Gambling in Reno

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
-T.S. Eliot

Hey guys, guess what?  Today marks the one-year anniversary of this blog!  I’ve never done anything consistently for a year!  Hooray!  I’ll celebrate by laying off all the moralizing for a week and skip ahead to an adventure (it is after all, supposed to be a travel blog, right?)

My return to society was not something I planned very well.  Reno is the closest big city to the Playa, and the whole gang was headed there anyway, so I booked a flight out of Reno to NYC via Salt Lake City.  What I didn’t realize was that my airline only moves four flights a day out of Reno, all through Salt Lake.  And, Reno being the closest city to Burning Man, I arrived at the airport a tiny bindi drop in a vast sea of hippies, many of them gunning for standby on those same four flights.  I had a brief discussion with a friendly gate and ramp agent who were sympathetic to my cause, but could not make seats appear.  It became apparent fairly quickly that I was not going to make it out of Reno by plane for a few days.  I had to be at work in under 48 hours.  The RV I arrived in had by then gone on to Las Vegas, they could not help me.  I remained in the terminal with campmate Carl, whose onward flight was assured, and weighed my options.  In my estimation, anyother airport would have given me significantly improved odds of catching a flight out.  But how to get there?

How do you know you’re in the Reno airport the day after Burning Man lets out?  You hear an announcement over the loudspeaker that says,
“Interstellar Transmission, please pick up the nearest courtesy phone…Interstellar Transmission, please pick up the nearest courtesy phone.”  Also, the airport has stationed a number of large boxes at each of the entrances for Burners to leave items behind (guess that’s been a problem in the past).  I reasoned many people would be dropping off their friends in Reno and then driving their RVs back (with space now, in the absence of their friends) to the neighboring large cities from whence they came.  And they’re a friendly, giving bunch, having just spent a week secluded with one another practicing all the principals I’ve just spent a month writing about.  I knew someone would take me.

In difficult situations, I’ve accepted rides from strangers all over the globe on scooters, tuk-tuks, golf carts, cars, and once in upstate New York, a boat.  But to my memory, I’ve never besought a ride to a specific place.  Nevada is one of four states in the US where hitchhiking is illegal.  Of course it is.  So I would never break the law…but I definitely made up a sign soliciting new friends with wheels.  Specifically, it said, “Anywhere but here!  San Fran, Vegas, Sacramento, etc!  Will chip in gas +hugs”.  Only, the spacing was off, so it looked like I was offering “gas thugs”.  I stood nervously outside the departure gates, not wanting to walk right up to anyone and put them in the uncomfortable position of having to reject me, but I also wanted to make sure people could see my sign.  I awkwardly paced the drop-off area, casually lurking around any dusty vehicles that pulled up, wearing my best ‘non-threatening but in need of some assistance’ smile, and avoiding cops, who might mistake my unorthodox friend making for hitchhiking.  As if!

After a while, a car pulled up.  There were two guys inside, one I recognized as an employee I’d spoken to earlier inside the airport, trying to suss out my options.

“Still here?” he yelled through the window.
“Yeah.  No one’s biting.”
“Well, we’re going to Sacramento if you want to ride with us…”

Such was the story of how I got a ride not from the Burner community, but from the airline community- from fellow travelers with a deep sympathy for the hazards of standby.  Chris is an airline contractor who works all over the place, on the ramp and at gates.  He’s from Folsom of the famed, Prison Blues (close to Sacramento), but worked temporarily at Reno.  Marty is a childhood friend and travel companion, who’d come to Reno with Chris to celebrate for the weekend.  It was Chris’s birthday.

Reno is a mere two hour drive from Sacramento and I had some time before my flight left—handy, because we had a couple of stops to make.  First up was lunch.  We stopped in a small mountain town boasting a burger joint visited by Guy Fierri his ‘Diners, Drive-ins and Dives’ series where I enjoyed an epic black bean burger with lettuce, tomato, caramelized onions, avocado, fried egg, cheese, and chipotle mayo.  It tasted like transcendence. Next we went over the river (actually) and through the woods (actually) to Chris’s grandmothers house.  She lives in the California redwoods on Donner Lake, not too far from Lake Tahoe.  “Scenic” does not begin to describe the lush red and green of the trees against the clearest blue of lake and sky in this staggeringly beautiful area that transports you to a place of serenity and calm until you remember it was named after a group of folks who ate each other to stay alive.

Even though we’d been driving and getting to know each other for at least an hour by then, I felt an odd moment of hesitation following them into Chris’s “grandmother’s” house.  Likely compounded by the Donner party and Folsom Prison floating around my subconscious, a little “what if…” crept in as I closed the door behind me, the last one to enter the house.  All this was dispelled in a moment when a small voice in the next room called out,

“Hello?”
“Hi grandma!”

91 years old, a teensy wisp of a woman, completely sweet, and probably able to outpace me in a footrace, her name is Millie—which is perfect.  We’d agreed before arriving to introduce me as a ‘friend from the airline’ as opposed to a ‘hitchhiker’.  Probably best.  We had an otherwise honest conversation.  Millie worked as a nurse into her 80s.  Once, she treated a patient arriving on an emergency flight from Burning Man who’d been hit by an art car.  Unfortunately, the girl was high on something and bit her.  Still, she seemed overall supportive of the event.  We hung out for a while, Marty and I chatted on the balcony enjoying the view while Chris helped out indoors, getting items too high up for his grandma to reach.  She plied us with homemade crinkle cookies and German chocolate cake for Chris’s birthday.  Then we were off.

I got the full tour of the area.  We stopped for pictures at a scenic overlook, before  continuing on to Sacramento.  There we ran around historic downtown like little kids in and out of candy stores (100 flavors to taffy!  Sample what you like!), costumes shops, kite stores, skipped up and down railroad tracks and onto an old riverboat-turned-hotel where we paused at the bar for libations.

Finally, I had to go to the airport.  It was sad to leave my new friends, but I was relieved to catch the flight.  It had been a tremendously fun day full of many things that make life excellent when it’s excellent: the intangibles of generosity, chance, friendship, and exploration.  Smoked maple bacon taffy.  Look—risk is risk.  Weigh your options and be as clever as you can in your decisions, but don’t expect to habitually avoid risk and like, enjoy yourself very much.  And don’t assume that avoiding risk means you get out unscathed every time, either.  Bad shit happens, that’s for sure. The more you exercise your ability to learn -the more you allow yourself to be taught through experience- the easier you can navigate the next obstacle…because it’s coming.   But awesome shit happens too, and you’re a lot more likely to find it if you go looking for it.  Stick your thumb out from time to time.

Good luck out there.