Late in the evening in back-road America you tend to pick the motels with a few cars parked in front of the rooms. There's nothing less appealing than an empty courtyard, with maybe Jeffrey Dahmer or Norman Bates waiting to greet you in the reception office. The all-night clerk at the Lincoln motel (three cars out front) in Austin, Nevada, who checked me in around 11:30 pm last week told me she was 81, and putting in two part-time jobs, the other at the library, to help her pay her heating bills since she couldn't make it on her Social Security.

She imparted this info without self-pity as she took my $29.50, saying that business in Austin last fall had been brisk and that the fifty-seven motel beds available in the old mining town had been filled by crews laying fiber optic cable along the side of the road, which in the case of Austin meant putting it twenty feet under the graveyard that skirts the road just west of town.

Earlier that day, driving from Utah through the Great Basin along US 50, famed as "the loneliest road," I'd seen these cables, blue and green and maybe two inches in diameter, sticking out of the ground on the outskirts of Ely, as if despairing at the prospect of the Great Salt Lake desert stretching ahead.

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