The Biggest Little City

Samuel stood on Virginia Street on a Thursday morning in March 1929, watching the men on ladders bolting new letters to the arch. The steel frame had been there since 1926, spelling RENO in electric lights at the intersection of Commercial Row. Now they were adding more. He could make out the shape of the words as the workers hoisted each letter into place: THE BIGGEST LITTLE CITY IN THE WORLD.

He was thirty-four years old. Most of his childhood had been spent in the foothills east of the city, in the valley where his grandmother had shown him which plants could be eaten and how to read the Truckee River when it ran high with snow melt. His grandfather had been there too, though he had died when Samuel was young. The grandfather who had watched the locomotives come through in 1868, who had understood already that the world was changing in a way that could not be stopped or negotiated with.

The arch had been here three years now, just saying RENO in glowing letters. Samuel had walked under it a hundred times without thinking much about it. But a slogan changed things. A slogan meant someone had decided what the town was supposed to be, had put it into words and made it official. The Biggest Little City. He thought about that phrasing. It was the kind of thing a person said when they were proud of something they did not quite understand.

A man was standing beside him. White man, mid-fifties, the kind who supervised day crews at the lumber yards or the construction sites.

“You looking for work?”

“Might be,” Samuel said.

“There’s a loading job at the rail yard. Ten hours. Fifty cents.”

Samuel nodded. He took the work. He always took the work. The alternative was to have less money, and less money meant the small rented room he kept was at risk, which meant the life he had built here, thin as it was, would scatter. He had not stayed long in one place before coming to Reno. Now he had been here three years. He was not sure if he was staying because the town was home or because he had nowhere else to go.

The rail yard work kept him busy until after dark. When he finished, the arch was lit by electric lights that made the new slogan glow white against the night sky. He walked underneath it on his way back to the boarding house. His shoulders ached from the loading. His hands were raw.

The boarding house was on the south side of town, in a neighborhood of small structures that seemed temporary even though some had been standing for twenty years. His room was on the second floor, narrow and hot in summer. He sat on the bed and looked at his hands in the lamplight. The calluses were thick. His hands looked like a laborer’s hands. That was what he was. That was what the town had made of him.

He thought of his grandmother, who was still living, though he did not visit her often. She lived in a small house near the Washoe colony south of the city, where maybe thirty or forty families had gathered over the years. She grew what she could grow. She made baskets, though not many people wanted to buy baskets anymore. Sometimes he brought her money. Sometimes he brought her food. He did not bring either often enough, and he knew she knew this.

The next morning, he walked through downtown before the day job. Virginia Street was crowded with automobiles and delivery trucks. The storefronts were new or recently painted. There was a divorce lawyer’s office on every other block. The hotels were full of men and women waiting for the papers that would free them. This was what the town had become. Not a rail stop anymore. Not a mining center. Something else. Something built on the dissolution of marriages and the traffic of people passing through.

He paused in front of the arch in daylight. A man on a ladder was making final adjustments to the last of the letters. The lettering was large and clean. Professional. It would be seen from blocks away. It would be seen by everyone who came through Reno now, on the highway from Sacramento or from the other direction, from the dry country to the east.

Samuel remembered his grandfather talking about what this land had been before the town. The way the river ran clear. The way you could see from one side of the valley to the other. The way the winter came and the summer came and you moved with them, following the food, following the water. His grandfather had not said these things with anger, as far as Samuel could recall. Just as fact. Just as the way things were before they were not.

He went back to the boarding house and changed into his work clothes. The day’s job was at a construction site north of downtown, a new hotel going up. He arrived at seven and worked until five, carrying lumber and mixing concrete. The dust got into everything. By the end of the day, he felt coated with it.

On his way home, he took a different route and walked past the Washoe colony. The houses were small and scattered. A few families were sitting outside, taking advantage of the cooling air. He did not stop. He knew some of these people. He had grown up with some of them. But he had also made a choice to build a separate life, and he did not want the conversation that would follow if he lingered, the conversation that would eventually turn to the question of where he belonged.

Later, in his room, he thought about the arch again. The Biggest Little City. He thought about who would read that slogan and what it would mean to them. Someone coming from the east, maybe, or from California. Someone who was not from here. Someone who did not know the history of the place. For them, the slogan would just be words on a piece of steel. For Samuel, it was something else. It was a statement of what the town had chosen to be. And the Washoe were not part of that statement. They were the before. They were what the valley had been when it was still a valley and not yet a city, biggest or little or otherwise.

He lay in the dark and listened to the sounds of the town. Automobiles. People on the street. Music from somewhere. Tomorrow he would look for more work. Tomorrow he would walk under the arch again. And the Biggest Little City would keep becoming itself, and he would keep moving through it, carrying lumber and mixing concrete, doing the work that kept him here.

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