All I know is what everyone else knows: these people flourished in a land that does not give up It’s resources easily. They may have been gluttons, overconsuming food, water, and wood, or they may been petty and warlike, the hungry bands raiding rival clans, which may explain the sudden move to protected cliff sites. But in the end, what they left behind were pictures such as this, and the possibility of chance encounters. They are magnificent, the native color of canyon red, and I stare at them until all the light is gone from the canyon.
MONTHS LATER, the President of the United States, Bill Clinton, declared the Escalante Canyons and Kaiparowits Plateau a national monument, setting aside 1.7 million acres for the ages. He tried to evoke Teddy Roosevelt, who protected the Grand Canyon as a national monument in 1908. T.R. had opened the twentieth century with a law to protect the past, the Antiquities Act, which he applied most effectively to Americas natural heritage. For Roosevelt, the West was a salvation, not only for his body, as when it made a sickly boy strong, but for his heart, after he had just lost his wife and mother in a single day, a time when he said the light went out of his life. Clinton had no such touchstones to evoke at the ceremony, except the traditional argument of doing something for the future.
As in Roosevelt’s time, when miners had plans to dig up both rims of the Grand Canyon, there were howls of outrage. The mining company said sixty-two billion tons of coal will now have to go untapped, locked up under the unvisited emptiness of the red rock country. Kanab lost the two hundred coal-mining jobs. Utah’s leading politicians were incensed. “This is the mother of all land grabs,” said Orrin Hatch, the senator who had once tried to take five hundred million acres out of the American public domain. Congressman James Hansen vowed to cripple the monument by depriving it of all funds.
There was one curious aspect of Clintons speech. He had gone to the south rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona to declare a national monument in Utah, several hundred miles to the north. It was as if he had gone to Boston to declare Broadway a Manhattan cultural treasure. T.R. went right into the pit of the battle and dared his critics to challenge his view that the canyon needed protection. Clinton chose the safety of a beloved national park, the place where most of the five million annual canyon visitors come for drive-by views of the great cataract.
Later, Hansen had a change of heart. He was still furious that the red rock country had been set aside as a national monument. But he had a new strategy on how to spite those who tried to protect it. Visits to Capitol Reef and Arches national parks, to the east of the Escalante wilderness, have quadrupled in the last decade. They, too, started out as national monuments. The “industrial tourism” that Edward Abbey feared has arrived, with waves of mountain-bikers competing with motorized three-wheelers to clamber over slickrock trails. In Moab, once a near-ghost-town after the uranium mining bust of the 1960s, a new hotel rose every month. And all over the Southwest, in restaurants and on T-shirts and iron grillwork, there appeared the likeness of Kokopelli, reborn in the commercial boom. Hansen now said he would try to fully fund the new monument and make damn sure that roads, trails, and visitor centers were planted throughout the open lands. In essence, he would try to ensure that the place was overrun-that the price of setting aside the red rock country was industrial tourism.
I knew then that if I were ever to return to the Escalante Canyons it would not be the same. I had had my random encounter, my rock art trophy. I felt like a hunter who had killed the last buffalo.
CHAPTER 6
Chaos or Cancer
Las Vegas, Nevada
Following the signs—“At I east Our Rain Forest Isn’t Disappearing”—I round the Mirage. Traffic was backed up all the way to Utah. Parked in the lot a quarter of a mile away and schlepped a single bag to the heart of the most-visited place in the West: the Las Vegas Strip. On the escalator, a woman, coatless and deeply concerned, said it might rain—a felony in this city, yes? Behind a glass wall, a white lion was sleeping. I crossed through the rain forest, mist all around, an arboreal version of Muzak. Heard tropical birds, the sound of water breaking against stone, slot machines. Without compass, I navigated my way to the lobby. Behind the check-in counter was a two-story-high wall full of live fish, blinking back at the perpetual daylight of windowless and clockless Vegas. Guy in a purple jacket, from Roswell, New Mexico, called up my name on the computer. One of the fish was huge, the size of a car windshield, but sluggish, giving me the eye.
