Into Thick Air (43 page)

I spend the night in an arroyo no wider than myself, beside a catclaw tree—a relative of the mesquite not only in genetic terms but also in form and general fighting spirit. On the horizon hovers a great blister of light—Vegas, still seventy-five miles away.

Eleven hours later, the glow of Vegas is swallowed by the sunrise in a demonstration of who's really the boss. I rise in the 44-degree chill and dress with the speed of a fireman. Breakfast is an apple munched noisily while I poke around in the desert, hip-swiveling to avoid the big puckered pads of the beavertail prickly pear. Then it's back to the highway, where a roadkill coyote lies half-devoured by ravens that reluctantly rise with my approach.

The wind is indifferent, the sun warms my shoulders, and there's nothing I'd rather do than spend the day pedaling down the gentle slope of this valley. There are no towns, just a single café called Rosie's. There's little of what might be called scenery—the mountains are too distant, the plants too modest. Now and then I notice something extraordinary: the shining ribbon of a cassette tape stretched over what seems to be a half-mile, or the long white trumpet blooms of
Datura
, a plant sacred to some Native American peoples—the same genus of psychedelic used by the Mapuche way down in Patagonia.

But mostly I live in the ordinary, glad to be riding under the blue dazzle of the sky, through air so dry it's utterly transparent. Occasionally I suffer faint regrets and recycle old grief, generally eco-political, occasionally personal—things I should have said, or did say and said poorly. Yet, as John Van Dyke wrote in his 1901
The Desert,
“The joy of mere animal existence, the feeling that it is good to be alive and face to face with Nature's self, drives everything else into the background.”

The background stays back until the road begins the plunge to Hoover Dam. As soon as I catch a view of Lake Mead I'm stopped at a military checkpoint, where two young men from the National Guard, in camo fatigues labeled POLLICK and HOFFMAN, watch for terrorists.

“I hate to profile Arab-looking men in rental cars, but that's what it's come to,” says Private Specialist Pollick. We agree that it would be easy to get through: shave, put on thirty pounds, slap a flag decal on your window, and you're an American.

It's truly easy if you're a cyclist; they don't check my bags. I ride down into Black Canyon, stopping only because it's my duty as a journalist, and I've spotted a discarded Exotic College Girls Adult Entertainment Guide for Las Vegas. Ms. Crystal says: “I'm a nineteen-year-old co-ed trying to work my way through college. Call now and I can show you how I earn Extra Credit.” Crystal wears only what appear to be three targets, strategically placed by the printer.

Just before the dam is a second checkpoint, manned by Privates Pollick and Hoffman—the same two soldiers. Following orders, they've moved. Hoffman waves a car through; its bumper sticker was evidence enough of citizenship: “The only good attorney is a dead one.” Next in line is a Lincoln Navigator, and Hoffman says, “Here comes an expensive bomb.”

In this way they grease time and relax, for the notion of blowing up the dam with a bomb in your trunk is preposterous. The great dam will not be so easily moved. I pedal down to and atop the dam; it is a highway as well as a dam. “Please stay off the wall” is stenciled on a low barrier. No problem. But I do edge close and peer over the enormous curve of concrete that must be the most awesome skateboarding opportunity on earth.

Far below, 726 feet down, the river exits the powerhouse in a swirl of foaming whirlpools. Maybe it is the terrible height that reminds me of my fallen friend, Jim Boyer, but there is something else. Jim's great-grandfather, Godfrey Sykes—an engineer, hydrologist, geographer, and question asker—was the first to study the Colorado River below the Grand Canyon. I knew the stories. Before a single dam was built and the great floods throttled, Sykes mapped the delta. He captured and estimated the sediment load, and produced figures that allowed us to understand how this river had carried away everything you don't see when you gawk at the Grand Canyon.

In 1900, Sykes took his family down the river, and wrote in his memoir
A Westerly Trend
: “Indian family parties are what pleased my wife most.
They were often drifting downstream on balsa rafts; men, women, children, dogs, and sometimes chickens.”

