Dotti Cullen displays the quilt she donated to the Nevada Commission on Tourism. Photo by Steve WoodburyRecently a delightful woman and her husband dropped by the Paul Laxalt Building—home of the Nevada Commission on Tourism and Nevada Magazine—with a charming quilt and a story to go with it.
Dotti and Ray Cullen told us how, about a dozen years ago, Dotti’s brother and sister-in-law, Fred and Debbie Halverson, and their young boys, four-year-old Christopher and eight-year-old Kim, joined Dotti and Ray on a trip across Nevada from their home in Fernley. The Halversons live in Washington, D.C., and Dotti was afraid that Nevada couldn’t compete with the attractions of our nation’s capital.
After much thought, she said, “we decided we’d do a Wild West adventure. Surviving Highway 50—that was our idea.” Dotti translated the story of their two-week, event-filled trip across the center of Nevada into an award-winning quilt.
Riding in a pair of RVs, the adventurers first camped at Lake Lahontan, where they swam, roasted marshmallows, and hiked to a rise above the lake to look around, where the boys were excited to spot wild horses.
The Wild West theme became an American Indian adventure at Grimes Point Archaeological Site. Dotti and Ray planted two arrowheads for the boys to find. “Seeing the petroglyphs and finding the arrowheads—that was almost too good to be true for the kids,” Dotti told us.
Kim, a budding rockhound, was entranced to find rock shops in Austin, where the group stopped for lunch. To top the day off, they headed for Garnet Hill to hunt for garnets.
The Cullens and Halversons spent several days in Ely, where they rode the Nevada Northern Railway—the boys had never been on a train, much less one pulled by a steam locomotive—and visited Great Basin National Park.
Dotti said her Eastern visitors were constantly struck by the vastness of Nevada, its miles of empty highway, the salt flats stretching away to the horizon, the big sky, and the view of millions of stars at night.
As Dotti laid her quilt on a table in the Nevada Commission on Tourism meeting chambers, she told us how the Wild West adventure gave her the theme for the quilt, which she worked on from May until mid August of last year. She pointed to the quilt’s nine fabric “postcards” depicting stops along U.S. 50. She lifted up each one, showing the “journal entry” which tells the story of that particular part of the trip.
A member of the Truckee Meadows Quilters, Dotti submitted her “Postcards Over the Edge from Nevada, an American Adventure” to the guild’s 2007 themed quilt competition. She won first place and the Judges Award.
As we marveled at Dotti’s needlework skills, she offered to donate the quilt to the Nevada Commission on Tourism. It didn’t take us long to respond in the affirmative—her work is a unique illustration of Highway 50’s many attractions rendered in exquisitely executed fiber art.
Dotti’s quilt now hangs in the lobby of NCOT’s offices, next door to the Carson Nugget on North Carson Street in Carson City. She invites everyone, she says, “to take my family’s journey across the state by lifting the postcards and reading the messages underneath.” —Joyce Hollister
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