A YEAR GONE BY

Sunday, March 11, 2007 | 8:50 a.m.

Las Vegas is one of the few places where the sunset can be as beautiful in the east as in the west. Shadows and a tangerine dusk settle on Sunrise Mountain. Driving east on Interstate 215, bending around that curve onto U.S. 95, the Boulder Strip glimmers.

Down on Boulder Highway, the new housing units are the Levittown of the West, worker pods of the desert future. At Nevada Palace, a locals joint, the marquee reads: "2 for 1 Lasagna."

Inside, there's the keno crowd, a prostitute, a stale pastry.

There's no better place to see, smell, feel sadness than on Boulder Highway, where it seems the alone have all joined, as if to seek solace in their own mathematically certain demise.

And yet the next day I come around that bend again and see the mountain and the lights and catch a breeze of the possible.

In Las Vegas a year now. When I told people who don't know me well that I was moving to Las Vegas, they all acted surprised, seeing me more in the Northwest or a sleepy college town. People who know me best understood immediately. It's a place of action and energy, and stories of darkness and redemption.

The experience of living here and being a journalist is enmeshed in those gestalts, the double-view of hope and experience, progress and failure, myth and reality.

An example:

At federal court last year some former county commissioners are on trial for taking bribes from strip club tycoon Michael Galardi, a man who'd evince a wince if your sister brought him around for the prom.

The defendants are a flower shop owner, an ex-cop, a son of Cuban immigrants who was a recent college grad, a working mom who'd moved to Las Vegas to start over after a bankruptcy.

They'd all risen to become powerful politicians. Proof that anybody with some ambition and a little skill could build the valley. Nobodies, and then, like Gatsby, they created themselves, players on the make in the fastest city in America. In Las Vegas, Dario Herrera could be somebody.

Then we heard the FBI wiretaps. There was Lance Malone of the m ustache, the jocular sleaze, talking with his boss and benefactor, Galardi. Malone was on his cell phone from Disneyland, where he was vacationing with wife and kids, talking about bribing public officials.

They were small people with small morals - how much cash could they stuff in an envelope or a Crown Royal bag in exchange for putting an unwanted CVS in a residential neighborhood?

The conflict between hope and experience was even more crushing when it involved good people. During the past year Las Vegas has seen big and imaginative people with big ideas show their own small humanity. So Jim Rogers, the university chancellor, dreams up the Health Sciences Center as a way to give us more doctors and nurses, which we need badly. It's the same creative, humane thinking that created the Marshall Plan and the moon shot: A need, a vision, a plan to carry out.

And yet, right when wise and strong leadership were required, Rogers fired one university president (just months after firing the other), before quitting with the now-infamous two-word letter of resignation: "I quit." He returned a couple days later.

The incompetence, the mediocrities, the petty corruption (all of which were apparently rolled into the failures of University Medical Center) were at turns baffling and frustrating during a newcomer's first year. But I learned to accept it in exchange for the mystery stew, that sense that anything might happen, and that it would be served with heaping spoons of irony.

There was the Family Court judge in Vegas accused of domestic violence, wearing a T-shirt that read, "Who's Your Big Daddy?" before his girlfriend said she'd made the whole thing up.

The part-time judge picked up in a prostitution ring.

The county recorder accused of taking bribes stuffed in teddy bears.

A candidate for governor accused of assaulting a woman a few weeks before the election, and winning anyway.

I soon realized: More stuff happens here.

One time I was talking on my cell phone with a college chum in my car, and I said, "Oh, look here, that man is in the turn lane and vomiting out of his car." She laughed at my nonchalance.

I learned to run red lights (wink, nod), stay up all night if I chose to, smoke cigarettes anywhere I pleased.

But I'm a nervous person, and this Goldwaterism mixed with an urban environment meant learning to drive and walk around in a near-constant state of anxiety.

A colleague wrote a story about Las Vegas drivers: Our city is 10th out of 150 in traffic fatalities. A pickup truck with empty beer cans rattling around the back careening down Maryland Parkway. This is another indelible image for me.

Then there was the crime. Someone rifled through my car (auto thefts doubled in six years, we learned).

The newsier crime stories were frightening while being in some ways unreal, cinematic, like when Metro Police officers on bikes shot a man on the Strip and then pulled him from his car and handcuffed him. Tourists thought they were filming a TV show or movie. Actually, however, it was the 18th time police had shot someone in 2006. That was in July.

No worries though. A guy with a helicopter company and a lawsuit or two against him but spotty experience as a cop made it out of the primary in the sheriff's race. The fact that this amateur interloper nearly became sheriff didn't faze anyone.

State Controller Kathy Augustine was murdered not a week or two after I was the last reporter (that I know of) to interview her. Prosecutors say her husband, Chaz Higgs, did it.

A couple of colleagues spent weeks finding out who Higgs is. Turns out, he was married four times, sometimes married before being divorced, bankrupt twice. Go to Vegas. Put the demons behind you. Start anew. Meet Kathy Augustine.

Is there a bit of Chaz Higgs in me? I wondered with a cringe.

Often the most heartbreaking stories were about people who were well-meaning and wanted to help, but Vegas just got in the way.

Like the Lied Animal Shelter tragedy. Every other city has an animal shelter, and they euthanize animals all the time to maintain sanitary conditions.

In Las Vegas, though, see, we privatize.

So these well-meaning people at Lied, a place built with donations, these do-gooders, they couldn't bring themselves to euthanize frequently, so they took care of the animals longer than they should have, and invited in a Humane Society team to evaluate their procedures. And the Humane Society found the animals were disease-ridden, and they had to euthanize 1,000 all at once.

Nevada and Las Vegas kept giving us so much to learn from the past year, so much to contemplate about the place, and no time to do it because there was always another story.

Guess I'll figure this all out in my second year. Except the governor's under FBI investigation, and there's a presidential caucus happening, and there's no water ...