They pleased Godfrey, too, especially the “floaters of watermelons,” cargo rafts that were no more than a triangle of willow poles with a score of melons within. “The pilot then tied his clothes, matches, and tobacco, and other effects into a compact bundle which he fastened securely upon the top of his head, took his seat in the water upon the submerged bent pole, said good-bye to his relatives and friends, kicked off from shallow water into the current and then the voyage began.”

Sykes would live through the Great Depression and see Hoover Dam plug the Colorado. “Of course, as an Engineer,” he wrote, “I fully appreciate the magnificent structures that have brought the lower Colorado under control . . . but I must confess that I have much the same sympathy for my old friend, the sometimes wayward, but always interesting, and still unconquered and untrammeled river of the last and preceding centuries, that I have for a bird in a cage.”

The hum of electricity rises from the foot of the dam, the plainsong of a river put to work. When the sun drops behind the rimrock and the canyon falls into shadow, I ride west. The road switchbacks up the canyon wall, under the sizzle of high-voltage lines heading for Boulder City and Las Vegas.

 

AFTER A NIGHT behind a casino—there was no other flat spot in Black Canyon—I wake to a cold wind whipping the creosote and shivering the bursage. I warm up fast during the thousand-foot climb to Boulder City, all the while toying with the idea that I may actually like Las Vegas. Hadn't I feared Cairo, dreaded Volgograd, and fretted over Djibouti Town?

But Las Vegas seems to revel in its reputation as a den of naughtiness and icon of sprawl, growing like a tumor in a place with less natural life support than Lake Havasu City. The Chamber of Commerce boasts that “every hour 24 hours, 365 days a year, another two acres of Las Vegas land are developed for commercial or residential use.”

Admittedly, this desert isn't the prettiest—no saguaros like fluted columns, no trees with green bark. It's gravel plains and the brave green
leaves of creosote, which aren't much larger than a fly. When I roll into Boulder City for breakfast, I'm not surprised that most every home has a lawn. There's a prim and perfectly maintained downtown, preserved in situ since the 1930s, when it was the federal work camp for the dam.

I have a cranberry waffle at the counter of the Coffee Cup Café. A big soft guy with trusting basset-hound eyes sits next to me and orders the special, chicken-fried steak. It's a startling mountain of food, or rather a basin and range of meat and gravy. He digs in, pauses, then explains, “I only get this once a week.”

Joe Fernandez is from Tucson, and he wants to go back. “A friend of mine calls this place the ashtray desert. He's right—nothing but gravel. Looks like ashes.”

What about Lake Mead?

“Sure, if you want to watch kids throw rocks at the suckerfish. But there's better free stuff in Vegas. At the Bellagio you can watch a boat come out on a track, filled with those New Orleans party dancers. They throw out pearl necklaces. They're just plastic.”

The man in the next seat discreetly offers a correction. “That's the Rio, not the Bellagio.”

“That's right,” says Fernandez. He glances at his multifunction watch on a Velcro band. “I've got to run down to the Home Depot—you could put your bike in my truck and I' ll show you around.”

It's a green Ford F-150. I guess the year, 1977, and Fernandez is delighted. I don't bother to ask where the Home Depot is. We head toward Vegas, down a valley like a dry lake bed, with Fernandez muttering, “Ashes, just ashes.”

The city is big, and Fernandez immediately worries for me. “Just remember to get out of North Vegas before dark. It's not so bad—kind of like South Tucson—but they've got the Bloods and Crips.”

The suburb of Henderson (“Where Everyone Has Fun!”) is tile-roofed stucco garages with attached living quarters. We pass the Home Depot, but Fernandez is in a paternal mood and wishes to show me the bounds of safety. He drives to downtown Vegas and lays out the rules. “Don't go north of the Lady Luck. Don't go west of the freeway.”

Fernandez lets me off at the Stardust Hotel and Casino, which he designates “the beginning of the safe Strip.” It's an easy enough landmark to remember, with Wayne Newton permanently on its marquee. I immediately park the bike and peek inside the casino. Coming from the desert, it's like being drop-kicked into a pinball machine, a sonic stew of slot machines worked by hundreds of God Bless America shirts. I stare and think: we gave the natives trinkets and bright things, and they seemed entirely satisfied.

