After a run of nights in either a camp cabin or yurt, I was grateful for a hotel room when we reached Nevada, even if a big part of our stay in Elko would be hiking in the nearby Ruby Mountains.
How many times have I blown past the mountain range on my way through Nevada and not stopped? Countless. Even though I’ve heard about “The Rubies” for years. Named for the garnets found there by miners looking for gold, the Ruby mountains also contain dozens of Alpine lakes, 11,000’ peaks, meadows, streams and forests. While my current residence on a pancake-flat island might fool you, I love inclines, especially if they lead to some treeless zone.
We hiked up Thomas Canyon in Lamoille Canyon, along a creek and through several fields of wildflowers and were rewarded with gorgeous views of the surrounding mountains. Metamorphic rock, granite spires, glaciation.The Ruby Mountains reminded me more of the Sierra Nevada, a similar result of thousands of years of compression and lift. The area was relatively untrammeled, too. While the campground at the trailhead was full, we crossed paths with very few other hikers.
What to do with a free night in Elko after hiking for several hours? It seemed like a good time to go see “Barbie”.
For better or worse, Barbies were an essential part of the imaginative play space around my house. We had Barbies, a Skipper, and a couple of other Barbie-adjacent dolls handed down to us from our slightly older cousins along with assorted clothes and shoes. My Barbies kept company with a Fisher Price boat with crew and, like us, played outside a lot. My friend Sally had Barbies, too, and I have vague memories of us bringing them along with us to one another’s houses. Eventually, I had a phase where I wished I looked like Barbie, which seemed an impossibility … and was. And while Barbie’s impossible proportions supported the “Barbie sets unrealistic beauty standards' ' criticism (and likely didn't help my later struggles with body image and eating), I mostly remember Barbie dolls fondly. So decades later in Nevada, I changed into the one pink thing I’d packed for our trip, and we headed to the Elko 6.
There’s so much that’s been written about “Barbie” the movie — which I read leading up to actually seeing it so my experience was a little spoiled — I don’t have so much more to add. I love that Greta Gerwig got to make a wild, wide-reaching and fun — if often contradictory — movie. While “Barbie” points out the consumerist loop so many of us are stuck in and perpetuates that loop all the same, I love that Gerwig uses it as an opportunity to illustrate what patriarchy is and does so clearly (I imagine the movie will likely send a lot of people looking up the definition of both “patriarchy” and “cognitive dissonance”). I love that it features the Indigo Girls’ song ‘Closer to Fine’ and skewers a horribly sexist Matchbox Twenty song. What I most loved about “Barbie” though, was Kate McKinnon’s “Weird Barbie”, her status the result of being played with too hard, and how her brokenness ends up being the key to healing.
The day before I went to see “Barbie”, the passing of Sinead O’Connor was the big cultural headline and I couldn’t help thinking of her as I watched McKinnon’s scenes. There’s been a huge outpouring of appreciation for O’Connor in the wake of her death which is both well-deserved …and maddening. A fearless Weird Barbe who was ahead of her time and so right about the injustices she called out, it's frustrating to see O’Connor venerated so publicly now that she’s no longer alive to receive it.