Reno: A Piggy Tale of The Biggest Little City

PETA: People for the eating of tasty animals.

          Logo on a t-shirt at the BBQ cook off. 

Reno, the self-proclaimed Biggest Little City in the World.  I’m here with my wife and my son and his family to attend the wide world of pork.  No I don’t mean a Congressional spending session; we’re here for the Nugget’s Best in the West Rib Cook Off, a little relaxation and some gambling. 

It’s been about 20 years since I’ve been to Reno.  My children were still in grade school and a short stay at Reno was a nod to my wife for putting up with a few days of camping at Lassen National Park.  My wife is not at all fond of camping.  We swung down Highway 395, south along the Eastern California border watching lightning storms in the distance.  It was the first time that I had travelled that route and I found the rugged, isolated high country to be spectacular.  The only thing missing was a herd of wild horses.

When I was a child Reno was the family way station on the many driving trips that we took to visit my dad’s family in Salt Lake City.  We usually left the house well before the crack of dawn at the ungodly hour of 4 AMish.  The early start was to beat the heat of Caliifornia’s Central Valley as well as the desert heat east of Reno.  In those days air conditioning in the car, at least our car, was open windows.  In the midday heat the car essentially became an oven on wheels.  

1960s Reno

As we hit the Sierra Nevada, my dad would glance longingly at the Truckee River, pointing out the calm pools that looked to be prime fishing spots.  He never did fish the Truckee but I’m sure he would have loved to wet a line and try his luck for a few hours.  As we drove past historic towns such as Auburn and Placerville, dad would talk about the great California Gold Rush of 1849.  It was of course the first great wave to the Golden State of what would be many migrations westward to find riches in California.  These days they seem to be leaving California in droves.   As we approached Donner Summit dad would tell the tragic story of the Donner Party, punctuating the narrative with remarks like, “Gad, could you imagine coming through these mountains in covered wagons when there were no roads.”  He talked about the terrible winter of 1846 when that little band of pioneers found themselves trapped in the Sierra snows.  His stories about their trials and, well let’s be honest, the cannibalism, captured my imagination and inspired me to read at a very young age, George Stewart’s, Ordeal by Hunger, the classic history of the Donner Party.  I would like to think that today’s parents point out historical sites and explain their significance to their kids along road trips.  The cynic in me says, “Nah, they probably don’t have enough of a sense of history to be able to explain what happened anyway.  Plug in the portable DVD player, keep ‘em busy, and leave ‘em ignorant.”

Reno was the breakfast stop on the way to our overnight stop, Winnemucca, in the middle of the Nevada desert.  By the time we got to the famous Biggest Little City arch we were tired, hungry and chafing.  We would stop at a coffee shop where I could get a stack of pancakes roughly the diameter of manhole covers and my parents could get a more modest breakfast and slip away in shifts to feed the one armed bandits.  Before heading out my parents usually indulged my entreaties for a trinket of some sort.  On one of those trips I got a Reno pennant to add to the collection on my bedroom wall.  Another trip yielded a slot machine piggy bank.  I would put my coin in the slot, pull the handle and my coin would disappear into the machine, kind of the way the real ones work.  The only difference is mine had a little hatch at the bottom that allowed me to retrieve my coins.  The real ones just take your coins, and that’s it.

Early auto survival gear

We would pull out of Reno, point the Big Chevy Impala East and head into the desert.  For a kid driving into the dessert created a certain amount of excitement and foreboding.  I still had my dad’s stories of the Donner Party whirling around in my impressionable mind (The Donner’s didn’t exactly have good luck during their desert crossing either).  The desert was also the place where cowboys went to die of heat and thirst in the horse operas (also known as Western TV shows).  As we left Sparks we would begin to see the signs advertising Little America, a hotel in Salt Lake City.  It was also where we would see cars sporting the Desert Water Bags; a canvas bag that was hung from the hood ornament of a car.  It held extra water for the radiator in case of overheating.  Our trip this year won't include a desert trek.

