Black Rock Desert is the stark landscape against which the book places Empire, Nevada, a company town whose subsidized homes, dependable factory wages, and conspicuously green lawns seemed to belong to another era. Its contrast between industrial security and open desert gives the setting its force; when the town’s closure was announced, residents faced the loss of both their jobs and their homes.

Geography and Industry

Empire, Nevada, lay at the desert’s edge, six miles south of an open-pit gypsum mine at the foot of the Selenite mountain range. Miners used blasts of ANFO, a mixture of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, to break ore from five terraced pits. The largest pit was half a mile across. Haul trucks carried sixty-ton loads of gypsum to the drywall plant on the town’s edge, where workers pulverized and heated the mineral to 500 degrees before forming it into wallboard used in homes across the American West.

The mine and plant gave the surrounding landscape an industrial purpose: the gypsum extracted from the desert became a commonplace material in distant homes. Yet the town itself occupied only a small, cultivated patch in the vast terrain. Beyond its lawns, Black Rock Desert extended unbroken to the horizon.

A Green Patch in the Desert

Past the factory, Empire’s single-story cottages followed four residential streets planted with cottonwoods, elms, and silver poplars. Many residents maintained lush lawns despite the arid setting. Seen from satellite images, the town appeared as a conspicuous splotch of green amid brown, barren land. That visual contrast registered both the residents’ civic pride and the distinct, company-supported order they had built at the desert’s edge.

The landscape also sharpened Empire’s isolation. The town was once marked on State Highway 447 by a two-story sign welcoming travelers to nowhere. With little beyond the settlement, residents made their own social life through block parties, potluck dinners, and Bunco games, as well as trips into the high desert to hunt deer, antelope, and chukar. Neighbors knew one another closely: doors were often left unlocked and cars parked with keys inside. That intimacy could feel secure, but it also meant that neighbors watched one another, whether or not they wanted to be watched.

The Town and Its Company

Empire was wholly owned by United States Gypsum Company, which made Sheetrock. At its peak, more than 750 people lived there; by 2010, its population had fallen to fewer than half that number. The company subsidized rents to as little as $110 for an apartment or $250 for a house, and paid for television, sewer, trash, and internet service. Factory mechanics could earn as much as $22 an hour, while equipment operators made somewhat less. For many employees, a day or two of work could cover a month’s rent, and living paycheck to paycheck was less familiar than it was in the world beyond the town.

This compact arrangement had a long history. Laborers established a tent colony at the site in 1923, and the mine worked a claim first established by Pacific Portland Cement Company in 1910. For decades, the town’s company ownership and isolation were bound together: the factory supplied livelihoods and services, while the desert made the settlement feel separate from the economic insecurity beyond it.

Shutdown at the Desert’s Edge

On December 2, 2010, that settled life was abruptly interrupted. At a mandatory community-hall meeting at 7:30 in the morning, plant manager Mike Spihlman announced that Empire was shutting down and that everyone had until June 20 to leave. He later recalled having to tell ninety-two people that they had lost not only their jobs but their homes. After the announcement, workers returned to the cold, overcast morning and to houses they would soon have to leave.

The shutdown transformed the meaning of Empire’s green island in Black Rock Desert. Its lawns and low-cost homes had represented an unusual measure of stability in a landscape otherwise associated with distance and exposure; now even the homes depended on a company that had decided to close the town. Elsewhere in the book, vehicle dwellers’ access to places to sleep is shown to depend on changing rules at parking lots and public lands, including restrictions and enforcement in locations far from Black Rock Desert. The desert is not identified as the site of those specific disputes, but the contrast underscores a broader tension in the book: open space may appear limitless, while the right to remain in any particular place can be conditional. In Empire, that condition arrived not as a gradual change in the landscape but as a deadline for an entire community to leave.