Leaving Las Vegas
The line between Las Vegas (along with maybe Reno) and Nevada moves every time we land there and head out of the city. Each time, we have to go a little bit further, the suburbs marching in lockstep towards the mountains and the west, the “55-plus community” billboards going up well out along 95 North now, while that “community” is, right now, nothing more than a rusting water tanker, spilling water on the dirt grid roads of the neighbourhood to keep the dust down, and the stick-frame houses that will eventually all share stucco of a small range of acceptable colours.
The city is big enough that you can’t guarantee your safe escape if you have a late flight in, so to limit the risk of rental cars and launching out tired onto night-black country roads, there’s an obligatory single night in whatever casino hotel has the best rates.
It is always a bacchanal, a modern Peter Bruegel painting of upturned ruddy faces, loud voices and full glasses and overflowing buffet plates and noise. If everyone’s fingers were shiny with grease from pulling apart a suckling pig, it wouldn’t seem out of place.
It is a raucous and absorbed orchestra, somehow right here and tight around you, but also from a parallel and unrestricted otherworld. You can sink into it, roll around in it, be part of it as an older man in a wheelchair uses both his hands to pull himself tight into his latest slot machine with the crook of his cane, as drink-comped women laugh loud at the bar and slap the bar top with flat and finger-splayed hands, as the three-card-poker players in their small semi-circle card-klatches commiserate about the close calls, damning the dealer for turning a flush.
All of it with the quiet shuddering feeling that it is kind of like the imminent fall of Rome, a heaping helping of the bread and engrossing circuses that no one thought might eventually fail.
And then.
And then you shed Las Vegas, finally, and you are handed the calculus of mountains, sky and earth, the simple but perfect three-part harmony from every horizon in every single direction. Every time I see it, it crushes me. Crushes me, because there is no way to explain it, to deliver it, in any way that works better than seeing it.
We stopped the car near the Nevada test site, where nuclear bombs have exploded and no one’s allowed to take the Mercury offramp without authorization, to pick around in the dust and read the historic marker sign and get stabbed by assorted hostile plant life.
Back in the car to see giant igneous knobs of gnarled black rock shouldering up through the sage and dust, stopping again, watching the wind bend a brilliant dust devil up out of the bright-white top of an alkali lake. Start and stop, for lizards and yellow flowers and orange flowers and white flowers that were never here when we were here in the desert together, but we have never been here together in early spring. So we get to wonder together.
I’m sunburned in Tonopah, I feel it on the side of my face, and off the road for the night but we’re back on it tomorrow, and we are heading north to the edge of Nevada to mine opals.