I went to Las Vegas for the first time when I was about 22 years old, it was the first vacation I ever went on alone. My parents and I had toured the south west in one of our yearly family vacations when I was a kid, but Vegas was conspicuously absent. Something about it being hell, probably. I went because I had a free plane ticket for reasons I no longer remember, and I had a week long break from my job. My first real paid vacation at my first real full-time job. It didn’t take much thinking for me to decide to go to the desert. Before I go any further, I have to distinguish myself from most of the people who go to Las Vegas. I wasn’t going to gamble, to screw a hooker, to get really drunk, spend a lot of money, and party. Although I would end up doing some of these things on my trip, my plan was to spend one night in the city of sin and then travel around to a bunch of national parks and trails.
In actuality, when I went I had no plans save a car to pick up and a vegas hotel for the first night. This is a zen-like way of traveling that I suspect can only be accomplished in the complete embracing of unembarrassed aloneness. One could probably not convince a family, a friend, a lover, to take on a mad and impulsive mission like this, nor would anybody want to. After a night at the Stratosphere (obligatory Vegas hotel gimmick: it’s really tall!) I head out of town in the morning. Over midnight omlettes, with an array of maps and brochures stolen from the gift store or taken from the lobby I semi-organized myself. I would go to the Hoover Dam first, a famous landmark which I had know the name of but not the location, nor even the significance of (it turns out it’s near las vegas). I would then proceed through Arizona and Utah in one night to what looked to be the most impressive nearby national park, Zion Canyon. The drive was exhausting and thrilling, driving there is like being on a roller-coaster you have to steer yourself. By the time night fell I was almost to my destination, but had begun to alarm myself with my observations. Observations like; I haven’t seen a hotel in a hundred miles, it might even be getting to be too late to get a room, perhaps I’ve overestimated my capacity to find a hotel on the road or Utah’s capacity to provide one, and there are no street lights here so I really can’t see anything anyway. Finally I did find something, basically a largish house turned bed-and-breakfast, where a kind and elderly couple who I had roused from either sleep or a particularly pacifying board game slowly showed me every room of the house and all its amenities before allowing me to settle for the night. The next day was one of those healthy days where you do everything an active young person is supposed to do; eat a hearty waffle breakfast, hoist yourself up a spectacularly and breathtakingly difficult chain-linked canyon wall trail, breathe the high mountain air, and, tipping your hat, be on your way. While I was exhaustedly limping back down this notoriously difficult trail I crossed the path of a mormon family. They were all blonde and smiles, healthy and beautiful, singing a song about jesus. Not one of them was out of breath.
On my way out of Utah I encountered one of the most interesting natural phenomena I have ever personally witnessed. The sky darkened and clouds roiled overhead, in a way that I had learned long ago meant a storm was coming. Then the strange thing happened, straining and hefting its weight around the sky made a big show of things. It raised its’ winds and summoned clouds to dim the powerful desert sun. Heaving and wrenching, with lightening streaking out of it in an impressive show of force and effort, the storm tried to do its thing. The clouds made a valiant effort but only a few drops fell on the parched earth. I guess it looks that way for a reason. The storm’s writhing was not in vain, because it did manage to raise a moving maze of dust, buffeting and coating all things in orange and brown. It was in these conditions, my car a pillar of salt, that I went back, driving past Vegas on a different route, all the way to the city of prostitution, Pahrump.If you’ve ever gone to a city that has no reasonable explanation for why people would visit it and stayed in one of its hotels you’ll be able to imagine instantly what my Pahrump lodgings were like. It was one of those long, low, meandering rows of identical rooms sealed inside a stuco snake of a building. Everything about my room yelled at me, “what are you doing here!?“ or whispered genericness. At the creature’s head is its mouth, the check in desk, and its brain, a rack of brochures, maybe a TV tuned to something that no one would watch deliberately. The kind of thing that your eyes are drawn too and rest on for no reason other than its production of hypnotic colors and sounds. Brochure racks became a great friend to me during my trip. Previously when traveling I had always known what to do, either because someone else with some kind of life experience was planning to trip, or I had done my research. In Nevada I just went to whatever attractions were savy enough to purchase a billboard, brochure, or banner. I was the ultimate advertising market.
