We've Arrived at the There

We are broadcasting live from Las Vegas, where the expected array of oddities and excess is delivering on all expectations. So much has been written about Las Vegas in the last decade-plus as it emerged as a de facto inevitability for a certain set of Americans that there is little left for me to share about the city that hasn’t already been reported.

Getting here was as anthropological as it gets. The morning on Day Five of this trip started late and found its early shape at the Main Street Cafe in Hurricane, UT. My buddy and I were referring to it as “Mom and Pop”--“Do you think Mom and Pop have wi-fi?”--because it was little more than someone’s personal kitchen and patio. All the same, according to UrbanSpoon, it was the highest-rated, most beloved restaurant in Hurricane. Mom and Pop beat out a few little-known Mexican chains, a number of national restaurants we were shocked to find in a relatively sleepy place, and some joint best captured by a local’s pithy review: “For food that’s overpriced and service that’s incredibly slow, it’s really pretty good.”

Set inside a small A-Frame with open seating and a kitchen that only barely bridged the gap between commercial and residential, Mom and Pop was what most people would call “charming.” The patio was lovely. The breakfast menu at Mom and Pop was generally sensible--waffles, eggs, yogurt parfait. All went well until the food arrived, but then, the day took an unfortunate turn. Mom and Pop, despite its storybook visuals and a host of factors that middle-class liberals champion when touting favorite out-of-the-way discoveries, is an enabler of America’s inexorable decline. The food comes slathered in mayonnaise.



Mayonnaise is disgusting. It is, essentially, a temperamental fat paste that doesn’t like the heat. Mayonnaise is either unnervingly viscous or sometimes a dissociated mess of nauseating liquid and the fatty, white epoxy from whence it came. It usually overwhelms the items with which it gets paired, be they eggs, potatoes, coleslaw’s elements, or anything else. Surely, human error exacerbates mayonnaise’s devastation, but the same can be said of uranium, and for good reason, we don’t put that in or on everything. With mayonnaise, America runs wild. It is a staple of childhood, an easy way to add flavor and cohesion to sandwiches. Those ham-and-cheeses are gateway drugs; they promote the theory that mayonnaise, salty and sticky and creamy, can beneficially lend itself to almost any dish. That’s why there is the insidious theory circulating to an alarming extent that mayonnaise can be served on a hamburger. America has allowed its love affair with mayo to grow toxic.

Never more poisonous was this mayo fascination than on Friday morning, when Mom and Pop ruined a perfectly good and reasonably healthful egg-white breakfast sandwich by tainting the combination of the eggs, the cheese, the turkey sausage, and the homemade multigrain bread. The naturally complementary flavors of the sandwich were subsumed into a sickening taste that approximated rot. The mayonnaise ruined everything, infecting the spongy texture of the eggs and the cheese’s gooey goodness with too much cream, the sausage’s savory flavor with the awkward tang of too much sodium and an unwelcomed sweet aftertaste. No amount of napkins and scraping could salvage the sandwich. This is why we’re fat.

A spoiled breakfast could not stop Day Five, though. Leaving Hurricane, we drove southwest, following a diagonal from the Zion region to Vegas. Along the way, we passed St. George, UT, a ballyhooed regional destination. Radio signals in the area were broadcasted from St. George and the mileage signs since we entered Utah touted St. George. The city--we assumed it counted as a city--was purported to have it all: lawyers and doctors, access to the Virgin River, a rodeo, outlet shopping, and more. St. George was so famous and so important that motels in other towns along the way carried a broad catalogue of brochures and pamphlets that further venerated what appeared to be a southwest hotspot.



St. George appeared on the horizon suddenly. The path from Hurricane to Las Vegas descends from short mountains and smaller foothills into the desert, so much of what’s coming is visible around bends and at the bottom of slopes. Finally, this oasis in a wilderness of sleepy hamlets and trucker stops was shimmering in the desert sun, resplendent along the highway. El Dorado would not have looked as beautiful.

