Nevada's Culture Wars: City versus Country

The other day, I came across a short video I’d taken while on the road in rural Nevada.

I was riding in the front seat of a pickup truck driven by a redheaded wild horse advocate in the vast rangeland north of Ely. The sky was blue and dirt kicked up by our tires was chalky and brown. A country singer crooned on the radio.

The clip reminded me of how very much alive I felt at that moment. Now, as I look out the window of my home office on a hum-drum suburban street in Henderson, I feel comparatively trapped.

I'm not really unfettered until I drive north past Indian Springs on my way towards Beatty, the Amargosa Valley and beyond. Out in Nevada’s rural reaches, I never listen to music or talk radio. I reserve my senses to witness the basin and range as it passes by my window. 

It allows me time to think. And, lately, I’ve wrestling with a particular problem: 

Why is there such a cultural divide between Nevada’s cities and its wide open spaces? The two camps simply do not understand one another, and many times, it seems, they’re not even listening to what the other has to say.

This spring, I published “Outback Nevada: Real Stories from the Silver State,” a collection of newspaper stories I’d written over the last decade about rural Nevada and the people who call it home. The book is not written from the perspective of an insider, far from it.

Wherever I go, I remain an outlier, an urban journalist from Upstate New York who remains captivated by Nevada’s rural heart. No matter how many new casinos and subdivisions they build in Las Vegas or Reno, the outback is where the soul of this state lies.

I've begun to see things from a rural point of view.

Recently, I’ve been interviewed by urban journalists who seem mystified by my attraction to the places out there, like I’d taken the time to interview the Disneyland characters — the Goofys and Minnies — who inhabit this theme park they visit only on weekends.

Such talks highlight the disconnect between Nevada’s city mice and its country squirrels. In a nation where both sides of the urban-rural divide seem close to war, writing off one another’s value systems as not just misguided but dangerous, is there a common ground?

Why must one be dismissed as conservative “flyover country,” the other as a whacked-out laboratory for a dangerous, even socialist, way of life?

I don’t know the answer, but have seen and heard and felt the volleys fired by both sides.

Once, I walked inside a restaurant in Austin to interview its owner, who immediately sized me up and asked, “What are you, some kind of liberal?”

And a Las Vegas interviewer opened a discussion by asking, “So, what do people in rural Nevada think of Las Vegas?”

“Not to burst your bubble,” I responded, “but rural Nevadans don’t think about Las Vegas much at all.”

I’d just spent three months living in rural McDermitt, on the Nevada-Oregon border, and got an earful of what many thought about big cities. For many, when it comes to affecting their daily lives, Las Vegas might as well be the moon.

For them, the big city means Winnemucca, the nearest town, 72 miles distant along U.S. 95, where there are doctors and dentists and Basque restaurants and car washes and a swimming pool and theater for the kids and a Walmart, on a street called Potato Lane.

Winnemucca has everything they need that they can’t get right at home.

But urbanites believe rural folks somehow owe them something, perhaps some concession for leaving less-populated areas alone, so people there can continue to be themselves. It’s as though, anytime they could move in at will, like an invading army, and colonize the savages.

Another Las Vegas interviewer asked if rural Nevada appreciates the urban “pipeline” that supplies the tax dollars so people out there can continue their remote lives as they see fit.

The only pipeline rural folks see, I said, is the failed water-grab that urbanites tried to foist on farmers and ranchers and Native Americans in the Great Basin, to suck the aquifer dry so Vegas could build more golf courses and subdivisions.

Well, that dragon has been slain, at least for now.

So my question: What do city types need to understand about their rural cousins that would head off the next water grab? What don't they get about the other side but should?

Not long ago, I was on a panel at a book festival in Reno, where we talked about how to bridge this rural-urban divide. One woman stood up and you could hear the emotion and the pain her voice. For the life of her, she didn’t understand why the two sides remained so far apart.

Why couldn’t they even stop and listen to other?

I hope my book allows city folks to learn about folks who are proud to be rural, who love their families and are just trying to get by in an increasingly complex world. Maybe then they'll realize that both sides have more similarities than differences.

In the end, we're all Nevadans.

Maybe down the road, at some other public forum, someone will suggest a solution to bridge this yawning urban-rural gap. But at least for now, both sides are talking. 

But are they listening?