the left.

DENIO, Nevada — A tiny little community sprouted a long while ago in this northwest corner of the great gambling-liquor-and-legal-prostitution state of Nevada.

Denio, named for an early settler, sends a handful or two of children to its three-room K-8 public school. There’s no high school. If you’re in 9th through 12th grade, you typically move 100 miles to Winnemucca for school, or 130 miles away to a boarding school in Crane, Oregon.

What we noticed when we arrived at the Denio Junction gas station/restaurant/bar/gambling establishment was that the ground appeared to be moving. There were gigantic bugs everywhere. They resembled huge grasshoppers, and they were crawling across the parking lot and up the side of the building and up the wooden fence. They weren’t thick enough to be a carpet; you could dodge them pretty well, but enough of them were smooshed on the ground to indicate that not everybody was able to — or wanted to — sidestep them.

“Mormon crickets,” the waitress/hostess/manager told us when we asked. “They’ve never been this bad.”