Fiddling while Reno burns...

I was astonished to catch a headline about wildfires outside of Reno, NV.  This picture probably best sums up the peril that area is in.  Luckily my personal experiences with wildfires are close to nil.  A bit over ten years ago, Orange and Sullivan counties in New York State were aflame with smoke that I could smell over 50 miles away.  And about six years before that, I took a late night drive out of Pasadena, and as the greater LA area sprawl receded, I saw the cherry red hellish glow atop the San Gabriel Mountains.

I am quite taken with the state of Nevada, especially points north of Las Vegas.  I found Reno to be homey and charming, and the area around it to be filled with the quiet beauty of the high desert.

My headline isn't meant to impugn anyone's firefighting efforts, only my helpless inability to help them put out the flames.  The folks out there battling these blazes are up against terrain that's rough and tinder-dry year round, with winds kicking up to speeds of 30 miles per hour and higher.

God, watch over these brave people and the residents they are working so hard to protect.

Tragedy in Reno...

   When I work on a computer, I occasionally multi-task: if there's a process that cooks on its own, like a backup, restore or virus scan, I'll take a quick peek at a news website.
   Last night a particularly harrowing one caught my eye: a vintage plane crashed during the Reno Air Show, killing the pilot, and injuring or killing quite a few spectators.
  I'm not an aviation enthusiast, but I really enjoyed the Balloon Race that took place during the GBR.  As the sun came up and I watched balloons inflate and ascend, I caught two overflights of vintage propeller driven fighters with my video camera.  In both instances they flew in perfect, tight "v" formation, although one group peeled off to honor the "missing man."  It was a glorious sight.
  What I hope comes out of this: a renewed appreciation for the dedication, time, money and effort it takes to keep vintage aircraft running, as well as the skill to fly them.  And perhaps a slight re-jiggering of spectator positioning and participant flight corridors to further minimize the chances of casualties if another plane experiences such a massive mechanical failure in the air.
  What I hope doesn't come out of this are hordes of brainless safety fascists, who will regulate events like this out of existence.  The problem is that they usually aren't happy "solving" the "problem at hand."  There's potential for them to expand their mandate to anything that burns petrol, makes lots of horsepower and noise, and goes really fast.
  Regulations have their place, but there are limits.  You can't engineer perfect safety into our world, but there are starry-eyed, brain-dead bureaucrats who will quench all legitimate risk-taking in an attempt to get us to that point.
 

Back to reality after GBR VI...

Usually when I vacation, I try to display some sort of clothing or accessory that demonstrates my interest in the shooting sports – perhaps a souvenir shirt from the fabulous Knob Creek Machinegun Shoot, or a picture of John Moses Browning pasted onto the outer leaf of a manila folder.  I call them recognition totems, so that if a fellow “gunnie” sees it, perhaps a conversation will ensue.  Conversely, I’m always looking out for the same thing. 

My Kalashnakitty shirt made it quite easy for Mr. Completely, Kee Wee, Kevin Baker (and one or two others I’m forgetting for the moment) to recognize me as a fellow GBR attendee.  We quickly formed up and had a lively dinner.

I hadn’t gone to any previous GBRs.  Always wanted to.  Why NOT go to a gathering of  quality writers collected together in a comfy hotel tucked into the Northwest corner of Nevada, one of the very best states to be in if you’re a shooter?

We had use of a hospitality room as a place to congregate, schmooze, discuss, argue and simply meet up before heading out for a field trip.

Our first was out to Cabela’s.  There aren’t any places like it where I’m from.  It’s basically a giant rustic cabin the size of a Wal-Mart but filled with an amazing selection of outdoor gear.  We were given an informative guided tour of the place, and were able to inspect and even hold some of the specimens in their famous Gun Library. 

The ranges we went to were unlike any I’ve visited.  They aren’t just a collection of targets set against sand berms, they’re basically tall hills that are part of the dramatic Nevada landscape.  The distances are between 10 and about 900 + yards.

