May 9, 2009 Crys­tal Bay Club, Crys­tal Bay, Nevada
Moon­al­ice poster by Chris Shaw

Accord­ing to Moon­al­ice leg­end, today, May 9, is National Train Day. It is the day we cel­e­brate the romance of the rails, and espe­cially the Moon­al­ice tribe’s con­tri­bu­tions. It all began with the 15th cen­tury genius Leo da Vinci Moon­al­ice, who con­ceived of the first loco­mo­tive. Three hun­dred years before James Watt demon­strated the steam engine, Leo sketched out a rail-based trans­porta­tion sys­tem. Sci­en­tists who built mod­els from Leos draw­ings dis­cov­ered the bril­liance of his work, but also a few lim­i­ta­tions. The hemp-fired boiler pro­duced enough energy to move a two-car train, but the fur­ther you went, the more lethar­gic the engine got. And it demanded more and more fuel. Appar­ently, Leo’s hemp-fired boiler got the munchies.

Accord­ing to Moon­al­ice leg­end, the tribe made many other con­tri­bu­tions to the rail­roads. Box­car Tilly was the very first hobo. She passed out in a box car near Bal­ti­more in 1840 and woke up 40 years later, hav­ing missed about 150,000 miles of travel, plus the Civil War. But no one made a greater con­tri­bu­tion to devel­op­ment of rail travel than Sir Humi­dor Moon­al­ice, the Eng­lish tribe mem­ber who invented both the smok­ing car and the refrig­er­ated box car, bet­ter known as a “reefer”.

Accord­ing to Moon­al­ice leg­end, a Moon­al­ice matri­arch named Red Queen Moon­al­ice ruled here in Crys­tal Bay in the 19th cen­tury. Red Queen was a great vision­ary — she saw Crys­tal Bay as a cen­ter for (shall we say) a highly evolved form of Moon­al­ice cul­ture. When white peo­ple first came in 1848, Red Queen rec­og­nized the threat to tribe’s way of life. So she made up some line of bull that there was gold near Sutter’s Mill. Before you knew it, the white guys grabbed their shov­els, bought some Levi’s, and took off. The next time the white guys showed up, about twenty years later, she made up more cock ‘n’ bull about sil­ver near Vir­ginia City. Boom. The white peo­ple took off again. By the time a third wave of white peo­ple came, though, Red Queen had passed the man­tle of lead­er­ship to her son, Two-A-Clubs Moon­al­ice. Two-A-Clubs was a few high cards short of a deck, and didn’t appre­ci­ate the nuances of his mother’s strat­egy. He told the next wave of white peo­ple that there was no more gold or sil­ver, but they could find low tax rates and nice casi­nos in state of Nevada. And so the white peo­ple stayed forever.

Accord­ing to Moon­al­ice leg­end, today is the 149th birth­day of JM Bar­rie, author of Peter Pan. The tribe has no idea what Bar­rie was tak­ing when he first wrote Peter Pan, but we want some!!!!

Accord­ing to Moon­al­ice leg­end, May 9 is also the 141st birth­day of Reno. The com­mu­nity is actu­ally much older, but the name was changed on May 9, 1868 by Charles Crocker, con­struc­tion super­in­ten­dant of the Cen­tral Pacific Rail­road, who appar­ently antic­i­pated the cre­ation of National Train Day and decided to cash in.

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