“A hundred and nine dollars a night. How did you get this rate, sir?”
“Why?”
“Just an hour ago these rooms were going for two-hundred-eighty-five a night.”
“What happens if I wait another fifteen minutes?”
“I can’t control the market, sir. You want to take a chance?”
“I’ll take the rate. What kind offish is that?”
“The big one?”
“Yeah.”
“Something tropical.”
The town is a mess, streets torn up, dust in the air so thick that the TV weatherbabe is advising small children and people with respiratory problems to stay indoors. And this is before the demolition crews have their way with the Sands Hotel. The latest Vegas thrill, blowing up big hotels that have outlived their theme, is the main-card draw for later in the week.
“You’ve got a view of The Strip, sir.”
I had asked for a mountain view.
“When they blow up the Sands, you can see it from your window. We’re expecting a quarter of a million people to watch it go down. Oh, and the fish…”
“Yes?”
“It’s a grouper.”
Found a ten-dollar blackjack table. Lost eighty bucks. Won back forty of it. Felt like Mark Twain when he arrived in Nevada. “We were stark mad with excitement—drunk with happiness—smothered under mountains of prospective wealth.” Heard a factoid from a card dealer: a million dollars in twenty-dollar bills weighs 102 pounds. Decided to stay at fifteen when the dealer had a six and a two showing. He pulled a queen. Passed the white lion again, still asleep. Tried to visit the desert dolphins—closed. Went outside just in time to see the volcano explode, water the color of Dennis Rodman’s hair spilling down the tiers of the faux mountain. A bigger tourist draw than the Grand Canyon. Walked up the Strip to New York, New York, the tugboats floating in the Hudson River out front, the Statue of Liberty half as tall as the one France gave America. Had a sidewalk bagel. Thought it strange that nobody told me to go fuck myself. Waited seven minutes for the light to change at Tropicana and Las Vegas Boulevard, the world’s most congested corner. Walked inside the Golden Lion’s mouth at the M-G-M Grand. Lost sixty bucks in a hotel with 5,005 rooms. Found the pool, with fake waves and sand. It seemed to have It’s own tide, not answering to gravitational pull. They don’t have surfing, which is promised in the next fantasy hotel down the Strip.
Went to the worlds fourth-largest pyramid and stared down the young sphinx out front, the Luxor Kid. Wondered if he would make it past the millennium, or suffer the fate of a slumping Vegas theme. Inside, saw the Nile River flowing through an atrium that could hold nine Boeing 747s stacked one atop the other. Lost twenty bucks. Had two drinks—Jack-on-the-rocks. Free. Wandered back to the Mirage, thirsty. In the lobby store, I paid four dollars for a liter of water.
THE Mojave Desert is the hottest place on Earth. Once, the National Park Service recorded a ground-level temperature of 201 degrees; the air can reach 134 degrees, though 120 is more typical in summer. People still die of stupidity while walking around cracked ground that looks like the Earth turned inside out, feeling their skin start to sting, the brain swell, unable to sweat. A dog left in a car parked at Circus Circus in July would last maybe fifteen minutes. A desert tortoise can go longer, living off a cup of water in It’s bladder for days without a drink. Since air conditioning, dogs have proliferated; the tortoises are nearly gone.
When it rains in the Mojave, it sometimes kills people. They get stuck in a wash that looks no m
ore dangerous than a jogging path at Desert View Heights in the morning, but turns into a river strong enough to move boulders during an afternoon thunderstorm. Or they drown in the casino parking lots, as happened to several people during a rainstorm in 1992.
