The last three months comprised the longest consecutive period I'd been away from Reno-Sparks in my adult life. And when the plane from Las Vegas bumpily landed at Reno-Tahoe International last Thursday, I found that my hometown hadn't changed much.
The air's still smoky. The daytime weather's still hot, but not overwhelming. The nighttime weather's still luxuriously crisp. And road construction is still freaking EVERYWHERE.
True story: I was heading from the Steamboat area, where my parents live, to a friend's house in northwest Reno Sunday night. The two main routes -- the freeway through the Spaghetti Bowl and McCarran Boulevard -- are unbelievably messed up, so I decided to be "smart" and take the freeway to Plumb Lane, at which point I'd head west until I hit McCarran. But there was MASSIVE DISGUSTING CONSTRUCTION ON PLUMB LANE, TOO. Construction is everywhere! You can't escape it! It's like taxes!
And while I am in a snit, why and the hell do they have to have the entirety of McCarran from Fourth Street to Kietzke Lane messed up and restricted to one lane in both directions? I am sorry, but there is NO LOGICAL NEED to "work" on that much road at once. I realize I am not a trained highway traffic engineer -- I am a trained humor columnist (check that -- nobody trained me, which is probably obvious), but that's beside the point.
OK, now that I've gotten that off my chest, back to Reno. Yes, not much has changed, but one thing was different: The vibe. If I may be serious for a moment, being dropped into the Truckee Meadows after some time away, I realized: There's a real divisive, contentious feeling around the Biggest Little City these days.
It was strangely weird, a juxtaposition of ideologies. Duh, you say, there's an election coming up, and that does explain much of it. In particular, the division was apparent in two ways. I'll call it: trenches and gays.
First, the gay thing. I attended many of the gay pride festivities this weekend, and had a jolly good time. The parade, while small, was certainly interesting (I especially liked the part where a train came through about four entries into the parade, holding up things for five minutes or so; score one for trench proponents.) Wingfield Park was filled with a good, fun, free feeling. It seemed like here, in this small Western city just a smidgen into the new millennium, people were finally concluding that gays and lesbians are people who deserve to be treated the same as everybody else. Not a single protester was there. Not one.
But after I left the park, I started to see them: The Protection of Marriage signs. They're everywhere -- in either English or Spanish -- and they have that lovely picture of the newlywed couple on it, smiling. If only it were that simple. No mention of gays or lesbians adorn the signs, but each sign represents the large number of people in Reno-Sparks who do NOT believe that gays and lesbians deserve to be treated the same as everybody else. No protesters were at Reno Pride, true. But they're out there. Prejudice is everywhere.
Then there's the trench. Some people want it. Some people don't. And there's no room for compromise between these two groups. The pro-trenchers say that the protesters are whack jobs who want to keep downtown divided. The protesters say the pro-trenchers are greedy businessmen who want to ram the project down the throats of the public. Both sides have some points; both sides are a little full of it, too. And it's defining this election.
As I got on the plane to return to my current home of Las Vegas (I had to go back because, one, I had work, and two, Michael Bolton's coming to Reno and God knows that his music should be avoided), it really hit me. The Biggest Little City that I love so dearly is badly divided, in many different ways. Yeah, that happens to cities, and let's face it, a little healthy division and contention is a good thing. It can lead to positive change. But this goes beyond healthy division. This was a bad vibe -- one that has me worried about my hometown
Jimmy Boegle is a fifth-generation Nevadan who wonders why a gay bar would play Eminem music. His (Jimmy's, not Eminem's) column appears here Tuesdays, and he can be reached via e-mail at jiboegle@stanfordalumni.org.