I was also thrilled that Reno, which is a wonderful town but one with a nasty reputation, might at last be associated with something wholesome. In fact, the status of Nevada within the broader culture has not changed appreciably since 1862, when Mark Twain, who launched his literary career up on the Comstock in nearby Virginia City, characterized it as follows: “If the devil were set at liberty and told to confine himself to Nevada Territory, he would…get homesick and go back to hell again.”
Some might argue that we Nevadans have brought this dubious reputation on ourselves by pursuing the questionable economic strategy of legalizing whatever was or is illegal in most other places—by turns prizefighting, gambling, quickie marriage and divorce (not always in that order), prostitution, and recreational weed. But, for that one brief and shining moment, sitting with my beautiful daughters and watching Kermit roll into Reno in his Rolls-Royce Silver Spur, I imagined a possibility of redemption for our beleaguered little city. I even indulged the momentary fantasy that the Muppets, with their unimpeachable moral virtue, might help us to imagine a healthier, more virtuous relationship to our own home place.
But, as so often happens to people in Reno, my fortunes changed rapidly, unexpectedly, and for the worse. The film suddenly cut from the iconic Reno arch to an even more familiar site: a small, run-down casino on the north edge of town, a place I drive by each day while taking the girls to school. This particular casino’s proximity to the local feed store, the rural liquor store, and a dilapidated taproom ensured my familiarity with it; this is my personal redneck strip mall. And although I have not had occasion to require the assistance of the bail bondsman whose storefront is just across the gravel parking lot, I find it comforting to know that he is close by in a pinch. Because the Muppets had fled the city proper for the broken-down, rural-urban edge, they were now on my home turf.
To appreciate why the Muppets’ cinematic appearance at my local watering hole and poker parlor appeared so inauspicious, you need first to understand that Kermit’s journey to northern Nevada is part of his heroic quest to get the old Muppet crew back together again to put on one last show, the proceeds of which will save the Muppet studios in Hollywood from the clutches of an avaricious oil baron. The charismatic frog’s odyssey to reunite his troupe leads him to my local casino because the Muppets’ stand-up comic, Fozzie Bear (the ursine humorist who, along with Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, and Edward Abbey, rounds out my personal quartet of patron saints), has fallen on hard times and has been driven to—of all the God-forsaken hell holes in the big West—Reno. Here, in the darkness on the edge of town, Fozzie has, in desperation, assembled the “Moopets,” a second-rate Muppet tribute band consisting of unconvincing Muppet impersonators, including Miss Poogy, Kermoot, and Animool, the latter a cheap knockoff of the manic, hairy drummer Muppet, who is here played with genuine panache by a real-life rock superstar, Dave Grohl of Nirvana and Foo Fighters fame.
The scene inside the casino reveals a vintage form of Reno despair so authentic and mundane as to be at once hilarious and disconcertingly familiar. When Kermit and his pals enter the derelict casino, Fozzie is already onstage with the flaccid Moopets, whose boredom is palpable. Surrounding the little stage are a few slumped-over, zoned-out patrons who are, if possible, even more jaded and apathetic than the half-assed tribute band itself. Several are certainly drunks; one may be a hooker. Singing a lame casino advertisement to the tune of the Muppets’ celebrated anthem “Rainbow Connection,” the stuffed bear croaks out a few uninspired lines:
Why are there such great deals
on our hotel rooms?
Free parking for cars, not RVs…
(“Not RVs,” chimes in Grohl, the grunge rock drummer turned fake Muppet backup singer.)
Our wedding chapel, is twenty-four hours,
No marriage certificate is needed…
At this moment, Caroline asked me if she could skip the film back and replay this song so she could master it in preparation for her elementary school’s upcoming talent show. I winced and suggested that we save that project for another day.
