Progress 49: Day 23: Las Vegas, Nevada, to Sedona, Arizona

Nice night for a stroll

Tuesday 15 October – Las Vegas, I believe, does not care for people walking around it. Its hotels and casinos love people walking around them, and spread the restaurants and slot machines and jewelry shops and aqua massage stations and tattoo parlors around about 29 acres and three floors. However, you are not to step foot outdoors, unless to use the covered walkway to the super-slots-center. Nonetheless, last night I put on my high-heeled shoes with the silver heels and strolled about a mile of potholes, past the dingy little alley called Debbie Reynolds Drive (Debbie Reynolds deserves better! Someone start a Facebook protest!), and into Piero’s Italian Cuisine, which at 9:30 was trying to shut down for the night. But the headwaiter decided they could manage for me, and discussed mushrooms briefly, then salad and wine. I ate extremely well for just $86.35 including tax and tip. You see, since it was so late we didn’t bother with a menu, where the prices might have been. All I knew for sure was that the $8 glass of wine was priced at $15, and Pia Zadora performs there three or four nights a week. After giving the lovely service persons all my money, I hobbled the long mile back to Circus Circus, awaking the next morning to blisters on my blisters, and walked softly, in semi-tied sneakers, to the free parking garage.

Not ancient Rome, but Vegas

Not Disneyland, but Vegas

Las Vegas in the morning is far less alarming and more amusing than Las Vegas at night. It’s still not something I can absorb – it makes no evolutionary sense – but at least it’s not blinking. I drove down the Strip, shaking the GPS, then back up the Strip, in accordance with the sun’s position and my desire to go north. South Las Vegas is where all the over-the-top hotels are (the Palazzo is broadcasting ‘The Girl from Ipanema,’ the Miracle Mile shopping center is playing ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ and Margaritaville has on ‘Benny and the Jets’); North Las Vegas is where the scary motels, cheap wedding chapels, city administration buildings and the Museum of the Mob are. Being neither the type of woman who marries nor the type who finds any charm in thugs for hire, I found no need to stop. There’s also a Museum of Neon, but I’d rather spend my time in Sedona.

I said not Paris.

Not Paris, but Vegas

I should like, also, a new James Bond movie set in Las Vegas. He could sink the Venetian, drop a villain into Mandalay Bay, hang-glide from the fake Eifel Tower at Paris Paris, and generally blow up the place. Maybe I should try to get Steve Wynn interested in a new concept hotel: a desert theme! With native plantings, solar panels, prickly-pear facials, a Cowboy Café (beans and cactus on sourdough bread) and rattlesnakes in the courtyard.

Not....... possibly anything but Las Vegas.

The dividing line, approximately,
between south and north Las Vegas

Ten miles from Las Vegas

About ten miles outside the city, I am immersed in desert. It’s not like this on the coasts, or in the upper mid-west. There, ten miles outside the city is usually still suburbs, and the bigger cities stretch their high-density areas for twenty miles and more. Here, I pulled off the freeway somewhere near (but not too near!) the Hoover Dam, and with trucks roaring by fifty feet behind me, I could experience the near-silence of desert in autumn. Despite my propensity for water, I find desert landscapes compelling, fascinating, beautiful. They are never comfortable, though. I noticed, standing in this disused dirt road, that no part of me wants to get too far from the car here. Unlike in the South Dakota prairie, where even aware of the real danger of that environment I still felt a pull to immerse myself, to get lost – here I feel awkward, an intruder. The setting is too alien for me to be drawn into it.

If you land here on Star Trek, you know you're in trouble.

Back on the road, zipping through Arizona, I noticed the median strip with real attention. This is probably at least partly because the broader scene was relentlessly unchanging. But these closer views – not just the mid- and far-distant hills and mountains, but the ground on the edges of the highway, just a few feet from my turning wheels – warrant attention. In desert country (this may be high desert; I’m not sure where the distinction happens) in October, these strips are sandy, with red-brown, nearly true-red and pale tan grasses, and small bushes, maybe eight inches to three feet tall. The bushes are green: bright, light green; dull, pale green; pine-dark green. There’s no Scott’s Miracle Gro Lawn green in the bunch. Many of them are thick with yellow flowers. These are not daffodils, forsythia or dandelions, but those shades of yellow.

I believe that's the Colorado River, center left.