From the basement of Death Valley, at 282 feet below sea level, to the ice roof of Mount Charleston, 11,918 feet above, the Mojave is fifty thousand square miles of the quirkiest land on the planet. This is creation with a hangover and cottonmouth. The entire object of a roadrunner’s life is to try to catch bugs in a thermal furnace without breaking a sweat. A kangaroo rat needs no water; it produces it metabolically through digestion of seeds. One of the Indian names for the desert was Tomesha—Ground Afire. General Patton’s soldiers, training here to fight Germans in North Africa, had their own name for the Mojave—God Forgot. Joshua trees grow in the Mojave and nowhere else. They need at least six inches of annual rain to survive, so they hug the higher slopes of the desert, waving those signature arms like referees at a Raiders game. The Mormons, confused but at their allusive best, named the trees for the Prophet Joshua, who was pointing the way. To what, though?
Until a few decades ago, only a handful of people lived in the Mojave, trying to coexist with the various curiosities of dry-country evolution. There was an inland sea here, then a tropical forest, then a lot of tumult and violence. The plates rubbed and scraped, the crust broke, and from the gastric core of the Earth came the mountains of the southern Sierra. Westerly moisture from the Pacific stopped dead in It’s tracks at the new wall, and on the other side, life without rain—the Mojave. In some places, zero inches a year; rain is a rumor. And when it does fall, it evaporates before it lands. In Las Vegas Valley, in a good year, four inches of rain. Other years, a single inch. The mountains always held some snow, and that which didn’t evaporate trickled through the crushed rock and ran deep, to an underground river. Some of this water came to the surface, reliable and clean, in a small oasis in the middle of Las Vegas Valley. Las Vegas, in Spanish, means “The Meadows.”
The Paiutes knew about it. In the summer, they lived in the mountains, seeking the natural air conditioning of high elevation. In the winter, they came down to the valley, to the dash of willows and greasewoods thriving around three large artesian springs. The Paiutes collected mesquite beans and ground them into a pulpy flour for bread. Willows made perfect baskets. And the floor of the desert was full of jackrabbits, grouse, snakes, and other forms of portable protein. Their rock art was not quite neon, but it was lively, with a lot of eternity spirals and animated clan figures, particularly in the western Mojave. An American army lieutenant, floating down the Colorado River in 1855, paused not far from the Las Vegas Valley to offer a snub for posterity. “Ours was the first and will doubtless be the last party of whites to visit this profitless locale,” wrote Joseph Christmas Ives.
But profit was the founding idea of Las Vegas. Even as Lieutenant Ives wrote, the Mormons were trying to plant a flag of the sovereign empire of Deseret in the Mojave. They viewed the valley springs as a place where they could gouge travelers moving along the Spanish Trail from the Rockies to Southern California—something that the Saints had perfected in Salt Lake. In 1855, Brigham Young sent thirty colonists to the artesian springs in the middle of the desert, ordering them to build a fort, control the water, and try to extract lead from the mountains. They constructed a shack outpost on a perch overlooking the valley, cutting mesquite trees for fences, and diverting water for irrigation. But the soil was hard and alkaline, and no amount of mountain water could bring a sufficient amount of crops to life in Las Vegas. What’s more, a monopoly on the springs proved difficult. The Paiutes still used it. And the flow was strong enough out of the ground that it could not be easily contained in one place.
Young was told that Vegas was no place for human habitation, that a biosphere of Saints would not take root in the hottest place in the land. A day trip was like an expedition outside a spacecraft; life-support systems had to be in tow. And the Mormons suffered from the same thing that people at the scientific base at Antarctica go through today— the malady brought on by lack of green. So after three years, the colonists folded their sun-cracked settlement, a rare failure for Brigham Young, and Las Vegas returned to a few bands of Paiutes.
What brought the place back to life was a melding of technology and sleaze. First came the railroads, inspired by the same idea that had led Young to think some profit could be made from a desert oasis in the middle of a well-traveled trail. The tracks of the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad went right through the Mojave. But the railroad still needed a place for the steam trains to be restocked with water. The three artesian springs of Las Vegas proved ideal. This came about by design, and some graft, courtesy of William A. Clark, the Copper King and one-term senator from Montana. He was a Las Vegas founding father no less worthy than the first mobster, Bugsy Siegel, but far more corrupt. The senator purchased eighteen hundred acres in the valley for himself, arranged for the train depot that would boost land prices, and then bought water rights to the three artesian springs. Shortly after the twentieth century began, Lombardy poplars, alfalfa, and fruit trees were growing in the old Paiute winter home. Clark had proved Lieutenant Ives and Brigham Young wrong: you can bend the desert to your will. The West, after all, is about possibility.