The painful Reno stereotypes pile up thick as alkali dust once Kermit and Fozzie retreat to the bear’s “dressing room,” which turns out to be nothing more than a paltry scattering of crappy furniture in the open alley behind the little casino. As the frog and bear speak awkwardly of what Fozzie’s life has come to, we hear in the background five pistol shots, followed by a police siren, squealing tires, and a cop on a bullhorn yelling, “Step out of the vehicle!” Given this alarmingly impoverished landscape, Kermit, stammering as self-consciously as an amphibious Woody Allen, expresses concern for his friend’s destitution. For his part, the bear puts on a brave face, responding, “Look at me: I’m living the dream!” This ironic outburst is followed immediately by a flash of lightning, a peal of thunder, and a sudden downpour—clearly metaphorical weather, since you would sooner draw to an inside straight than see a thunderstorm around here.
Grasping at a last scrap of pride despite his abysmal condition, Fozzie tries futilely to console both himself and his web-fingered pal: “It’s allright, Kermit, it’s not your fault. We had a good run.” And with this grim assessment, the now not-so-comic bear incisively encapsulates the Reno experience. The message is unmistakable: my town is the final whistle-stop on a one-way trip to Nowheresville. Reno is depicted as the place where dreams—even sweet and innocent Muppet dreams—come to die.
My girls quickly recognize the familiar exterior of the casino, though of course they have never been inside. “Hey, isn’t that right across the street from where we got the baby chicks this spring?” asks Caroline.
Big sister Hannah has a harder question: “Dad, is it really like that in there? All smoky and dark with not very good music and people asleep at their tables?”
“No…not really,” I replied. “Well, kind of.”
“Hmm,” said Hannah, processing. “That doesn’t look very fun.”
Caroline followed up, excitedly, “So the Muppets are right about Reno after all!”
“Well…not really,” I said, a little defensively. “OK, sort of. Well, OK, yes. Allright. I guess the Muppets are right about Reno.”
In that moment, I realized that one reason we Renoites have such a troubled relationship to our place is because we feel compelled to resist stereotypes that are sometimes accurate. It was also a difficult moment because I could see the girls trying to renegotiate their own relationship to place—struggling to reconcile a landscape they love with the satirical version of it rendered by Kermit and his crew. For the girls, our home desert exists within a wild, magical world where beauty expresses itself daily, effortlessly. What could it mean that their hometown was now Muppet shorthand for the place you land in life only when all decent options have been exhausted?
This challenging parenting moment forced me to revisit the vexing question of how I should respond to the negative stereotypes that plague our little city. One approach is to fight back with facts: Reno has a vibrant arts community, a beautiful river corridor, incredible weather, and amazing access to desert and mountain wilderness. It is a city full of nice people—independent, unpretentious people with solid common sense who do not try to convert you to anything. My hometown is a place where you can order a rye Manhattan without having to explain that you don’t want a damned maraschino cherry in it. Or, I could take a different tack by pointing out that folks who live here can take a joke and, for that reason, appreciate the brilliance of the Muppets’ parody of us. After all, we really are the biggest little city of the pathetic tribute band. Performances here have included Who’s Bad (Michael Jackson, though the name says it all), Live Wire (AC/DC, the “blunder from down under” resurrected), One Night of Queen (not a transvestite cabaret show, though we have those too), Voyage (a faux Journey, which was a band so atrocious that even a knockoff must be an improvement), and Eliminator (not the brand name
of a laxative but instead the fake ZZ Top, complete with the mega-beards they made cool a generation before Duck Dynasty). We Renoites really do know how to laugh at ourselves, which explains why so many of us went into mourning when Comedy Central’s classic mockumentary TV series Reno 911! folded way back in 2009.
But, after ruminating on my conversation with Hannah and Caroline, I’ve decided that I’d rather defend Reno within the terms of the negative stereotype that plagues it. I think again of the real place that is parodied in the Muppet movie. Some of the folks inside that old neighborhood casino may be past their prime, but they are still welcomed. There is a unique kind of tolerance there, where the down-but-not-quite-out find a temporary home. You can’t tell a millionaire from a bum in that place, which suits me fine, since I look like a bum and would just as soon have people wonder. Maybe folks from hipper places think we can’t separate the wheat from the chaff around here—that we aren’t smart enough to judge winners and losers. Then again, maybe we are and just don’t. Reno may have earned its bad reputation, but it has always been the land of the second chance, the place where the down-and-out Fozzies of the world come for one last shot at redemption. “Could be, might be, maybe this time, maybe next time,” wrote Jill Stern, who described Reno as “a symbol of the second chance and the chance after that which every man always believed awaited him.”
