(N.B: I recommend clicking on the photos to enlarge them, particularly the photos of nature.)
The weekend in Las Vegas came and went. Though time in Las Vegas is unlike time elsewhere, the Vegas excursion was fairly typical. One special moment: while playing poker at Caesar's Palace, I had the misfortune of sitting next to someone who looked like John Travolta in Swordfish and talked like Val Kilmer, only stupider and more tone deaf. I didn't sit down to play until 12:30 in the morning on Saturday, and the room was fairly quiet. My table was especially tame. Players went about their business solemnly, and there was no conversation. Occasionally, someone would nod at an opponent after a good hand, and sporadic chuckles filled the awkward silences that followed the dealer's jokes. To his credit, Silvio was working hard.
Val Kilmer was the exception. He was chattering incessantly and inanely, but largely to himself. In a span of ninety minutes, I turned $100 into $167. Kilmer, meanwhile, spilled a vodka tonic on his lap and unbuttoned his shirt to inspect if his pants were wet. Don't even begin to argue with or work to comprehend his methodology. The man was not of this world. He then nervously talked about how expensive his shirt was, as though that would make us forget that he'd spilled on himself and then conducted the world's worst fact-finding mission to uncover the truth about his pants and wetness.
Time wore on, and he jibber jabbered, no longer concerned with his clothes. On hand after hand, he'd provide running commentary of his own decisions before conducting post-hand interviews with himself. When he won--which was fairly often since he was playing against zombies and had a chip stack six times the size of anyone else's--he would wink at the dealer and toss him a tip while saying to no one in particular, "That's why you work at it. And man if I didn't have that gut shot." I was seated immediately to his right, so he couldn't see my eyes rolling. When he lost, Kilmer would revisit his missteps for ten and fifteen minutes, sometimes allowing the post-hand analysis to extend for three and four new hands at a time. "If only you'd bet like you were supposed to, dear, then I wouldn't have stayed in for the river."
The best part was when he started going around the table guessing where everyone was from. It was as futile as you might expect, and nothing Kilmer did indicated that he was especially gifted at this kind of guessing game. When he arrived at a silent Asian woman, he said to her, "You must be from Asia. I can just tell. Is it China?" The woman nodded, likely hoping he would move on. She was wrong. "I knew it! Let me guess--Beijing City!" The woman stared at Kilmer and did nothing else. He stared back, mouth agape, waiting for her to validate his suspicion. She never did, perhaps because she couldn't recover from the fact that he thought that big city in China is called "Beijing City."
So that was Vegas. I made my peace with it, said my goodbyes, swapped out one friend for another, and started the return trip home. The excitement was far from over, though.
My return trip runs through the southwest and takes me to exciting destinations, known and otherwise. To celebrate such exciting terrain, I thought a photo essay at the outset might be more useful than my usual long-form musing. Photos seem most appropriate because on Sunday and Monday, I visited two well-known monuments commemorating the power of the Colorado River, one created, the other demanded.
To the photos and narration we go...
The first stop on the long way home was Hoover Dam (no "the" before the name, as I learned), and to get there, we passed through suburban Las Vegas. Las Vegas is not really a city, of course. It is an amusement park with planned communities and synthetic neighborhoods built around it. Vegas has suburbs, though, and they are as American as it gets. I thought that I knew about car culture when I lived in Ann Arbor, but then I moved to St. Louis. In Ann Arbor I walked places--to the corner store, to the other side of town, to restaurants in commercial districts. In St. Louis, I walk nowhere, and I assumed that I had received a necessary education in automobile life. But then I saw the Vegas suburbs and felt like a dropout. Outside of Vegas, the concrete is new and bright, so very much so that the strip malls and pavement seem like a cartoon. The car wash above fit in nicely.
I knew nothing about the dam other than what I had seen in a National Lampoon movie: Clark Griswold once got lost there. I also knew it had something to do with the Colorado River. Signs that the dam was close sprang up around Boulder City, NV, where power lines are the dominant landscape feature.
Boulder City looks like anywhere in the southwest--mountains lingering in the distance, trees looking lonely, power lines ignoring it all.
The town gets pretty as Lake Mead--the largest man-made lake and reservoir in America--approaches on the left. Even better, a breeze picks up, and suddenly, what is otherwise an easily dismissed outpost of stereotypical living gets transformed into something vaguely European. Boulder City can feel a little like an Alps town set against a lake, particularly because the lake comes into view as the road descends.
