Columnist Susan Snyder: A trip to 13th Street? Good luck

Friday, Sept. 13, 2002 | 9:11 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Fridays Sundays and Tuesdays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4082.

Superstition says it's bad luck to start a trip on a Friday, so it's probably even worse luck to start one on Friday the 13th.

Silly. About the only bad luck I could encounter as I board an airplane this afternoon is when security decides my bag is the one they must paw through, and they hold up my Barrel of Monkeys jammies for all to see.

The scariest thing about triskaidekaphobia is spelling it. (Even spell-checker had a problem with it. Is that bad luck?)

And in trying to get people to talk about fearing Friday the 13th, it became apparent that they think it's even worse luck to speak to a newspaper columnist about it. Or maybe this time around, the Sept. 11 anniversary and its orange alerts replaced their superstitious fears.

So I gave up on the shopping-mall crowd and went looking for luck on Las Vegas' 13th Street. It runs in stops and starts for roughly 13 blocks near downtown.

Near Bridger Avenue, children were all pressed and proper in navy-blue uniforms. They squealed as they scrambled over the jungle gym and pointed their sneakers to the sky from swing saddles on the First Good Shepherd Lutheran School playground.

A man walked past with bags from three different stores. His morning's shopping done, you had to wonder whether he wanted to walk all that way or if he had to. He didn't return a "Hello," so there's no telling whether his luck was with him or had run out.

Ray Smith sat on the steps of a pink apartment building across the street from the school playground. The 37-year-old construction worker didn't have to labor that day because the previous night's thunderstorms had soaked the crew's materials. He was waiting for his fiancee to pick him up.

Sounds pretty lucky -- an unexpected free day and somebody to play with. But Smith says the luckiest thing was that he and his sweetie were moving from 13th Street. She was bringing the truck to pick up the last load.

"It's bad," he said. "Only one other person lives in this building now. It's a pretty neighborhood. But as soon as it gets dark, watch out. The third night here we heard gunshots."

Hmmm. Well, he's lucky they weren't aimed at him, right?

A few blocks beyond there, 13th Street dead-ends where it meets the freeway overpass. It picks up again two blocks north at Mesquite Avenue.

The houses are modest, older homes that don't look alike with lawns and trees and stuff we can't plant anymore.

On the west side of the road, a man balanced a garbage bag fat with aluminum cans on the handlebars of a mountain bike while he picked through trash cans on the sidewalk. A few houses away, a man without a bike did the same, crunching the cans flat with one foot and shoving them into his bag.

Wonder whether either admired the landscape. To the east is a virtually unobstructed view of the valley all the way to the base of Sunrise Mountain -- a million-dollar vista in some parts of town. Luckily, not in all parts.

I imagine on 13th Street, like everywhere else, luck is about how you look at things that are, rather than how things actually are. After all, it's silly to think that bad luck happens simply because your bed faces north and south.

Now excuse me, while I run home and rearrange some furniture. I have a plane to catch.