Canvassing in Sparks, Nevada: Bitten By A Dog, Then A Republican

I’m a veteran of foreign wars, though I don’t think the VFW would find much in common with my battle-hardened experience. On the two most recent election cycles, the 2016 election that resulted in Trumpocalypse and the 2018 midterms that determined whether the Terrorist-in-Chief would be green-lighted to broaden the swath of his destruction, I canvassed voters to vote Democratic in Sparks, Nevada. Both times, while I found much warmth in personal encounters, my visits were punctuated at their conclusions by fierce resistance to change. The first was expressed by a lunging canine, the second by a self-styled human rattlesnake. Yet even Nevada is being transformed in ways that its vanishing desert rat culture can’t forestall. Nevada’s future is more blue than red and the driving force behind this transformation is not campus radicals but Latino voters and middle-aged suburban women.

Sparks is a working- and middle class suburb of Reno, slower to change than its larger, more cosmopolitan neighbor, where the brash gambling palaces for which Nevada has long been famous are rapidly being displaced by boutique coffee bars, gourmet vegetarian restaurants and food coops. Urban Nevada, unlike its hardscrabble rural desert oases, is increasingly home to transplants from California, Texas and elsewhere attracted by its low taxes and wide open spaces. Eighty percent of Nevada residents were born elsewhere and their influence is felt everywhere. The neighborhoods we canvassed in Sparks are already seeing a diversification that is only evident in its largely look-alike housing developments once you start ringing doorbells. Contrary to its Fifties era reputation as a haven for gamblers and quick-divorce courts, Nevada has long been a purple state with Harry Reid (D) as veteran Senate Majority Leader and numerous moderates from both parties as governors. Las Vegas and Clark County are a Democratic stronghold, with Culinary Union Local 226’s 57,000 members from the casino industry forming a potent constituency to turn out the vote. In addition, Latinos are a growing segment of the population and most have been motivated by Republican targeting of immigrants to vote Democratic. What makes some Nevadans wary of Californians, however, is an aversion to what they characterize as its “nanny state” politics. They prefer their own “Western Democratic” politics they believe they share with Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, less dependent on labor unions and more on Latinos and women who’ve been helping shift the state’s colors on the spectrum.

Precinct headquarters is located near a local high school. Here sits Elaine’s house, distinguishable from others on the block only by its surplus of Halloween spider webs and carved pumpkins. Inside, half a dozen spirited middle-aged women train us canvassing volunteers, mostly from California, in how to arrange for voters to get to the polls and fend off verbal volleys from the occasional irate Republican neighbor. These women, ranging in age from their thirties to sixties, bear no resemblance to the hirsute college students like myself who fifty years earlier would never have deigned to walk a precinct. We were more attracted to marching, speechifying, engaging in internecine ideological warfare with our fellow leftists and denouncing mere “liberals” for their lack of revolutionary fervor. These women, dressed in casual pants and t-shirts, are eminently practical, poring over voter registration lists, texting canvassers in the field with tactical advice, and pumping up us largely geriatric volunteers with wholesome good cheer. As we stand in the kitchen nibbling on carrots, radishes and celery, Ellie, a warm-hearted white-coiffed woman who looks like in an earlier era she would have served aspic at a Ladies Auxiliary luncheon, regales us with her adventures surviving sandstorms at Burning Man a decade ago. This revolution doesn’t look the slightest bit insurrectionary, yet it’s far more likely to succeed than we ever were — because it’s run by women, and (in case you haven’t noticed) women know how to get things done.

When I canvassed voters in Sparks the day before the 2016 election, the neighborhood I walked was a step down from Elaine’s house, populated with smaller homes, big barking canines and bold signs warning, “Beware of Dog.” It was a Monday and there was no sign of life on the deserted streets. Few residents responded to their doorbells. They may have simply chosen not to but most were probably at work. The few who did open their doors were mostly Latino, and they spoke with understated passion and a certain guardedness of the need to defeat Trump. But for the most part we left election flyers tucked part way under their doormats, knowing they’d probably be tossed in the trash without a second glance. At the end of the day I found my precinct list taking me to a dead-end street with chain-link fences around most yards and a cacophony of baritone barking emanating from behind wooden fences. I made my way to the front steps of one of the few yards without a fence. The front door was glass and I could see within a man sitting in a lounger watching what I presumed was a television just out of view. Between him and the door sat a very large dog of indeterminate breed. I was still several feet away when the man casually flicked open the latch on the door and out flew the hound. Heading straight for me, he reared up on his hind legs and thrust his muzzle an inch from my mouth. His eyes bulged as he flung spittle in my face. Then dropping down he took aim at my stomach and tore into it with the force of a pro linebacker. I reeled back and staggered to keep my balance.

