Columnist Susan Snyder: Living with a No. 34 ranking

Tuesday, May 21, 2002 | 8:29 a.m.

At least Mississippi and Louisiana are still considered worse.

Although, it is a wonder that a Kansas research firm's annual ranking of states' livability could name Louisiana the nation's least-livable. It has New Orleans, after all. And New Orleans doesn't stink.

Still, New Orleans is only one city, and a whole state shouldn't be judged on one city's characteristics. So it's also a wonder that Nevada's ranking of 34th among the 50 states was based pretty much on life in the Las Vegas Valley.

An analyst for Morgan Quitno, the company that released the ratings last week, said Nevada made a poor showing because two-thirds of its population live in this urban region.

I imagine it's hard, sitting there in Lawrence, Kan., mulling over economic figures, average daily temperatures and the number of sunny days annually, to understand that the Neon Dustbowl is Mars compared to the rest of the state.

For example, Bob Eddy, who owns Desert Lobster in Mina, told me last month he hasn't even set foot in Las Vegas since 1996.

And in Beatty, residents circulated a petition to prevent an absentee property owner from installing a bigger, blinking billboard to advertise the casino operates there. Help stop "Las Vegas-size billboards," said the petition taped to the counter of the Union 76 Foodmart.

We're worse than Mars. We're a synonym for "community eyesore."

"It's just awful," said Jolene Brown, owner of the Amargosa Toad gift shop. "It's pollution."

Ouch. We're that, too?

"We've already got five (billboards) in town," she said. "We already can't see the stars at night."

There are stars up there?

The food mart clerk said in April townspeople had a barbecue that raised about $2,000 to help longtime neighbor Cara Kerr, a cancer patient who was living out her last days in a Las Vegas hospice.

"She's a real sweet woman. It's sad for the whole town," Brown said.

Nice to live in a place where one person can mean so much.

Farther north, residents around the state capital are concerned that population increased 60 percent since 1990 and promises to double by 2020.

They were rankled last month by vandals who defaced the the giant American flag affixed to the mountainside overlooking town. And they don't want nuclear waste stored at Yucca Mountain either. It was an Incline Village woman who gave $75,000 to the fight -- the single largest individual donation.

People who care about seeing stars at night and who take care of their neighbors and love their country and hope to protect future generations from the waste we create. It all sounds pretty livable to me.

It seems a shame such daily miracles of an entire state are overshadowed by the tangled urban messes of one of its valleys. We're not so bad as people in spite of where we put our houses or how many we build.

Granted, it probably is hard to get by up in Luning, where the local mall is a roadside flea market hawking scrap steel for 30 cents a pound.

And it probably is harder to get along here than in Minnesota or Iowa, where the people and money are spread a little more evenly.

But a hard life isn't necessarily an undesirable one. Building sturdy character takes a fair amount of sweat.