All this serves as an extended and unnecessary explanation for why I went to a brothel. What took me to Pahrump was, of course, its notoriety as being one of only two counties in the United States where prostitution is legal. Not to say I wanted to sleep with a prostitute, nor did I, it was just a kind of curiosity, a desire to see what such a place was like. Well, if you guessed that as a town, Pahrump was depressing in the extreme, you’d be pretty close but not exactly right. It was not only depressing, but actually had a sense of depression about it. Sand covered tractors sat disheveled in front of buildings that could just as easily been warehouses as homes. Billboards hung grey and torn in the sky, advertisers largely unwilling to abandon their messages to the winds. The stores looked like, if you entered them they’d be dimly lit and all of their stores would be held in glass jars or wooden crates and covered with dust 40 years thick. The dozing store clerk would startle upon seeing you and, leaning back in his chair behind the counter, eye you from beneath the brim of his hat while you birdlike picked through the merchandise, as if to say “don’t worry about it, I know you’re not going to buy anything, no one does”. I only speak from imagination because, of course, I didn’t go into any of the stores. Once you’re in one of these places that are infamous but not particularly interesting you are left wondering what to do. If you’ve ever been to 4 corners, the place where the 4 southwestern states meet in one place, you’ll be familiar with the feeling.”Well, here I am standing in 4 states at once, what do I do now?” It is an attraction that is attracting until the very second you are there.So, left grasping at distraction to avoid sinking into the Pahrump nature, I decided to visit the “Brothel Museum”, which actually should have been named the “brothel, museum” since it was an actual operating whorehouse. I would like to describe it in loving detail, the folksy porch with glitter splayed over it, the red oak door with the vaguely sexual knocker, the lush sexualized carpet, but the fact is I can’t remember any of it. Truth be told, once I realized the situation I was in, I was terrified. It was unnerving and otherworldly and when I try to remember the place I remember feelings rather than facts, a rarity for me. I imagine it in my head as the most typical looking bordello you could imagine. A place where highwaymen and cowboys kicked off their dusty boots to be fanned with peacock feathers by buster blondes while drinking whisky sours in iced glasses. I remember it being very red, with a lot of wood. A couch, maybe. I have the feeling that maybe even my few physical remembrances of the place are more about a conglomeration of various famous brothels from television and movies. I couldn’t even tell you if they had a staircase. What a do remember is a bell being rung (or maybe it was an intercom or even a walkie talkie) and a group of women lining up in front of me all wearing very little clothes. They asked me if I had a girl in mind or if I wanted to choose one from the lineup. I have never, even in my childhood felt more like a child than I did at that moment.
“I’m just here for the museum” I think I must have said.
I can tell you one thing, it was definitely not a situation in which I would have been able to have sex, even if I had been willing to. I stunned around the museum, really just a largish room off from the viewing station, or whatever you’d call it, and glazed at various antique bustiers, handcuffs and dildos that had lost most of their flash and seduction, until I felt I had stayed for long enough to not seem rude, and then stumbled into the bar. I then had a conversation with a prostitute over a rum and coke. No, wait, they didn’t have rum, which I found very odd. A whisky and coke. Although I wish I could describe the conversation in detail, I am very hazy on it. I think we might have talked about her career aspirations and mine. A lot of them lounged, chatting up potential customers and sitting on barstools, smoking and drinking in outfits that seemed to invite urinary tract infections. Truth be told I was very out of it. The air was dizzying and the atmosphere swarmed around me, making it impossible for me to stay for very long. As much as my liberal attitude dictates that prostitution ought not to be illegal, I couldn’t feel much of anything in a place where people sold themselves. It is an eerie thing, like a morgue. I got back to my hotel, reverse following the handwritten directions I had jotted down on a piece of branded “sleep inn” stationary. Then next morning I wanted to get out of Pahrump, quickly. The hotel, unsurprisingly, had no home made mixed berry currant with waffles. Surprisingly, it didn’t have any breakfast of any kind. I didn’t care, I wanted to leave. It was under these circumstances that I drove to the desert that I almost died at.