Kevin Baker said it best and I’m paraphrasing here, “As I drove up here from Tucson I saw all of this empty land and I thought it would make a great gun range.”

I’ve had the same thought myself, while transiting through Nevada’s quiet terrain on previous vacations.

Reno itself is a great setting for GBR.  Reno should never be mistaken for Las Vegas, and vice versa.  Las Vegas is a gambling town that happens to have people that live and work there.  Reno is a place where people live and work, that just happens to have gambling.

Both cities are surrounded by plenty of rugged hills, mountains and scrub desert, but Reno feels friendlier and slower.  It lacks that “anything can happen” vibe threading the air in Vegas, but I think that’s a good thing for a tight-knit group like the GBR attendees.  Traffic can certainly be bad around Reno, but it’s a crawl around Vegas, so our excursions to Cabela’s and local ranges would have been hampered.

 I had a slightly surreal moment at the GBR: I met Paul M Barrett.  He’s a business journalist for Bloomberg Businessweek.  Paul wrote a story in January about Glocks that I felt at the time was very anti-Glock, anti-gun, and anti gun owner.  I dashed off a response the moment I read it.  As I recall I wrote it right from my Blackberry from the now-defunct Borders store where I read the piece. 

Businessweek published the letter, which I found gratifying.

But I never expected to encounter the fellow in person, and we had a good dinnertime conversation.  As I understand it, he spoke about gun issues with the other attendees and had quite the vigorous debate going.

I think Paul left the event with a better sense of who we are – heck he got a taste of gun-law frustration when he himself tried to obtain a permit to own a pistol – a process fraught with paperwork, fees and bureaucracy in NYC and New York State.

His overarching stance wasn’t especially pro or anti-gun but contained a heartfelt plea for both sides to be able to sit down and discuss the issues in an intelligent and civil way.

It should be pointed out to any “non-gunnies” reading this post that well over 40 states don’t require anything even like this to merely have a handgun to keep at home and take to the range.

The gap (or similarity) between a blogger’s online persona and how they are in real life was one of the things I was curious about well ahead of my arrival at GBR. 

They are the smart, articulate, passionate and polite people that I expected them to be.

Everyone I met was interesting to spend time with, and generous with their guns, ammunition and money (fundraising for Valor-IT).

I’m looking forward already to next year’s gathering.

Can't hold your liquor? Perhaps you haven't watched any news lately

Still working on a longish post about GBR VI, but I had to comment about someone ahead of me at the ticket counter here at the Reno airport (outbound).
 She was holding onto a half-finished bottle of grape juice (not allowed on the plane) and clutching an unopened bottle of some amber-colored liquor in a much larger than sample size (definitely not allowed on the plane as a carry-on item).
  When reminded politely by another passenger that she most likely wouldn't be permitted to carry any of it onboard, she remarked how she "always was able to do that when traveling back from the islands" and proceeded to tear Reno a new one, claiming to have received bad service at Harrah's and feeling like there was nothing to do and aside from that it was "too dry here."
   Really?  This woman, sounding like an experienced traveler, had absolutely no idea about the rules regarding liquids?  And had no idea what the climate and activities in Reno were like?  And didn't read any prior reviews of the property she stayed at?  Part of me wanted to say, "STFU, you clearly have enough money to travel often... don't be so damned miserable."
  Right before finding a helpful airline employee to try to marry up her high-proof would-be contraband to her checked luggage, she announced that she was going to open up the bottle and "have my own cocktail party."
  Good for her.  I'm sure her lack of preparation means that there's another rule she didn't know about: you can't fly drunk.  Pilots need 12 hrs minimum "bottle to throttle" as I understand it, but tipsy passengers are identified in the terminal, too, and are just as strongly discouraged from getting onboard, and frequently are forced to wait around until they sober up.
  Going back to her negative comments about Reno, she expressed a strong disliking of the place, and a desire to never come back.
  "Good." I thought.  "I'm sure Reno feels the same way about you."  Bon Voyage...