Carson Column: Home to Vegas

My family moved to Las Vegas in 1962 when I was about a year and a half old.

According to the old Americana Encyclopedia I dug up from around that time, there were 64,000 people living in Las Vegas and 18,400 people living in North Las Vegas.

There are towns in Nevada whose populations still haven't exceeded their previous glory. Genoa is one of those. So are Tonopah and Goldfield.

Las Vegas isn't one.

In 1940, there were 8,422 people living here. In 1950, there were 24,624.

As way of comparison, when my family moved to Nevada, there were 5,163 people living in Carson City and Reno had 51,470 people, the size of Carson City today.

That is a far cry from the more than 1 million people who live in the Las Vegas Valley today.

You should never get lost heading to Las Vegas at night. Whether on foot, in a car, or in an aircraft, the city has a corona that is visible from at least 200 miles away. I remember my mom telling me that if I was ever lost to wait until nightfall and I would be able to find my way back to civilization by following the light.

My wife, Jennifer Hollister, and I arrived in Las Vegas at 8 p.m. Just in time for a fireworks show celebrating the reopening of a casino.

My family has lived along Ann Road since 1965. Ours was one of the first homes in this northwest quadrant and my father is one of its longest continuous residents.

When I was a child, we would be able to get water from an artesian well at the highway's base. Salt cedar grew thick there, a small island of lushness in the desert.

As we were entering the city on the night before Thanksgiving, I decided to play a little game.

"What we really need is a grocery store right here," I say. "Right here," I repeat two more times.

"You mean like that one," Jenn says as she spots a supermarket that did not exist last Thanksgiving.

We wrap up our trip on the busiest travel day of the year with a visit to the store on one of the busiest grocery shopping days of the year.

People rushing around trying to find last-minute items for their Thanksgiving feast. We are buying the makings for stuffing and gravy.

My dad tells me they will be putting a super Wal-Mart up about a mile north of his house.

It should be fairly convenient for shoppers in Tonopah.

We drive west on Ann Road across an overpass that would have looked nice on the Highway 395 bypass. At points, where there are developments on either side of the road, it is wider than Carson Street.

But where there was no developer to pay for the widened street, it shrinks down to the rough two-lane road I've traveled since it was paved in the early '70s.

My father's place is an island of stability in a place that knows no such peace. There are trees there that I helped him plant as a child.

Thanksgiving goes off as usual. Jenn cooks for a couple of hours before the meal and we all eat. In addition to my mom and dad, my brother's ex-wife and their two daughters are at the table. It's good to have children around for the holiday. They add another dimension.

On Friday, Jenn and I take advantage of the busiest shopping day of the year to, yep you guessed it, go shopping.

That night we have dinner with a friend of mine from high school.

When I knew her at Clark in 1978 she was Tracy, now she's Teresa. Like the city we both keep coming back to, we've both undergone some changes.

She has gray streaks in her hair. I've got a little bit around the muzzle.

But we tie up a table at the restaurant for nearly two hours talking about ourselves and what we've been up to in 16 years.

Tracy joined the U.S. Air Force after college and served during Desert Storm.

While she was away, her dad died suddenly.

"He was playing tennis, which is something he loves to do," she said. "My mom lobbed the ball at him and it just hit him and then he fell down."

Tracy's dad was dead within minutes. She said his heart exploded.

It was a few years after this ordeal that Tracy resigned her commission and came back to Vegas to be with her mom.

On our way home, Jenn and I talked about where we live and why. For Jenn, Carson Valley and Carson City are home and she feels the changes in her bones.

So she understands when I say I don't think I could ever live in Las Vegas again. The city that I knew is buried under layers of pink stucco and neon.

Streets are torn up for the sake of changing the way the dividers work. Homes spread out on all sides of the valley. At night more than 300 square miles of sodium-yellow lights spread like points on a topographic map across the valley culminating in the twin mountains of light that are the Strip and downtown.

Vegas' once wide-open boulevards are now packed with cars from noon until midnight. When I was a 16-year-old, I could take Sahara to Rainbow and be one of three cars on the road at 9 p.m.

We're lucky that, for whatever reason, Northern Nevada did not attract the sheer numbers of people Las Vegas did.

What shocks me is to compare the numbers over 40 years. Carson has grown 10 times since 1960. Las Vegas has grown more than 20 times its size in that same four decades.

I can't go home again, because the city I knew is gone.

Kurt Hildebrand is the assistant managing editor of the Nevada Appeal. Reach him at 881-1215 or on the Web at kurtikus@aol.com.