It all happened so fast that it was over as quickly as it had begun. The owner emerged from his lounger and casually yanked on his canine’s chain. “Beast!” he spat under his breath, but not very convincingly. Pulling him back inside he stood there but didn’t apologize or ask if I was hurt. I retreated to the street and staggered dazed to the end of the block before examining my stomach. It was bruised in the pattern of biting jaws but they hadn’t broken the skin. It was a chilly November day and I’d worn a padded down jacket that must have absorbed most of the blow. MoveOn, organizer of the canvassing operation, urged me to head for the nearest hospital and offered to cover all expenses, but I was done with Sparks and wanted nothing more than to head home. Welcomed with applause on the chartered bus by my fellow canvassers, I was vastly relieved when we crossed the notorious Donner Pass and back into California. Yet history pursued me and a day later that lunging dog had transmogrified into a howling president-elect.

On the weekend before the 2018 midterms we’d already been conditioned to endure the savagery and barbarism of a political party gone altogether off the rails, yet I felt far less isolated and alone canvassing Sparks’ still largely deserted neighborhoods. More residents were home on the weekend and ready to engage. Granted, this time around the precinct captains had selected only registered Democrats to contact, those who seldom voted and needed encouragement to follow through. At one home two young girls opened the door and called their mother to speak with us. She and her mother had already voted, she said. Then when we thanked her for doing so, she gradually opened up. “I’ve been living here all my life. I was born here,” she told us. “But since Trump has been in power my neighbors look at me strangely. I have a laundromat. One day a woman came in to wash her clothes and began attacking me because the washers have tinted glass and she couldn’t see her clothes to know if they were being washed. I didn’t manufacture these washers. This is just the way they’re made. Then she said that I and my people should get out of this country and go home. But I am home! She said she was Native American. I said if you want everyone whose ancestors weren’t born here to leave, only you will remain. I feel so unwelcome here and I’m from here.” She wiped tears from her eyes. My fellow canvasser and I teared up as well. “I wish I could do more to help,” I said. “You’re more than welcome in our America.” But she doesn’t live in “our America.”

On a neighboring street we encountered a muscular Latino man who lingered with us for a while to tell his story. “I live here but I worked in Eastern Washington state. It’s Trump country and there’s a lot of prejudice against Latinos. Even among the younger generation. All day I have to listen to insults, but I have to be diplomatic ’cause I can’t afford to lose my job. We gotta get this guy out of there. He’s killing this country. Frankly, I think it’s time for these old men to step aside. I have three daughters and they know what’s up. We men have had our chance to run things and we’ve made a total mess of it. It’s time for women to run the show. Maybe they’d do a better job.”

When we’d finished our final lists we headed back to my car, parked on a street corner in front of a neatly tended house. As I opened the trunk to stow my remaining materials the owner of the house strode across his front lawn and confronted me. Shorter than I but compact and muscular, he had a weather-beaten face. He wore a brown t-shirt on which were emblazoned the words, “The last rattlesnake that bit me died in a week.” Bristling with hostility and kinetic energy, he blurted out, more as an accusation than a query, “May I ask you just one question? May I ask you just one question?”

“Sure,” I said quietly.

“What the hell are you doing here in Nevada with your California plates trying to drum up votes for Democrats? Why don’t you just go back home and deal with your own problems.”

“We’re here because you have a Senatorial race that could determine control of the entire U.S. Senate. And that’s a concern for all Americans.”

“You’re not answering my question!” he retorted.

“I believe I am but you don’t seem to be hearing it,” I told him.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he continued, striding restlessly across his lawn before coming back within range. “California has way more problems than we do,” he continued. “With all your do-good liberals you’ve made a complete mess of your state and now you’re trying to export your problems to us! Go back where you came from. Everything was fine here before you people came along.”

He turned on his heels and headed for his late-model black pickup. His wife, who had been watching from the sidelines, threw a contemptuous comment of her own our way before slamming the door on the passenger side. Their car slowly backed out of the driveway and they began creeping down the street past us as the man hung his arm out the window and prepared to launch another volley.

It was all happening as fast as the dog who’d lunged at me two years before. There was no time to sit back and meditate on a response. Yet I was fairly sure that if I remained calm it wouldn’t come to blows, and in a strange way I was actually curious to engage with him. He hadn’t really asked his question from curiosity, yet the fact that he had formulated it as such led me to wonder whether there was some kind of opening here. With no forethought I approached his pickup and reached a little ways across his elbow as he leaned in my direction.

“Tell you what,” I proposed. “How ‘bout we shake hands and agree to disagree? That’s the way we Americans do it, isn’t it?”

He paused a few seconds, then to my surprise reached across his left elbow with his right hand and shook mine. It was one of the firmest handshakes I’ve ever experienced. And curiously it was warm. I don’t exactly mean emotionally warm, maybe physically warm; it was solid and sustained contact. This is about as intimate as some men ever allow them to be when encountering another man, especially those who fancy themselves more deadly than rattlers. A firm handshake is an forthright acknowledgment, however unstated, of equality and acceptance of one another even if there’s no other point of agreement.

