The Shoe Tree of Middlegate, Nevada

Fredda Stevenson sized up the despondent young man who’d slunk into her remote watering hole on U.S. Highway 50. He was thirsting for beer and, as Stevenson learned, advice.His new bride, he grumbled, had blown all their cash on slot machines in Reno. Then they’d sped east through 100 miles of sagebrush and hills as dark and lumpy as mud pies. They camped down the road from Stevenson’s bar, near a large cottonwood tree that had inexplicably thrived in Nevada’s badlands. The couple started qua...