The sign for Red Robin flew past us on the right. Naturally, I was jazzed up. Another, for Olive Garden, was next. There was no stopping them; the signs kept whizzing by. TGIFriday’s. Red Lobster. Cracker Barrel. McDonald’s. Burger King. Wendy’s. Taco Bell. This was the American destination of our dreams! Our enthusiasm was palpable, but the national food brands didn’t enjoy exclusive access to it. On the left, we saw signs of St. George’s imposing, impressive retail titans rising to eye level and beckoning us to pull over. Nike wanted us. Polo, too. Gap. Timberland. The outlets were amassed over a ridge, tucked into the side of the road like a pot of gold uncovered. St. George was such a shopping bonanza that the outlet mall even had an Old Navy store, and that, of course, seemed like an oxymoron. Isn’t Old Navy already something of a Gap outlet? Can an outlet outlet itself?

As quickly as it started, it ended. Intent on getting to Las Vegas in time to enjoy a Friday afternoon at the pool, we didn’t stop in St. George, and after a few exits, it was gone as suddenly as it appeared.



St. George receded into memory somewhat uncomfortably. As it grew smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror, its attendant stature was strikingly sad. Billed throughout Utah as a premium destination, and held out as a putative civic anchor for the region, St. George was nothing more than a few square miles of national chains and housing clusters. St. George’s modest reach was so circumscribed that the desert’s endless rows of shrubs--these small, green bushes that clearly aspire to something more but will never grow beyond such humble means--were always creating a natural border. And even then, the border was only literal, because St. George ultimately fit in well among the small-time scenery with ideas of something greater. Like the morning’s mayonnaise, St. George became an odd symbol of what America thinks, expects, and asks of itself.

After Utah came Arizona, but only briefly. Too bad. The northwest corner of Arizona was twenty minutes of red stone and rock structures that count as mountains for New Yorkers from the Midwest. Working around the curves in those canyons, arriving upon one vista after another with stone walls that encourage claustrophobia but blue skies and widening view corridors that suggest opportunity, was as thrilling as navigating through the snow-capped Rockies. But Arizona’s arresting scenery was quickly replaced by the American desert of Nevada, a searing stretch of green and tan dotted only by power lines. If southern Utah felt like another planet, Nevada felt like an alternate universe, a version of the present that might have been conjured on Lost or some disaster show intent on the unique titillation of low-level fear mixed with excited curiosity.



Little thrives in the desert, but casinos have a reliable place in the ecosystem. Passing by miles of dry terrain, actual tumbleweeds(!), and those omnipresent power lines, we saw as many casinos as there were exits. Ranging from slot machines serving as an ancillary gas-station service to, well, Las Vegas, the casinos of the Nevada desert are manifold. Needing a break, and eager to gamble, we stopped at one, the Virgin River Casino, in Mesquite, NV, that roadside billboards had advertised since Wednesday.

Virgin River was exactly what I assumed: dingy, kitschy, and awesome. Old people motored along in wheelchairs with oxygen-tank jet packs while women too old and too tired for their outfits brought bad drinks to the gamblers. The casino advertised its loose slots (unembarrassed, as you might expect), and it touted a sports book that had a strong resemblance to the sunken living room of a 1970s ranch house. At the blackjack tables, dealers wore nametags that listed their respective nations of origin, a practice which struck me as some kind of useless xenophobia veiled in a contrived attempt at community. Maybe I would have thought differently had I stopping on the side of the road in a region of the country unafflicted by immigration paranoia.

My buddy and I played blackjack for about a half hour. The table was using just two decks--probably no need for more on a Friday afternoon in late April at a small-time outfit--and to thwart any attempt at card counting, players had to keep their cards face down and could only touch the cards with one hand. As most know, normal casino blackjack allows players to see their hands, the hands of the other players, and the dealer, while also allowing players to legally handle the cards as they please. Adjusting to conventions which only reinforced that Virgin River was playing casino proved difficult as the condescension rose and the intoxication of gambling carried us toward levity. By the time we decided to make our final push to Vegas, I had won $45, and that seemed fitting.