Remember this important point: Reno keeps Fozzie off the street until he is rediscovered. And that is the part of the Muppets’ send-up of our town that I treasure the most. It is here that Fozzie lands when he has no place to go, when he is utterly without prospects. This is precisely what allows Kermit to rediscover the ursine comic, whom he recruits to reenter a life of fame and fortune. Fozzie is no doubt back on Broadway now, but without Reno, who knows? Nobody wants to contemplate a Muppet suicide or overdose. Besides, I’ve been sleepy over a beer once or twice in that little casino myself, listening to a musician or comedian who had not had their break yet, or who had it long ago and was trying for that mythic, long-odds comeback. Any town might have given Fozzie his first big break, but only Reno could give him something more precious by far: a second chance. Who in hell would want to call Reno home? Well, as Kermit croons in the Muppets’ signature tune, “The lovers, the dreamers, and me.”
EVEN IN THESE extremely arid lands, where desiccation is a condition to which we’re well accustomed, the severe drought of the past few years has been especially troubling. Recently, though, we’ve had the opposite problem: not too little water but far too much of it, and in too little time. A series of unusual summer thunderstorms has hammered our desert hills, fueling flash floods. You might think that a lot of rain is a good thing in a place that receives so little of it, and perhaps an ennobling metaphor like “quenching the land’s thirst” might rise to mind. Once you’ve witnessed a flood in the desert, however, a very different metaphor suggests itself. Imagine being so parched that dehydration is a real threat to your survival, and then being offered a sip of water from a forestry hose blasting at 450 psi; you’ll get your water, but it will likely take your face off with it. Needless to say, this choice may cause you to ask yourself: “Am I really that thirsty?” As my fellow desert writer Craig Childs put it in his book The Secret Knowledge of Water, “There are two easy ways to die in the desert: thirst or drowning.” According to the US Geological Survey (USGS), in American deserts more people drown than die of dehydration, which puts the immense power of flash floods in humbling perspective.
In weather-nerd parlance, a “flash flood” is distinguished by speed as well as volume: it is an event in which geomorphic low-lying areas are inundated in less than six hours. This event can be triggered by torrential rains or accelerated snowmelt, or by the collapse of an ice dam—or an artificial dam, as when 2,200 people were swept to their deaths in the 1889 Johnstown Flood in western Pennsylvania. While we don’t tend to associate deserts with water, flash flooding is not only surprisingly common but also especially dangerous in desert areas. The unstable temperature and pressure gradients that characterize weather patterns in arid lands can create a lot of water in a short time. Desert soils, both sand and clay, are poorly suited to slowing and absorbing water, and in an open, mostly treeless landscape like ours there is little vegetation to stanch the flow. While heavy rain falling on a forest is much like water pouring onto a sponge, a torrent in the open desert is more like a deluge splattering onto a rock.
Because this landscape does not have regular rains to help keep ditches, culverts, and drains clear, floods here tend to be heavily laden with debris, which creates blockages that exacerbate water damage. This effect is clearly visible on our rural road here in Silver Hills, where the recent flash floods uprooted sagebrush, Russian thistle, and tumble mustard, jamming them into the mouths of culverts, where they formed a mesh lattice that captured mud, clogging the culvert heads, impeding water flow, and causing the runoff to jump the ditch and rip across the road surface, where it sliced through the roadbed, rendering it impassable. Most surprising and hazardous, flash floods in the desert often occur beneath clear skies. Localized thunderstorms somewhere in the upcountry release the water load, which gathers force as it tumbles downslope through canyons, arroyos, and washes, eventually blasting into areas where no rain may have fallen—where, in fact, the sky may be clear and the sun may be shining brightly.