Here we have a Western Area Power Administration electricity field in its natural habitat, directly across the HINO from a visitor intake center that introduces people to Hoover Dam.
The blue on the horizon in this shot is more of Lake Mead. That big concrete structure holding back all that water--trillions of gallons!--is Hoover Dam. This photo was taken on the Pat Tillman Bridge that now spans the canyon in which the dam is located. Until six months ago, the only way to drive from Nevada to Arizona while visiting Hoover Dam was to drive on top of the dam, itself, and that created traffic that unintentionally honored Boston before the Big Dig.
More Hoover Dam. I am not the sort of person who visits landmarks and walks away with serious reverence for human ingenuity, but the dam is among the few truly awe-inspiring things I've ever seen. A massive banner that said something like "Engineers FTW!" would be entirely appropriate were that sentiment not self-evident.
Please notice the access road above the dam that abruptly ends in the right side of this photo. The Tillman Bridge flies high above the Colorado River, and the elevation, the inherent precarious nature of dams, and a mind fueled by action movies all made me a little nervous the entire time. Seeing a road end without any warning, rhyme, or reason only enhanced the tingle of danger that was unavoidable.
But don't tell this girl. She and her adult supervisors thought it was a good idea for her to sit on top of a wall that separates bridge foot traffic from the westward-bound cars that fly by at sixty-five miles per hour on the two-lane highway that the bridge supports. Did I mention that tremors run through the walkway as the cars rumble along? To be fair to this woman and her entourage, it was totally worth it. As you can see from my own photos, the extra two feet of perspective she achieved by sitting above certain death was warranted. How else would you see Hoover Dam from that bridge?
That poor girl and her foolish supervisors were only a few of the colorful folks one finds at Hoover Dam. Witness Exhibit B above, and Exhibit C below...
Yes, those are the Aqua Teens bearing arms. Naturally, I gave the dude a shout out for his shirt. I wanted to talk in a Master Shake voice, but the tour was starting.
You didn't even know that we had a Bureau of Reclamation, did you?
Here's the deal: the Colorado River is pretty much unfuckwithable. It provides water (and now electricity) to Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, California, and Utah. It is so powerful that it created the Grand Canyon over the course of six million years (science!) and regularly flooded towns, destroying farms, roads, buildings, and infrastructure. As mentioned before, the Colorado River demanded a solution, and Hoover Dam is what this country came up with. Hoover Dam makes the Colorado River more predictable and allows for regular distribution of water and electricity. I promise I wasn't paid to write this. I merely learned these lessons on my tour of Hoover Dam and feel that the river gets short shrift outside of the states it directly affects.
Side note: the rhetoric at Hoover Dam takes relativism to a whole new level. For instance, Lake Mead's volume was put into some kind of a context by telling visitors that it holds enough water to cover Pennsylvania in one foot of water. Hoover Dam? It has enough concrete to erect a four-foot-wide sidewalk around the Equator, and it weighs as much as eighteen Empire State Buildings. You know, because everyone has a good sense of what this all means.
Anyway...
Here is where the next James Bond movie will be filmed.
In this shot, James rams a henchman's head against one of those blue centrifuge arms while some hot woman never to be heard from again gets in trouble and causes James to make a tough choice.
That computer is left over from the Dharma Initiative.
At the end of a Hoover Dam tour, participants can retire to a modest museum to learn more about Hoover Dam history. Some of it is fascinating. Boulder City, NV was established to support all the workers required to build the dam. Special machinery was invented to bore holes into the canyon walls. The dam was completed in five years, two ahead of schedule. The concrete poured for the dam would have taken 100 years to cool had a one-inch metal pipe not been inserted into the middle of each section. Instead, those pipes formed a plumbing system through which cooling water passed.
Other parts of the museum are straight up propaganda, and it's hilarious. But hey, America loves its own mythology.
Once you finish a Hoover Dam experience, you either go to Nevada or Arizona. We chose the latter, because Arizona is on the way to St. Louis.
