This post is largely a continuation of the last one—because I realized, about three minutes after I’d finished the last one, that there was a lot I hadn’t said.
So I’ve taken all the scraps I cut out of “Time, with the Canyon”, and woven them into their own story. This story, appropriately, ends where the other left off: when we’d turned the car back toward the sea, and were zooming through the deserts towards home.
Nevada announced itself with casinos and dusty hills. Welcome to the Hoover Dam. When we’d finally escaped the bottlenecked traffic across the Hoover Dam, Welcome to the Fabulous Boulder City. It was only an hour between the Fabulous Boulder City and the Fabulous Las Vegas (and might I point out here, Nevadans, that a word used too often degrades in meaning?).
I drove us to Las Vegas, but, after Greg’s GPS again led us astray (blithely insisting that Caesar’s Palace was out in the suburbs), I let him take the wheel. Thank god, he was the one who drove us into the street of hotels known as the Strip. What with seven lanes, abrupt turns, and taxis zipping back and forth like ping pong balls, it was an automobilist’s nightmare. None of this was helped by the omnipresent, gigantic billboards looming at us with pictures of Cher and Carrot Top, nor by the fact that other billboards were embedded in the backs of trucks. Seriously. I can just imagine some publicity exec getting up one day and saying, “You know, we just don’t advertise enough…but I’ve got a swell idea! Let's make it so that drivers can never escape pictures of Cher and Carrot Top!”
Saying things like “Urgh,” and “Stay calm,” we finally managed to find the vehicle-entrance to Caesar’s Palace. We opted out of valet parking. Later, at the reception desk, the concierge betrayed some surprise at this. Self-parking was quite a faux pas.
We stayed at Caesar’s Palace for one night, and then, because the next day was St. Patrick’s Day and prices skyrocketed, we moved to the low-budget Luxor. That’s the casino shaped like a pyramid. It was at the Luxor, in fact, that we saw an extremely drunk, disgruntled leprechaun wandering dazedly across the casino floor.
Caesar’s Palace was a megalithic labyrinth. Our first night there, we searched for half an hour to find an exit onto the street. Finally spotting a panel of dark glass doors, I yelled, “Quick! Before the walls change!” Unfortunately, those doors just led to the pool.
We finally found a back entrance (near the much-espoused valet parking), and straggled from there, eventually, onto the main drag. Along these sidewalks between casinos, after dark, rushed a wave of giddy, intoxicated humans. The wave carried us as far as the casino Treasure Island (or, as it now wants to be known, “T.I.”), where Greg heard the sounds of a pirate show in progress. He glanced back at me, wide-eyed, and started running.
When we breasted the front of the crowd, however, he was already bristling in anger. Above us on a fake ship, a few women wiggled striped-bikinied hips—and Greg hissed, “Those aren’t pirates.”
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One archetypical instance was on the second night, when Greg and I were on a semi-deserted sidewalk near the Venetian hotel. A man dressed exactly like Captain Jack Sparrow leaned out of the darkness of a nearby alcove and said “Ello love” to me.
“Surreal,” Greg said. He was right.
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The Southwest desert—as described by Barbara Kingsolver in Animal Dreams, Leslie Marmon Silko in Ceremony, and Willa Cather in The Song of the Lark (among others)—has made a special burrow into my imagination. Because many of these books play with the mythology of the Ancient Pueblo peoples and other indigenous groups, I think of the Southwest desert as coyote-country, jackrabbit-country. Land of the great tricksters.
In many Native American cosmologies, the god Coyote made the world—but Coyote, being a bit of a rascal and far from omniscient, always gets himself entangled in misadventures. Las Vegas seems to me like one of Coyote’s mistakes: an alternate reality of perpetual daytime and insincerity and fogged mirrors… Coyote would trot away with his tail low, but his tongue still lolling, not having learned his lesson very well.
Las Vegas is a skin-deep place. All the gaudy hotels had themes, like New York, or Paris, or Clowns—but once inside, they were all the same: grungy, smelly casino floors, blinking slot machines, and uber-chic restaurants with names like “Areola.”
Last week, I talked about how so many of our historical travel records are narratives of conquest. My favorite type of travel narrative, on the contrary, is one that respects the places it visits, and tries to understand them from multiple perspectives. I’m trying my best to respect Las Vegas, but, my oh my, it’s harder than usual.
In fact (if you must know), I spent the whole trip being miffed that none of the slot machines were educational.
Fabulous, indeed.
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