The Shadow Catcher

I’ve driven this eighty-mile stretch between the Mad Greek Restaurant in Baker and Las Vegas half a dozen times; never, before, at night, and I have to say the night drive is the easier of the two, less tedious, more reflective. You’ve got the sixteen-wheelers riding up your back but you’ve got them in the daytime, too, although in the day they’re less jacked up on caffeine or amphetamines or their own personal nighttime desert demon.

Vegas. Upward of thirty million tourists leave their money with casinos, on the tables, in hotel rooms, at the restaurants every year — to the tune of thirty billion dollars. Gaming is the city’s leading earner, followed very closely by tourism, construction and the military. It’s no coincidence that in Nevada ADAPT OR DIE, the desert’s scorching motto, is also capitalism’s slogan, and it’s easy to forget as you drive into the state how much land has been co-opted by the federal government as a good place to detonate a bomb and shoot at targets with nothing between you and the bull’s eye for miles and miles around whether you’re standing with a rocket launcher on your shoulder or gunning the horizon from your F-16. Nevada is the state that owns the trademark Ground Zero, for good reason. Between 1962 and 1992 eight hundred nuclear devices were detonated here, in the atmo, before they started “testing” underground. To the north, northeast and the northwest of the city, tracts of land larger than Rhode Island and Delaware are owned and operated by the Feds. Nellis Air Force Base, the National Atomic Test Site, Area 51—our federal government owns more land in Nevada than in any other state — nearly eighty percent of it. So as Las Vegas tourism expands, so does the need to house its service community — the croupiers and waitresses, the spa receptionists, the nurses, palm readers, the cosmeticians — and you can see the spill of endless stucco homes and red-roofed planned communities flooding across the valley, threatening the boundaries and the no-go zones of the bomb and gunnery ranges.

Like Los Angeles, Las Vegas is a horizontal construct, but Clark County (named for William Clark, another railroad mogul) has knocked against Uncle Sam’s wall on all four sides and has nowhere to go in this new century but up. Adapt or die. The existence of the military in Nevada proscribes how the state can manage its expansion and construction which in turn is in demand because of tourism. Which has its roots in the dirt of gaming. No wonder people come — it’s all so freaking improbable. Triple-digit temperatures are not uncommon five months of the year and yet this is the city that fills sixteen of the twenty largest hotels in the world each season. The city where New York and Napa Valley celebrity chefs come to clone their branded brandades and boudins. Come to test their bombes. Growth fuels growth, that’s what this city tells you from afar, If I can do it, against these dry as bonefuck desert odds, then imagine what you can do inside my magic circle.

Thirty million tourists is a lot of people every year and even from out here on I-15, with the megawatt attractor beam signaling space from the top of the thirteen-acres-of-glass pyramid of the Luxor in the distance, I can understand this city’s calculated spike to our adrenaline. Even endangered bats with complicated sonar reflexes cannot resist the Luxor’s artificial highway to heaven, so how are we supposed to feel about it? The beam is huge and now NASA is telling us it wasn’t true about the Great Wall of China being seen from the moon but — hold your helmets — this light beam from the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas is. Who wouldn’t want to come here just to witness that? To say nothing of the fact that if you can’t afford a trip to Venice, guess what. You can ride a gondola without ever passing Customs. You can eat a Nathan’s hot dog on a fake New York City street. Enjoy moules frites under the Eiffel Tower. So I get it, I really do. Ersatz experience, but, still: experience. Not for me, but, still: I understand the appeal of this Strip-ped down impersonation. I understand why thirty million people come here every year.

What I can’t imagine is my father ever coming here.

As I knew him, I would have to say. As I knew him for the last, and lasting, time.

Which was more than thirty years ago.