How I joined the California diaspora

Only a few days after we moved to Northern Nevada (the part that is not Las Vegas, for you geography buffs) I stopped at a signal in what passes here for “commute traffic.” A large white pickup truck, the sort favored by militias in hot climates all over the world, sat rumbling in front of me. It bore a bumper sticker that warned, I DON’T CARE HOW YOU DID IT IN CALIFORNIA.
A few years back, after I sold my bricks-and-mortar business in Silicon Valley, my husband got a serious case of “We should move to Reno.” He’s always browsing the internet for new places to live. His previous “we should move to” notion was a remote mountain village in Panama, so this seemed like a positive development. We could drive there for a visit, and we didn’t need to receive any inoculations prior to our trip.
Once there, Mark would quickly realize that despite (or because of ) its tax advantages, Nevada was a pitiless hellhole, and that his wife was an incredibly Good Sport. I would score major points and we would return happily to a goat farm in the lush, lovely Santa Cruz mountains.
We began our adventure north of Reno, in a Deliverance-style community called Verdi, not far from increasingly tony (but sadly, over-the-California-border) town of Truckee.
Well, cross that one off the list, I thought smugly to myself, as we recalled some of the more memorable trailers we’d seen there. On we went past Reno, to an airbnb in a horsey, windy area called Pleasant Valley. There, we met our first wild horses, who were hanging around the rural neighborhood with disappointed expressions.
Well, yeah, you live in Nevada, I thought.
At the end of the weekend we spent the night in South Lake Tahoe, the eastern (Nevada) side, which is dominated by casino towers and places to get drunk quickly.
Then we drove home to Santa Cruz, having not discovered Mark’s eden. I was pretty pleased with myself, having gone well out of my way to make positive comments about things we’d seen. I’d even done a couple of watercolors of wind-thrashed sagebrush, demonstrating my appreciation for the predominant local flora.
But Mark was not to be deterred. Instead, he planned another trip. This time we’d go further south, he explained. Somehow, he held out hope that there was more to Northern Nevada than baking RV parks, strip-mall casinos and listless mustangs.
We visited Carson City. In the historic downtown of the state capital, where Kit Carson had once lived, we enjoyed a delicious brunch at a restaurant called Adele’s. There, we learned a thing or two about farm-to-table, Nevada style. For starters, our waiter actually knew the name of the 4H pig that had given his life for our house-made breakfast sausage.
I didn’t mention to Mark that the Bellini I sipped with my fabulous local duck-egg omelette was the best one I’d had outside of Italy. He didn’t need to know that.
For our next trip, we chose an airbnb on a ranch in Gardnerville, south of Carson City. I’d selected it purely out of spite, to prove that the photographs of the freshly-built, picturesque ranch were ridiculously doctored, if not downright fake. That would explain how a working cattle ranch in Nevada could be so close to the towering backdrop of the snow-dusted Sierra, and surrounded by meadows of emerald-green grass. Come on.
As it turned out, the setting was even more spectacular than the photograph. Still, wind buffeted our snug apartment above the barn all night long. I mean…wind.
In the morning, our hosts inquired if we knew about Genoa, a small hamlet at the very foot of the Sierra. It was the oldest town in Nevada, founded in 1851. I agreed to stop on our way back to Santa Cruz.

The town was tiny, with less than 300 residents. And it was not, as advertised, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, it was between the toes. Snuggled under a canopy of cottonwoods and locust trees sits a couple of blocks of historic houses and a teeny, well-tended Main Street. The back streets are unpaved.
Genoa is known for its unbelievably sooty, dusty and iconic bar, which attracts hundreds of motorcyclists every weekend and bears a sign over the doorway that says NO HORSES INSIDE. The Genoa Bar is famous for its relics, such as a leopard-print bra discarded by Raquel Welch in the 1970’s, which hangs from the antlers of a taxidermied deer.
Genoa was settled by bloodthirsty Mormon traders but its patron saint is a Norwegian immigrant, Snowshoe Thompson, who carried an eighty pound sack of mail back and forth over the Sierra on hand-carved wooden skis — not snowshoes. He did this twice a month, for twenty winters. By himself. As a volunteer.
Mark pointed out the little information kiosk in the center of town. He nudged me forward.
“I’d like information,” I said reluctantly, to the smiling volunteer. The woman regaled me with her story. She and her husband had moved from San Rafael 10 years prior.

