Las Vegas to Hoover Dam, etc.: When we woke up in the
morning we felt like it was time to get the hell out of dodge. Not so easy. The roads were labyrinthine and also we took some time looking for a place to get cheap coffee. So we spent far longer than was comfortable trying to leave the desert. No plants anywhere. Mountains that were effectively just rock and
dirt. Got the feeling here even more
than in Yellowstone that Nature was trying to destroy us. In Yellowstone I’d felt like Nature was
trying to squash us out deliberately.
Hard to explain. Like the
rainstorm: maybe it seemed like some kind of cosmic retribution for our
encroachment on Holy Land. Here Nature
seemed out to get us but only in a general, uncaring way. Nature was out to get everything:
plant, animal, car, person. Nothing
could last in this heat. The sun leaning
down on the land with its full weight and crushing anything with the gall to be
outside for long. A Vegas life would be one without outdoor sports. One of anxious
driving in constant engine-busting conditions and days spent inside watching TV buffered from the heat by central air. All the
houses here looked the same as if they’d been constructed in one fell
swoop. Probably they had been. Maybe they'd collapse together too. Each was
sidled up to the next in an incredibly unappealing aesthetic. But why not maximize the space? It wasn’t like anyone took pride in their
lawns here. There were no lawns. Just a lot of really hot rock and really hot dust and poor cars trying not to melt.
Drove out of LV finally
and went to the Hoover Dam kind of on a whim.
We entered and paid $10 for parking (Big Government strikes again!) and
wove around the parking complex looking for a space. We saw one but a bus had JUST doubleparked
over the line onto it and this pissed Tim off to no end (“He should have to pay
for TWO spots!”). We finally found parking on the top of the
complex and overall that wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened. At least it would be easy to remember where
we’d parked the car. Tim and I slathered
SPF50 all over ourselves but Tim didn’t think he’d have any luck with it. Resigned to the fact that as a "ginger" he
WOULD get sunburned no matter what. I
was more hopeful and even took the opportunity to conduct an experiment: I put
one type of sunscreen on my left arm and another on my right. Both were SPF50. Would there be an appreciable difference between
arm color at the end of the day? Only
time would tell.
We took the elevator
down to the main floor of the Hoover Dam.
Pretty crowded but not unbearable.
Tim pointed out, I think correctly, that we were the only
English-speaking people there. Walked
towards the Dam and saw a beautiful Art Deco sculpture in bronze: two angels
(though they were more humanoid than angelic, more muscular than your
run-of-the-mill angels. Clearly they’d
been doing THEIR interval workouts) holding their wings up straight as if
referees signifying a successful extra point attempt. They were probably ten feet tall from toe to
wingtip. Very impressive. The place was Art Deco all over and just as
glorious. Whereas LV gave the impression
of bare survival in the wilderness, life spurred on by the sheer force of
avarice, the Hoover Dam was humanity harnessing Nature, putting it
to work for the common good. Hoover Dam was a triumph of will and spirit, LV an ongoing death rattle © AMT. I'm being ridiculously bombastic but the point remains: LV = sad; HD = inspiring.
We walked the perimeter
of the Dam and saw the reservoir and it was very impressive. I, though usually deathly afraid of heights,
felt fine as long as I kept myself at arm’s length from the safety
railing. However this distance combined
with my leaning-away-from-the-Dam posture left me hazardously close to the road
that ran over the Dam. In all I was
probably in greater danger walking this way than I would have been
had I like jumped up on the railing and tried to balance (which I saw some
people doing). HD apparently
straddles the line between Nevada and Arizona and there were huge cement pylons
on each end of the Dam that said respectively “Nevada Time” and “Arizona
Time.” Lent itself to the classic joke: “Hey, do you know what time it is?
ARIZONA TIME!” etc. Walked back
across the Dam when we’d seen all we needed to.
Marveled at the fact that the whole project was apparently started in
1931 and finished in 1935. That was the
political climate back then. Such that
FDR could be like, “Hey, you guys want to build a giant dam to power this whole
region? Yeah? OK cool, get started on that. Make sure you show me all the blueprints.” Tim went to the bathroom and I just hung out
in the lobby (the bathroom had a lobby) which was crazy Art Deco. Walls and floor of some obsidian
knock-off. Or maybe real obsidian. Who
could tell? Just loved the idea of some
designer assigned to bathroom duty being like, “This will be my masterpiece.”