My wife and I got an early start on Friday morning and landed in Truckee near the summit of the Sierra Nevada.  Truckee is a picturesque little town around the summit of the Sierra Nevada.  The original settlement of the town was known as Pollard Station in 1866.  In the late 1860s Truckee’s main industry was logging.  In 2011 logging has died down and if our experience is any indicator, the new industry is fleecing tourists.  We stopped for breakfast at a historic looking little place called The Wagon Train Coffee Shop located in an old brick building.  My wife’s modest sausage and cheese omelet, my two biscuits and gravy, 3 strips of bacon and 2 eggs and a cup of coffee each came out to thirty dollars.  Yikes!  I’ve paid less for a more sumptuous breakfast in San Francisco.  Gas was fifty cents more per gallon than in the high priced San Francisco Bay Area.

As we descended from the Sierras into Reno we passed the Truckee River and as my dad had done so many years ago I pointed out prime fishing spots.  We arrived at the Atlantis, mid-afternoon, and waited for my son and family to arrive and then off to Sparks for the rib cook off.

At the Cook Off it's carnivores only

Let me be very clear; The Nugget’s Best in the West Rib Cook Off is not for the health conscious, the vegan faint of heart or anyone with a religious edict against eating pig.  It is a carnivorous celebration; a pageant of pork.  The only nod to vegetables comes from the deep fryer; zucchini, mushrooms and mammoth, and very tasty, onion rings.  The contest is held in Sparks, just east Reno.  For the remainder of the year Sparks’ claim to fame is as home to The Mustang Ranch.  No, this ranch has nothing to do with horses but it does sell, uh, rides; in a manner of speaking.

But it’s in September that barbecue masters from around the country converge on little Sparks Nevada to vie for a first place prize of 7500 dollars.  Huh?  Is that all? Given the amount of work that the pit masters put in, not to mention the travel, the relative pittance of a purse speaks to the passion that these folks have for their barbecue.  For six days these folks tend their barbecues, from the simple smoker you can get at the local hardware store to huge custom built rigs on wheels. As you enter the closed off street you notice, columns of smoke, the smell of wood, from hickory to apple to mesquite, and of course the smell of meat, meat and more meat.  From my 6’1” vantage point I saw barbecue stands as far as the eye could see and beyond.  The contestants come from around the country but the workers manning the stands are locals, many apparently college students from The University of Nevada at Reno (Do they ever get any studying in?).

Pig is king at the Nugget Cook Off

Why is this pig smiling?

All varieties of meats are available but clearly the king of the contest is the swine variety.  The various signs display cartoon caricatures of smiling (and why are they smiling?) pigs and most visitors are carrying pork ribs.  For about seven dollars you get a four bone sampler of ribs that you can bathe in the various sauces, from tangy to sweet to fiery to sauces which start out with sweet and finish with heat. We got and shared samplers from Mike Mills and Willingham’s Memphis Barbecue (neither purveyor is actually from Memphis) to Texas Outlaws Barbecue which is not actually from Texas.  By the time that we had walked from one end of the street to the other and back, I’d consumed over a rack of ribs and looked forward with some trepidation to a night of labored digestion and meat sweats.  Was it worth it?  Sure, why not, I not only had some of the best “Q” ever but I marveled at the dedication and passion that folks can have.  Anyone who fancies owning a business, whatever that business, even if it’s a vegan restaurant needs to pay a visit.  And I’m not talking about pigging out on sauce slathered pig, I’m talking about getting a feel for the dedication that it takes to start an enterprise.  These are people with a manic dedication and pride in something they love and believe in.  This is what it takes to start a business.  It’s an obsession that makes you strive for perfection and compels you to bore your friends for hours on end while you regale them with tales of your hobby.  It’s an enterprise that you would do for free, and often do at the start, if you weren’t trying to make a living from it.