I had a memorable experience of this kind of flood thirty years ago while backpacking in the Escalante Canyons of southern Utah. If you’ve never seen this magnificent country, it is perhaps best imagined as an immense labyrinth of fissures carved into the exposed face of a vast expanse of mesas and plateaus. For the hiker, navigating these canyons means meandering through a maze of narrow slots, beneath sheer walls of Navajo sandstone painted with carbonate patina and streaked with the impressionistic tracery of desert varnish. The narrowness and depth of these sinuous canyons create their undulating beauty but also ensure that those of us walking within them have little idea what might be going on beyond the slice of sky we’re able to see between the looming rims of the canyon’s sheer walls.
On the day I witnessed the surprise flood, bright sun illuminated the red cliffs of the canyon I was tracing, while the sliver of sky visible above me remained pure azure, save for an occasional, puffy alabaster cloud drifting innocently across it. Despite these ideal conditions, by midafternoon I heard the distant rumbling of thunder, which was my cue to peel a weather eye and devise contingency plans. After hiking for another hour I reached a bottleneck in the canyon, and I knew that in entering it I would risk being trapped without an escape route in the unlikely event water was running somewhere above me and beyond my sight. Instead I decided to wait it out, remaining in a wide amphitheater of the canyon bottom, through which the small creek slid first against one wall, then snaked gracefully across the cobble of the broad wash to run gently against the other wall. I sat down on a sandy bench that seemed safely elevated above the creek, leaned back against my pack, and enjoyed the beauty of the place.
After a half hour I noticed the little creek begin to rise, and rather quickly. Within minutes, water that had been only inches deep—so shallow that I had simply walked through it perhaps twenty times that day—rose to a foot deep, while also quickening its pace. Then, roaring around the bend of the canyon, came the aptly-named “snout,” the leading wave that is pushed before a flash flood. It was several feet high, viscous and brown, loaded with debris, and barreling into the canyon with a volume and force that far exceeded anything the little creek could contain.
I grabbed my pack and clambered up to a broad notch higher in the cliffside. From there I watched as the coffee-colored snout led a wave that swept the canyon bottom, overrunning the shallow creek bed and spreading out over rocks and sand, tearing through reeds and bushes, encircling boulders and swirling around the trunk of a large cottonwood tree that had formerly stood thirty feet from the creek. I watched in amazement as the canyon of dry cobble became a c
liff-to-cliff river, shallow but roiling, spitting chocolate foam and plowing forward with a tumbling load of upcanyon debris.
In the next moment, something equally remarkable and surprising occurred. The sky darkened as I heard the wind rise and felt the temperature plummet. And then the rain that had been heralded by the flood exploded above me in a cloudburst so intense that it hammered the cliffs in deafening sheets. Water also began to run down the canyon walls and spout from their tops. Within moments the canyon bottom was being pounded by a series of spontaneous waterfalls, as the mesa lands above funneled the runoff and shot it over the canyon’s sandstone brow. Squinting through the blast I counted eleven simultaneous waterfalls, one of which was launching from the cliff beneath which I had sheltered, catapulting itself over me and into the canyon-wide torrent below.
In less than ten minutes the dramatic downpour ceased, and one by one the waterfalls shut off. The expansive sheet of spontaneous river below me retreated toward the creek’s banks, leaving water standing in pools and debris heaped against the shoulders of boulders and the boles of cottonwood trees and up high in the tangled arms of willow thickets. It was difficult for me to process what had just occurred, not only because I had never seen anything like it but also because the force and power of the flood were matched by its incredible speed. An immense volume of water had arrived suddenly, blasted the canyon, and vanished, all in what seemed a matter of moments.
The massive thunderstorms that hit northwestern Nevada this summer packed a similar punch. Worse still, these storms rolled through in a tight series, reducing the land’s capacity to absorb additional water, and tearing into areas where mud, silt, and debris deposited by other recent storms had already created obstacles to drainage. Our flash floods were smaller than those that ripped through the Front Range of the Rockies in 2013, and they were minor compared with epic events like the 1976 Big Thompson Canyon flood in Colorado, when a foot of rain fell in a four-hour period, creating a twenty-foot-tall snout that scoured the canyon, killing 143 people who were unable to reach higher ground in time. Among those drowned was Sgt. Hugh Purdy, whose heroism is sung in “Here Comes the Water,” a beautiful, heart-wrenching ballad by the Zen Cowboy, Colorado musician Chuck Pyle.
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