Columnist Scott Dickensheets: Bulging Henderson a mixed blessing

THE SIGNS posted at Henderson's city limits don't bother announcing its population; that would require a continually updating readout. The place is booming, from the Hooterville of old to nearly 150,000 residents and climbing.

The growth hasn't bugged me much; most of it has happened over there, by which I mean Green Valley, where residents don't even like to admit they live in Henderson. I reside in what I've always considered Henderson proper (in every sense of the phrase). Sure, I've nurtured a general angst about this city getting too damn big -- every time you hit the edge of town, another planned community has sprouted in lizard country -- but it rarely seemed immediately scary.

Now, however, they're grinding away the foothills of Black Mountain.

Head south on U.S. 95. As you near Black Mountain -- it's the glorified dirt mound topped with radio towers to your right -- you'll see what I mean: surrounding hills split open, peeled back and terraced, some already graced with homes and apartments, others awaiting construction.

Possibly the sight won't bother you. It bothers me. Possibly all you'll see are inconvenient hills being graded by progress. I see hills gutted and obscenely splayed. That finally seems too much. Friends and I regularly lament it over Friday night pizza. To us the violated foothills symbolize the processes by which our comfy little town has begun bulging nearly beyond recognition. We wonder how much longer we'll want to live there.

Yet, this isn't a simple matter of hating growth; it's more a case of remixed feelings.

Because, obviously, growth has its good points. I don't mean jobs and revenue; that's the stuff of economics treatises, not lifestyle columns. I mean little quality-of-life details. There will soon be two coffeehouses in downtown Henderson, where once there were none. Instead of city government being housed in the old, low-slung, one-story city hall, downtown now has a campus of appropriately imposing civic buildings. And, according to Allure magazine, the Euphoria Beauty Center in Green Valley is the nation's largest beauty shop -- 42 nail technicians alone, just five fewer than in all of North Dakota. If that isn't progress, what is?

Of course, not all the details are so favorable. Henderson's James I. Gibson Library had a security guard last time I was there, unnecessary just a short time ago. Sunset Road, once a handy shortcut to Vegas, is dammed with stoplights and packed with traffic. And for the longest time, Green Valley's growth spurt divided the city between old and new.

But growth is a mixed curse. The infilling that has clogged Sunset includes a mall and two large bookstores, services Henderson had been sorely lacking. It's also, I think, helped knit the two halves of the city together: With less blank desert between us and them, it seems a lot less us-and-them.

And the city has at least met me halfway regarding hillside construction. According to Planning Director Mary Kay Peck, the city now has a hillside protection ordinance limiting the gutting of foothills. None of which means we've decided how long to stay.

So if the Henderson I grew up in recedes a little every day, ground away like so many inconvenient bumps in the desert, perhaps it's a small price to pay to have almost as many nail technicians as North Dakota.

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