Heading east into Arizona, the desert opens up. Mountains still frame all views, but they are farther recessed from the road. The extra space is ably filled by shrubs and sad grass. As in southern Utah, there are miles upon miles without traces of life, human or otherwise. However, not far away from Kingman, AZ, something curious and, frankly, unnerving starts to happen: Trailers pop up. Without roads, stores, subdivisions, apparent sources of water, badges of government, or anything else that connotes municipal life, the trailers start. They run for a while, sometimes sparsely, sometimes densely. It looks as though people decided to park in someone else's lawn.
The phenomenon is unnerving for a number of reasons. First, land ownership expressed through the built environment is something I take for granted. Thanks to buildings, fences, signs, posts, lawns, parking lots, and so many other constructed elements, I almost always know who owns what land. And absent that specific knowledge, I still can tell that someone owns what I am looking at, even if I can't identify the person or entity. In Arizona's desert trailer parks, the demarcated order of ownership is not nearly as easy. This arouses anxiety, however slight, because the absence of ownership hints at lawlessness. After all, who would enforce the rights connected to a building, or a patch of land, or that broken down truck? It's hard to tell. Similarly difficult to discern is who, exactly, is in charge. There are no schools, city halls, municipal names, hospitals, police stations, or anything else in this part of America. These communities feel permanently temporary, like extended camping trips that happen to also serve as vacations from order.
Another reason it felt creepy was that life in this part of the country seemed unlikely to resemble anything I have known or seen. "Seemed" because I, of course, only drove past it. However, in Kansas and Colorado, the small towns I saw were different but recognizable. In Utah, I saw nothing, and that, too, was something. But these RV Bedouins were doing something completely alien.
This trading post in Golden Valley, AZ provided some answers, but only a few. A woman in the store said that on a typical Sunday, she and her husband, a documentary filmmaker, would commandeer an abandoned building four miles away and show his nature videos. "It's a ghost town. Really. No one is there very much and the buildings just sit around. Sometimes old people like to dress up in western-themed clothes. You should just go in and sit down. No one will care, and the admission is free." We declined and moved on, still perplexed. What do these folks do for jobs, for schools?
Sunday night ended in a motel a few hundred feet from the southern rim of the Grand Canyon, but along the way, we passed through Seligman, AZ, the self-professed historic home of U.S. Route 66. We stopped at the Roadkill Cafe for dinner. I believe it's a chain, but we were fooled. While dining, I received three phone calls about Osama bin Laden. I asked the waitress to switch the television from Sunday Night Baseball to a news network, and the other diners heard my request. A few people joked that finally, terrorism was over and we could get back to fighting Russia. (That might have been me.) Someone else said we should unfurl a "Mission Accomplished" banner. And a few more people seemed excited. But then everyone went back to eating.
Yesterday, Monday, was spent at the Grand Canyon. My buddy and I hiked down into the canyon before driving along a scenic route that offered multiple vantage points. Hoover Dam affirmed man's power, but the Grand Canyon affirmed nature's, and nature is winning. After all, Hoover Dam only exists because it has to. The Grand Canyon is so staggering that it defies description. It even defies photography. Not even a panoramic lens coupled with expert narration that brings the Grand Canyon to life could adequately capture what it is like to behold something so massive and majestic. My buddy and I, normally capable of lengthy conversations about anything, spent most of the day silent as we attempted to fully appreciate and comprehend what we were seeing. A visit to the Grand Canyon could take weeks if a person so chose. We spent a night and a day.
On the way out, we stopped at Desert View point. This portion of the canyon lies in the east and hosts something famously and descriptively called the Watchtower. A five-story stone building that is round and offers views of the expansive desert that lies to the north and east of the primary canyon gorge, the Watchtower is a great stop, but a little removed from the rest of canyon life. The Watchtower also tries to pay homage to American Indians by peddling real and fake Indian goods downstairs and relying on an American Indian decoration motif. Sadly, like many of the white man's efforts to acknowledge American Indian culture, the Watchtower felt kitschy and silly. Kitschy because of the omnipresent commercialism, and silly because I couldn't resist thinking, "It's nice that the National Parks Service has honored American Indians by giving them one goofy, remote building in the middle of nowhere."
From the Grand Canyon, we drove to Flagstaff, AZ and ate dinner at Granny's Closet. I had the chicken parmigiana and the salad bar add-on. Love those baby corns, bad blue cheese, and entry-level pasta. We watched the Hawks win and Dirk Nowitzki elbow Ron Artest.
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