Clark County, the most populous in Nevada, is named for a man who tried for twelve years to buy a Senate seat. He finally succeeded only after handing out bribes to legislators; the money was pressed, in W.A.C.-monogrammed envelopes stuffed with thousand-dollar bills, into the palms of citizen legislators empowered to elect a senator. “I never bought a man who wasn’t for sale,” Clark said. Today, one shudders to see the oxymoron etched in stone outside official county buildings: Clark and Justice in the same line.
The first well, going more than five hundred feet deep, was dug in 1907. And not long after that, a two-mile long redwood tunnel was built to channel water from the artesian springs to a dusty town-site. Just to demonstrate how rich they were in the very thing that was said to be denied them, early Vegas inhabitants let the water run all day, gushing out of the ground and trickling away into the desert. Pictures show bearded, sun-hardened men standing next to open spigots, laughing. Can’t live in the middle of the Mojave—hah! From It’s very start, Las Vegas used more water per person than any other town in America.
The mass sleaze came about by design as well. When the little grid of Las Vegas was sketched near the train depot, the idea was anything but the classic Jeffersonian town model, which called for parcels to be set aside for a college and parks. Vegas was drawn, in 1905, as a shakedown train stop where different kinds of thirsts could be slaked. One section of town, Block 16, was given to whores and saloons—a pioneering resource that has left It’s mark. Today, prostitution is legal in the Pahrump Valley, north of Vegas, and nearly 5 percent of the women who work in Americas fastest-growing city are employed in the sex trade. Block 16 was an instant hit, with many a multiple-story building, while the rest of the town withered.
By the 1930s, the entire state of Nevada had only ninety thousand people, most living around Lake Tahoe in the north. Las Vegas did not have a paved road until 1925, when barely three thousand people lived there. Then Nevada decided, as a Depression-era gamble, to attract moral outcasts, drifters, and losers—at least those who weren’t already in the state trying to scratch something from the played-out gold and silver mines. Before the drive-by method was perfected, getting a divorce took some effort. Nevada made it easy. Anybody willing to spend six weeks in the Silver State could be declared a legal resident for the purpose of separating from a spouse. But during those six weeks stuck in Nevada, a moral outcast needed something to do. And why not spend the time giving up what money would be left over from the divorce? So the state legalized casino gambling as well. The Mormons were on to something with their vision of Vegas as a place to soak travelers; they simply didn’t have the right plan.
&n
bsp; Bugsy Siegel is said to be the great modern pioneer of Vegas, seeing the desert pit stop as a place that could be glossed up and made classy, a town where every lunch-bucket lug could be a Monte Carlo cad for a night. His Las Vegas took hold in 1946, at the fabulous Flamingo, away from the honky-tonk dives around Fremont Street and Block 16. His Las Vegas was women in sequined gowns and blackjack dealers who called you sir. But it was Howard Hughes who took it corporate, showing the way for future junk-bond financiers, theme-park tycoons, and insta-home fantasists. Hughes arrived in 1966, via a midnight ambulance to the Desert Inn. He stayed for just short of a decade, buying hotel properties from the Mob. It was a great spot for a wacked-out billionaire, a state with no corporate or personal income tax, and a local government that needed mere spill from a table to see the way to civic enlightenment. The Strip grew from Mojave dust. The Sands, the Aladdin, the Dunes, the Desert Inn, the Frontier, Caesars Palace, followed by a new airport, a convention center—all of it just west of the old town by the train depot. And, more important for the new powers in town, all of it was outside the city limits. They were free to build the ultimate Western city, the boomtown that never went bust, the something-for-nothing metropolis that blew itself up every few years, the land that welcomed people without a past because it would never have a past.