“We’ve never looked back,” she said. As many people know, Marin County is every bit as crunchy as Santa Cruz County, but with more fog and more money. I stared at the woman in disbelief. If Marin People could live here…well, maybe there was hope for me.
As we drove home, I could see that Mark was trying to hide his smile of triumph. He never actually uttered the words, “See? I told you so.” But he didn’t need to.
Less than six months later, to my absolute shock, we left California.
Turns out, our Genoa neighborhood is chockablock with members of the California diaspora — a word which sounds like a combination of lower-GI turbulence and a fungal infection. (Perhaps that’s apt.)
It’s as if a Retiree Rapture hit Orange County and the Bay Area, then deposited all its golf-loving Rapturees here. And as I travel around Northern Nevada, I hear “our” exact story again and again: Husband gets the notion to move to a tax haven with lower cost of living and leave the frenzy of California behind. Wife humors. Wife finds herself buying packing tape and boxes at Home Depot and wondering what the hell just happened.
I have yet to meet anyone who regrets their move. Gone from our lives is the Thunderdome of Bay Area traffic, the drifts of roadside trash, and about 80% of our stress. In the span of our morning dog-walk, we go from bird-filled wetlands to jackrabbit-filled high desert to an alpine trail that would take us all the way to the Tahoe Rim Trail, were we so inclined. Lake Tahoe itself is less than 30 minutes’ drive. On a hot summer day we can drive over the hill and cool off at one of the laid-back “beach clubs” that serve beer at homespun tiki bars. And there are slot machines in the grocery stores, in case you accidentally saved up too much money for retirement.