So that’s fascinating to observe for miles and miles and miles. And then, I must confess to becoming bored. Somewhere outside of Kingman, Arizona, driving just a hair over the 75mph speed limit on interstate route 40 east, I thought, ‘Ho hum.’

This is the perfect time to practice knee-driving.

You remember Jerry Harrison’s post-Talking Heads album Casual Gods, and the great track ‘Rev it Up,’ yes? “Steering with her knees/She’s got both hands free... She said, ‘Let’s ride./Rev it up rev it up little boy and ride.’” I’ve tried this a couple times in the past for less than one second per time, but I’m with Harrison’s narrator on this one: “Screeches and swerves/screwing up my nerves.” This big, wide, straight and nearly-empty highway, however, allows me the chance adjust my technique somewhat. It’s all about foot placement, although I think denim-clad knees, versus any of the many slipperier fabrics, are helpful, too.

This was before the repetitive-scenery part.

After a few bouts of practice, hands hovering by the wheel to take over with alacrity anytime a truck heaves into view, I can confidently say that, given my current ability and rate of improvement, knee-driving will not be my talent should I ever get roped into the Miss America contest or something. However, it is not the thing I do worst in the world. What is the thing I do worst in the world? A few months ago, I might have said trusting myself. Today, I’m more inclined to say playing any musical instrument. I think people who can pick up a guitar and strum a few chords without even a lesson are like miracles of nature.

When a highway exit arose to break up the landscape a bit, and one of the signs advertised a Dunkin’ Donuts nearby, and I suddenly craved a doughnut, I knew this desert landscape is legitimately mesmerizing. My first job with taxes taken out was at a Dunkin’ Donuts, and I no longer like doughnuts. I do not like the ingredients, the taste, the nutritional values, the thick coating of sugar, the gummy texture or the smell of doughnuts. I do not like the stench of a Dunkin’ Donuts, which believe me imbues itself into your polyester uniform, your cotton undergarments, your skin and your hair and even your sneakers after a four-hour shift. My craving a doughnut is a clear indicator that all is not well in my personal space.

That train is carrying grease to the Dunkin' Donut.

Fortunately, the road was climbing, and things started to mix up a bit more. At 5,000 feet, I was bereft by the sight of a dead bobcat, at the side of the road by the base of a small mesa. It broke my heart. Even dead, it was absolutely beautiful; perfect form for its function. A bit further on, there was a small herd of white cows, who were probably perfectly content to have bobcats dying by the road. And not to get morbid or anything, but within another few miles there was the mangled corpse of some furry mammal, maybe a coyote. On the plus side, when critters start showing up dead on the highways, that’s usually an indicator that there’s a healthy population of them in the area. Fingers crossed...

Just as I started thinking about closing the sunroof, a snow-topped mountain emerged from the scrubland, about 30 miles from Flagstaff. The scrub had yielded to healthy and plentiful bushes, I think Manzanita, neatly spaced as if they’d been planted that way. Then the pines had joined the mix, and dominated it by the time I reached Flagstaff – it was like a pine forest there. Flagstaff is at about 6,000 feet above sea level. South of the city, the pines got shorter, the Manzanita came back, I saw more exposed rock – and I opened the sunroof again. And then I turned off the interstate and headed toward Sedona, and within a few miles I saw Bell Rock and Cathedral Rocks and red, red rocks fantastically eroded and started to dance around in my seat.

Red rocks rising

Big sky, big moon; both good

Here are my rules for desert walking: 1) watch for snakes; 2) don’t brush against cacti; 3) keep an eye on the sun. By the time I’d checked in to the semi-fancy Hilton my credit-card points paid for, with a slight glitch sorted out by credit-card company and Hilton desk clerk working assiduously to ensure my happiness (they hire the right people and then train them well, and I so appreciate that) and comping my ‘resort fee’ even though it wasn’t anyone’s fault, but at $30 a day for the ‘resort fee’ I’m not saying no – the sun was starting its sneak toward Asia. I bumped down a red-dirt road to a parking space, fee machine not operating due to federal government shutdown, and leaped out for a lap around Cathedral Rocks’s shortest trail. Everywhere I looked, I wanted to capture the view on my brain forever, and in my guts and heart and soul and whatever else there is. How did Montana get the copyright on ‘big sky?’ The Arizona sky is gigantic.