In Gardnerville the other evening, a gentleman undertook to improve modern medicine by blinding it. It was about 9:10 p.m. when a medical helicopter, one of those noisy angels that descend with mercy and a bill, reported that a blue beam from the earth had taken a personal dislike to it. The pilot, being a…

There are many ways to spend a quiet Saturday evening in Carson City, and most of them do not involve a knife, an argument, and a deputy with a notebook. Yet a 50-year-old gentleman on North Roop Street chose the more theatrical option, which proves that while wisdom is said to come with age, it…

Reno keeps a tidy collection of corners, and most of them are agreeable so long as a man approaches with humility and a working respect for gravity. One of these corners, stationed near Plumb Lane and Humboldt Street, was minding its business Thursday evening when it was set upon by a motorcycle traveling with more…

A horse walked into a saloon in Virginia City, which is not as unusual as it sounds if you have spent any time in Virginia City. The town has always been hospitable to creatures of uncertain judgment, and on a warm afternoon, a horse fits right in between a prospector and a politician. Now the…

Mom had just polished the floors and dusted every surface in the house, and she’d gone on and on about company coming. She strictly forbade Adam and me from setting foot outside. Now, any sensible boy would have obeyed. But Adam and I were not sensible. We slipped out the bedroom window like two tiny…

Nevada is a generous state. It will give you sky enough for 10 countries, wind enough to sand a cathedral flat, and silence enough to hear your own bad ideas forming. It will also give you a spectacle now and again, if you are patient and stand where the dust can find you. It was…

I once rode for a man who had the decency to keep his wisdom short and his fences mended. L. David Kiley ran a ranch so far out that to this young man, it felt like Nevada had added an extra county just for him. It was only from Sutro Street to Pyramid in Spanish…

In Nevada, they have drawn a bright and holy line, exactly 100 feet wide, around every ballot box, as if democracy were a skittish animal liable to bolt at the sight of a campaign button. Step across that line with a pamphlet, a slogan, or an overdeveloped sense of civic duty, and you may earn…

Out in the Virginia City Highlands, where a man can hear his own opinions echo, law enforcement spent several hours persuading one citizen that court orders are not merely decorative. On April 28, deputies with the Storey County Sheriff’s Office answered a report that a temporary protection order for domestic violence was getting treated as…

On Wednesday night of April 29, officers went to a home near Tropicana and Boulder Highway on what was labeled a domestic disturbance, the kind of phrase that covers everything from loud arguments to the sort of sorrow that makes neighbors look away. Then the situation upgraded itself. Dispatch advised that a man had taken…