Yes, there are tradeoffs. Nevadans love guns like nobody’s business, and you could be forgiven for believing there is only one amendment to the Constitution, the second. There is an informal shooting range right alongside the road out of our town, where people blast away at a gravelly escarpment created by the Genoa fault. (Yes, we still live at the edge of a giant tectonic plate. Some things never change.) Sitting on our patio in the evening, we hear the distant report of small-arms fire among the honks of Canadian geese and the cry of broad-winged hawks.
Native Nevadans, however, are not easy to pigeonhole. I made friends with a lovely Tibetan Buddhist who teaches the tenets of Positive Psychology in schools, is a yoga instructor, and designs and sews her own chic Dries Van Noten-ish linen frocks. She’s an old-school Republican but voted for Donald Trump because she liked the fact that he was an Outsider. (The unofficial state motto is “Don’t Fence Me In.”)
Molly grew up on a ranch. Her dad made a living on both the rodeo and polo circuits, using his cow ponies as polo ponies. Now in his 80’s, he recently crashed the small plane he uses to check on his herds of wily range cattle, out in the eastern part of the state, near the Ruby Mountains. Of course, he’s recovered fully and back in the air. This is more or less a classic Nevada life.
So back to that pickup truck bumper sticker. Most expat Californians don’t go around proclaiming that status, unless it’s to bash our former state. (The epithet you hear the most is “traffic,” uttered with the kind of revulsion usually reserved for “waterboarding.”)
When I began working at a local business incubator (a project recently abandoned by the less-than-charitable foundation that funded it) I was grateful to the pickup truck driver who’d admonished me against sharing too many Awesome California Ideas. We left-coast carpet-baggers have driven up real estate prices, created “traffic” for the locals, elected Democrats, and created interminable lines of up to two people at Trader Joe’s and Costco.
To my surprise, I found Northern Nevada to be a busy sandbox. Carson City is one of the smallest state capitals in the nation, with only 55,000 residents. You are but one degree of separation from just about anyone, here. I expected that getting to know people in my new community would take effort. It turned out to be about as difficult as getting out of my car.
Our first holiday season, after living here for less than 10 months, Mark and I looked around our Christmas party and realized there were more people in attendance than we’d ever managed to gather during decades of living in Santa Cruz.
In the Bay Area, when you invite someone to a social event, they are likely to caution you against getting your hopes up, but that they might attend if nothing more compelling comes along. Nevadans, with their primitive frontier ways, tend to express delight, rather than dismay, when invited to a dinner party.
One day I looked up from my coworking table at the incubator to see, on the patio of a brew pub across the street, the governor signing a new bill into law. The bill, promoted by a lobbyist I’d recently met, created a new class of “artisan” distillery. Yes, we have our legislative priorities, here. Seems an eccentric local billionaire wanted to turn a turn-of-the-20th century flour mill into a distillery that makes hooch using all locally-grown ingredients. This required some finagling with the current laws, which had been put in place to protect the state’s vulnerable liquor distributors.
Governor Sandoval was so close I could see the colorful state seal of Nevada stitched on his cowboy boots. A Republican, he’d been short-listed as a Supreme Court nominee by President Obama. (How quaint the Old Ways were!) During the meet-and-greet that followed, I briefly considered crossing the street to ask him where he’d gotten those sassy-man boots.
A couple of months later, I found myself meeting with the Governor’s Office of Economic Development and helping host a trade delegation from Poland and Czech. I also met a couple of dozen members of the best-and-brightest Mandela Fellowship, a State Department program, when they visited Northern Nevada from Africa to learn more about entrepreneurship.
Any lingering California snobbery was finally extinguished when I attended the finale of Tahoe Summit, an annual meeting on the State of the Lake. A little bird had told me I could write to senator Harry Reid’s office to request free tickets and to my surprise, I received a pair.
It was the best double bill imaginable, at Harvey’s outdoor concert venue: a terrific speech by then-President Obama, who could read the ingredient label on a box of saltines and bring an audience to its feet, followed by a concert by Nevada native-sons The Killers. Brandon Flowers was in fine form that day, his pompadour bobbing jauntily as he belted out their biggest hits to the rapturous crowd.
Holy shit, this is Nevada! I thought.
Alas, many folks in Northern Nevada hope it will become the next Silicon Valley. I’m pretty certain these are people who have never lived or worked in Silicon Valley, or realize how deeply unflattering hoodies are.
Fueling those dreams is Tesla’s vaunted Gigafactory, in an industrial park just outside Reno, along with massive data centers for Apple and a huge fulfillment center for Amazon. In sheer acreage, this is the world’s largest industrial park.
Who, do you think, would be at the forefront of such a development? Cali carpetbaggers? Land-grabbing Silicon Valley bigwigs?
This is Nevada, people! The giant industrial park was developed by a notorious brothel owner, Lance Gilman, of Mustang Ranch fame. He dubbed it the Tahoe Renoe Industrial Center. Yes, the acronym, the one everyone uses, is TRIC.
Recently, Mark learned about a pretty tantalizing job opportunity that might require a move back to the Bay Area. Was my move-to-Nevada husband willing to eat his words and head back into the belly of the beast? We reminded one another of the positives: good friends, family and movies showing films that did not feature comic book protagonists.

We went to the Genoa Bar and sat on the wooden porch with our Icky IPSs, the official beer of Northern Nevada, named after a giant, fossilized Icthyosaurus.

We mulled over the prospect of leaving. Soon, we were speculating about the price of a 50’s-vintage tractor for sale across the street. A battered flatbed from Ranch Number One, where we buy grass-fed beef, cruised by, a pair of border collies balanced atop a stack of newly-baled grass hay, barking their heads off. Two tween girls walked a large, dignified sheep on a leash into town, to chat with some women who’d stopped by the bar on their evening horseback ride. We chatted with some folks playing hooky from a wedding reception down the road at the hot springs resort, where Mark Twain used to soak. They’d never been to Genoa before.
“Did you know that they have Raquel Welch’s bra in there?” asked one of the men, awestruck in the way that only someone who is drunk can be.
“It’s so covered with soot you can barely see the leopard print!” declared his wife.
I remembered how horrified I was the first time we stepped into the bar and saw all the dangling cobwebs, which I imagined would fall into my glass. And this gal was already on board with the whole dust-and-soot thing. She and another woman began to discuss the practical considerations of leaving their underwear in the safe, another Genoa Bar tradition.

On my way back from the restroom, I saw a familiar, 40-ish fellow reading a large, old book, a history of Nevada, tilted back in a chair, his feet propped against the dormant wood stove.
“Reading in the bar?” I smiled.
“The library doesn’t serve beer,” he replied, with practiced ease, and went back to his book.
“We’re not going anywhere,” I said to Mark when I returned to the porch.
I don’t care how we did it in California.