“Thanks,” I said, still somewhat surprised that he’d taken me up on my offer.

Then he gunned the accelerator and called out his window as he headed off something about doors and don’t hurt yourself. I laughed and nodded. It wasn’t till next morning that I realized what he’d actually said:

“Don’t hurt yourself when the door hits you in your ass on your way back to California!” His throwaway comment was accompanied by laughter. He’d gotten the last word after all. When I realized what he’d said, I briefly took offense and began composing snide comments I could have made had I been given more time to respond. But after awhile I realized that my instincts had been better than a more clever response. I’d acted from somewhere near the center of my being. And the fact that he’d shaken my hand so firmly and, oddly, so warmly, may have been more persuasive in its way than any verbal argument. Neither of us will persuade the other of our rightness by force of argument. For some men especially, most communication is non-verbal, a language of body movements and suppressed emotions. To touch at all is to climb a Mexican border wall. To shake hands is to cement a deal and acknowledge our fellow manliness.

To be bitten once by a ferocious attack dog unleashed by its lounger-bound owner, then again by a rattlesnake Republican bristling for a fight is to enter into a realm of masculine combat. The fact that I not only survived but somehow emerged still curious and a little more awake to new possibilities tells me there may be more room for movement than we realize. My rattler interlocutor won’t endlessly be able to fend off a future more diverse and disturbing than he’s known in his once homogeneous hardscrabble desert culture, but he may yet discover that there’s more excitement to be found in breaching walls than in remaining stuck on one side. And for my part I’ve already discovered that in that restless, repressed energy that powers him and many other rural men is electricity arcing between negative and positive. Stasis and stalemate may someday give way to flow, however intermittent.

Lest the reader dismiss this possibility as hopelessly naive, I’ll cite my personal experience living for several decades in the deep woods and small towns of California’s Northcoast three hundred miles north of San Francisco. Humboldt County was historically a natural resource-driven economy supported by a logging industry that began to close down in the seventies when most of the last of the old growth redwoods were mown down and the remainder set aside for state and national parks. At the same time a few thousand ex-urbanites, some bearing college degrees, flowed into the county. Attracted by cheap land, sites too remote for enforcement of building codes, and a shared affinity for what was then called “grass,” homesteaders set up self-reliant homesteads on twenty- and forty-acre parcels carved out of larger ranches with a mix of logged-off forests and cattle rangeland. Their initial relations with the local logging and ranching culture were edgy at best. Long-time locals burned out a few fledging homesteads as hippie and redneck cultures circled each other warily. But over time, as local boys watched their new neighbors make easy money growing marijuana, they dropped the logging gigs that were dwindling away in any case and became pot growers themselves. Over time the two cultures interpenetrated and gave birth to a new generation of “hipnecks,” sons and daughters of hippies and loggers who drove giant 4x4 pickups at high speeds down narrow mountain roads and grew pot with abandon in the backcountry. It was far from paradise, a comedown from the once high ideals of hippie homesteaders intent on “the simple life,” but it made for a modus vivendi all could live with. Humboldt County today is reliably blue, as are all the rural coastal counties of Northern California.

As ex-urbanites fleeing the high rents, high taxes and gridlock of coastal cities begin to populate smaller towns in the American heartland, a similar and broader transformation is underway. Reno and Sparks are two such places and there are likely hundreds more. We can expect social frictions as two such disparate cultures clash, but each brings something the other needs. Crucial to successful co-mingling is mutual respect, and it may need to begin with us urbanites dispensing with our dismissive attitudes towards “flyover country” and its inhabitants. Rural Americans do the under-appreciated and under-compensated work of growing our food, hauling it to market, and feeding other parts of the world with our surplus. They deserve far more respect than they receive from urbanites who haven’t a clue how much work it takes to grow a vegetable or raise a farm animal. Meanwhile, many city folk are deeply frustrated by having to take jobs they know contribute little or nothing to the world and may even hurt it — work that author David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs.” In truth we need each other and share more values than we realize. By the nature of their work and culture, rural Americans are far more rooted in place, committed to one another and the land they live on for generations. The rootless, restless nature of urban life desperately needs to learn how to commit to people and place to “be there” for one another in ways we in cities seldom are. If we’re ever to bridge the false divides that set urban and rural Americans from one another, we need first to honor our country cousins for who they are, then seek to redirect their allegiances from a crooked con man dispensing false promises to solidarity with one another in pursuit of the common good.

And oh, by the way: my rattler Republican may have thought he’d gotten the last word when he pulled away in his pickup, but two days later a different last word echoed across by the country. Nevada turned blue: its Senate seat and governorship both flipped to the Democrats. It surely wasn’t due to anything much I was able to accomplish, but demographics is destiny, and the flight from California’s high priced lifestyle to the open spaces of the high desert is bringing new life and welcome relief to the parched earth of Nevada.