Left Hoover Dam. In the line to the elevator saw a woman wiping the sweat off her neck and armpits with paper towels. That seemed the least graceful option if the alternative were just sweating. No
appreciable difference between left and right arm color. Boring. Sorry.
Headed towards the Grand
Canyon. We’d kind of screwed up by failing
to book a Grand Canyon campsite in advance and I called two potential sites and
neither had openings on such short notice. Not entirely unexpected. Freudian Me says that we probably wanted to avoid camping altogether. Some "mistake." As we moved
farther away from Nevada driving conditions became more forgiving. Less desert, more colossal stone up-juttings
in the land. More trees, if just a few
more. Listened to more J. Rufus Fears. Ate lunch at Subway, at my insistence. Tim and I have been disagreeing all trip as
to the health content of this or that restaurant chain. To make a long story short, my contention is that Subway, in addition to being cheap, is not AS BAD for you as many other chain restaurants, though it may taste bad. Subway makes an effort. Subway tries. Anyway, I will never, never be convinced that a cold, cheese-less sub at the 'Bway is effectively as bad for me as, say, a Pizza Hut pizza or a burger from In-N-Out. Anyway, we ate a decent, if not
totally good-for-us lunch at the ‘Bway and headed to Grand Canyon. Somewhere down the line I took over driving
and was having a hell of a time keeping my eyes open. Not sleepy: the sunscreen fumes were
irritating me. We got to GC and saw signs for “Extreme Fire
Danger” and wondered if it was the danger that was extreme or the fire
itself. The latter was much more promising. Paid the obligatory $25 (BIG GOVERNMENT!) and
found parking and got out of the car and walked towards the Canyon and…just
lighted upon this enormous hole in the ground.
Not to belittle the experience at all – just to say that the Canyon came out of
nowhere. There we were, suddenly staring
out at the GC. It was huge. Corroborating Louisiana Man’s description it
literally did take the breath away and there was gasping all around. It was shadowed in the setting sun and we
could see the grooves and details of every arroyo. We could see straight down to the Canyon’s bottom
where (we overheard someone say) water was running. No picture could do it justice though we took
quite a few. After the initial view
(called “Mather Point,” I think?) we walked around and found the “Amphitheater” which
was an amphitheater-shaped rock formation that opened onto a pier or
cliff. May have been manmade. We both walked out onto the pier
(it was sufficiently spacious so as not to set off my Heights! alarm) and got a
tremendous view of the Canyon. There’s
not much use trying to describe in writing what the thing looked like. Just that it stretched on and on and
everywhere you looked you could see some detail clear as day and that detail,
you’d realize, would have to be miles away from you. I dunno.
You’d probably do better to search Google Images for pictures of the
place. But even then!
We spent a pathetically
short amount of time at GC (30 minutes tops, I think) but decided it was best
to head towards Flagstaff. Before we
left I washed my hands and eyes and sunglasses in the GC bathroom sink hoping
the sunscreen fumes would go away. They
sort of did. We had, as usual, some
trouble finding our car but located it relatively quickly. I drove to
Flagstaff and when we arrived was adamant that we not eat dinner at a chain
restaurant, whether 'Bway or anything else. Tim insisted that chains were all
we’d find here but I had more faith. There were trees and where there were
trees we might find original human culture. Unfortunately Tim was right; there wasn't much in the area. Maybe if we’d looked harder we’d have found
something.
Before heading out for dinner
I did an interval workout. Had to find
a vacant space where to do it and had quite a bit of trouble in this. All was parking lot. Around the Motel 6 were renters hanging out
on ledges yelling to each other and propping their doors open with garbage
cans. One old man sitting in a fold-out
chair outside his door as if this were a common occurrence for him, as if this were just how he
lived, as if he’d brought his fold-out chair specifically to sit outside his $60 Motel 6 room and people-watch. Didn’t he
realize that HE was the main attraction?
Tim took the car to Little
Caesar’s and I walked to a local grocery store. Both of us got enormous meals and I for one almost ate mine in its entirety (some fruit and a WHOLE ROTISSERIE CHICKEN). Tim gave up before he could finish his (all points: ME). On our Motel 6 beds (college dorm room-style
low-to-the-grounders) we watched some
American Gladiators-type show on NBC and caught up on some supplementary readings. Tim read from Cormac McCarthy's THE
CROSSING. I read some from FEAR &
LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS. Tim read some FDR speeches
(awesome) and I read, finally (we couldn’t get it to load anywhere else),
Eugene V. Debs’ bit on the “worthy” vs. “unworthy” poor. What a phenomenal writer. Bed around 1:30 (for me at least).
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