My free map/tourist brochure claims that there are “over 100 sharks and deadly crocs” at the Mandalay Bay, so I opt for the Somerset Motel, a couple blocks off the Strip. It's a quiet relic from the sixties, with no slot machines. Across the street is Meskerem, an Ethiopian restaurant where I feel comfortable. The clientele is entirely Ethiopian taxi drivers.

After a meal of
injera
and
wot
I head back to my room without prowling the Strip. Tomorrow. For now I open the Yellow Pages to find a bike shop. Assuming I reach Death Valley, I will thereafter ride to the closest town, catch a bus to Vegas, and fly home. I'll need a bike box, and wish to get a bike shop to hold one for me.

While doing so, I'm easily distracted by the ninety-two yellow pages devoted to Entertainment, Adult. “Bored Blonde Housewives Gone Wild (Full Service).” “Live Grateful Third World Women.” “Barely Legal Secretaries in Short Skirts.” Does any other industry come close to this page count? Not Automobiles, not Physicians, not Insurance. Sex is trumped only by the 147 pages of Attorneys, including, “Mainor and Harris. Putting the Personal Back into Personal Injury.”

The next day I ride around non-Strip Vegas admiring the massive billboards of Wayne Newton. His teeth are so perfect that he appears to have only two very large teeth, upper and lower jaw, like a parrot fish. After I return to the Somerset, I read, write, and eat
injera
and
wot
until 8 PM. Then it's time for the Strip.

Five hours later I return. As Jimi Hendrix asked, Are you experienced?

Yes. Now I have seen gondolas with seat belts plying chlorinated canals on the second floor of a casino. I have seen very small Guatemalan women standing under bas-relief cupids, handing out pictures and phone numbers
of Tender Young Girls who can be in my room in twenty minutes. I have pretended to be dismayed by the endless gimmicks, yet found myself cursing when I ran out of film as the volcano erupted in front of the Mirage. I have seen floral arrangements the size of refrigerators, casinos whose far horizon could not be discerned, and fountains with hydraulics capable of washing one hundred buses in ten seconds.

I saw them in the company of gap-toothed bikers with greasy ponytails and women dressed entirely in vinyl; Appalachian hill folk and Armani robot suits; newlywed brides still in white lace and gum-scrapers kneeling on the lovely mosaics in the Bellagio—an almost regal palace betrayed, in the end, by the blinking slot machines and legions of silent moms slipping in $10 bills.

Except for the slot machine ladies, most of them looked happy enough, as if they had discovered the poetry of Eduardo Galeano.

I hope they slept as long as I do, until the phone rings at 10 AM. It's my wife, Sonya, holding the phone so I may hear Rudy say, “Where are you now, Daddy?” Sonya says the kids don't miss me. Thank goodness, because I miss them.

I shower and pack while the television tells me that I can get Cipro antibiotic for the panic price of $300, in the event that somebody sends me a letter containing anthrax. A crazy person sent such a letter, killing a man in Florida, and now 270 million Americans are very worried. Of course it's easy to worry in Las Vegas, to be suspicious. Everything for the tourist is fake, from the Eiffel Tower to the “grilled” stripes on your burger. Worse, I remember that I donated my Cipro stash—free from Dr. Pellerito—to Kamil in Djibouti. I hope he's making a killing selling them on the Internet.

I am charmed by the way the bike comes alive the moment it moves, kept upright by the blind determination of spinning wheels to maintain
their vertical plane. Turning from the Strip onto Sahara is not a matter of twisting the handlebars. I merely lean, and with the slightest tilt of the front wheel the bike turns itself beneath me, then straightens as I do. Together we aim west. We've only two more mountains to cross before Death Valley, and we reach the base of the first range by dusk.

No matter what the day may bring, the bike will carry me to the place nobody's noticed, at least not from a car. This time it's an arroyo of gravel and cobble 2,000 feet above the city and 3,000 feet below a wall of white and red sandstone. It's called Calico Ridge, and it smolders in the late sun as I open my Mickey's malt liquor. Dinner's ready in ten minutes: Lipton stroganoff with an actual carrot added by the chef. Master of a minor universe, I kill the stove and listen to it ping as the metal cools and contracts. Then the sun is gone, and there is only the song of the night insects. They're not my species but still more attractive than the Las Vegas Yellow Pages. I think we' ll spend the night together.