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Road Trip IV - Welcome to Las Vegas Posting Date: Jun 30 2008 12:32AM Where have you been? This is week four of five in this special series of columns. Better go back and read the previous three columns, then join us back here once you’ve caught up to the rest of the class.
As my faithful travelling companion and I motored my mother’s gleaming 1989 grey Toyota Corolla gently into Zion National Park in southwest Utah, the air filled with tides of white fluff. It was like driving a Toyota in a snow-globe. This wasn’t the only bit of surrealism. In Zion, the Virgin River runs green, like Crayola iced tea.
Above the river so green there lies something called the Upper Emerald Pool which we knew was important because of the signs. So up we hiked. And hiked. And hiked. If there had been a Middle Emerald Pool, I guarantee we would have stopped there and turned back, but no such luck.
When we finally reached our Emerald Pool, we knew instantly that every foot of the climb was worth it. The Upper Emerald Pool is round, green tinted, shallow and the size of Godzilla’s bathtub. The pool lies on the softest and whitest sand you ever squished between your toes and the water is held in place by a perfect stone wall that stabs two hundred feet into the sky and wraps gently around the pool. The water in the pool comes exclusively from a tiny stream that vapourizes instantly as it falls over the top of this wall. I waded barefoot into the icy water and let the warm sun and the chill mist fall on my shoulders.
As we left Zion for Las Vegas, I began to think about the way people act inside the boundaries of national parks. Almost everyone smiles and says “Hello” as they pass on the trails. In fact, people are just plain friendly. They ask questions like, “Where y’all from?” and “Beautiful, isn’t it?” There’s no rushing, no competition, just the enjoyment of deep breaths and broad vistas. Everyone is meek compared to the magnificence of nature.
And then there’s Vegas.
Las Vegas was ninety-three degrees American, but it felt like twenty degrees Canadian because there was no humidity and a desert gale was blowing sand through the city like microscopic bullets.
On the Las Vegas Strip, the beggars sat on lawn chairs, under umbrellas, drinking cold beer and asking for spare change. The hotels all had speakers hidden in the sidewalk so they could talk you into spending money. The streets had no painted lines, just coloured bumps like brail for your steel belted radials. There was a sign in front of Caesar’s Palace that had Julio Iglesias’s name spelled out in letters big enough to sleep six. If you could have gone into a laboratory to create something exactly opposite in every way to Zion National Park, this was it. (And remember, this was like a decade before they started building casinos to look like entire other cities, like New York, Paris and Winnipeg.)
Caesar’s Palace, for example, greeted us with large, muscular gentlemen who tried to look tough while wearing skimpy, gold lamé centurion outfits. In one shopping mall, every store had an armed security guard. Two blocks away, there was a store called – I swear – “Guns Guns Guns.” I dared my travelling companion to go in and ask what they sell.
At night, Vegas comes alive with lights and fountains and lurking young men who look like paperboys but hand passers-by colour catalogues of the local prostitutes.
Las Vegas: the city where total excess is just a start.
I thought Las Vegas was the pinnacle of geographic comedy, until the next day when we drove to Lake Mead which is, cross my heart, ten times funnier than Vegas. Lake Mead looks as if someone spilled a bjillion gallons of blue paint on the desert. There is no sand, no vegetation and lots of cars and trucks driving with two wheels in the water. It’s very much like a watering hole in Africa, but if you replaced all the wildebeests with rednecks driving dune buggies and drunken parties on house boats. It’s just like that.
Next Time: Arizona Dreamin’ |