I had learned my lesson from the parched hike the day before, so before I headed into the desert I stopped and purchased one whole bottle of water. This, I thought, should keep me hydrated. To be fair I wasn’t planning on going far. My raid-the-brochure stands strategy fell apart a bit at the previous day’s national park and I ended up actually having to talk to a person in order to figure out which trail I ought to take. I asked specifically for their hardest trail that could be completed in a day. And I got, well, exactly what I was looking for. I was exhausted by the end of it, but thrilled at my physical accomplishment, satisfyingly achy. With the previous day‘s strain still clinging to my body I resolved to try a trail of only moderate difficult, 2 miles long, 3 tops. This would leave me plenty of time to travel to back to Las Vegas and spend the evening there before I would leave the next morning.
Red Rock Canyon is essentially a desert, and the core problem with trails that are basically in the middle of the desert is the way in which they are marked. The traditional currency of a trail that doesn’t take its lead from some significant and obvious or natural feature is the line-of-rocks. A desert is a flat arid landscape that consists of mainly dirt, occasional scraggily plant growths, and of course, rocks. This means that if you are tasked with creating a trail through the middle of the desert it is really your responsibility to make sure the way in which you organize said rocks is noticeably different than the haphazard scattering of rocks a desert generally possesses. The trail blazers of red rock canyon failed at this task. I had intended to follow my path through some desert to a canyon, which I would walk through until its natural end point, a dry waterfall. This certainly sounds simple enough and you can’t fault me for imagining that this would be a fairly standard procedure. In actuality the trail fell apart almost immediately. There are some times when you’re at the beginning of an endeavor and suddenly and briefly you are gifted with a glimpse of clarity, an ah-hah moment in which you realize “this will not go well for me”. Of course, people tend to be curious creatures, always striving towards a greater goal, always bold enough to ask the question “what if this thing does not go badly?” As such we infrequently listen to our quiet voices of reason.
I like to site an experience that I had as a neophyte busboy in my first ever paid job. I was reshelving the freshly cleaned and steaming hot glasses in the bar and encountered two cups which appeared to be stuck together, one on top of the other. They wiggled around like a loose tooth stubbornly holding fast, but could not easily be pulled apart. “Ah-hah” my quick teenager science-class-attending brain deduced “these cups must have EXPANDED during the processes of being washed in scalding water and then heat baked dry. This is why they do not come apart. I am a genius.” I really was pleased with myself, but my thought process, slave to logic and safety, almost instantly added a premonition to this realization “You do not want to attempt to pull these glasses apart, it will definitively be a bad thing.” My counter point was “well maybe it won’t be”. I tugged a little harder and sure enough one of the glasses exploded completely in my hand, burying tiny suicidal shards of itself into my palm and fingers. I had to spray my hand with weak acid to dissolve the pieces, making a fist hurt for weeks.
It was a similar feeling that seized me early in desert hike, and it went something like this
“I have only been on this trail for a few thousand feet and already it seems to be fading into unrecognizability. I could easily not be on the trail right now, I don’t know where I’m going or where I’ve come from. I should probably just turn around now.”
After being run through my mental filter of optimism and machismo it came out in my actions as genial bemusement. What kinda jokers made this trail? Why I’m gonna take a buncha’ pictures of how badly designed this trail is and show them to my friends when I get home and won’t we have a laugh. So it was with this attitude that I first started going in what was definitely, in hindsight, the wrong direction.
An aside- when telling a story like this I always wonder if I should describe things as they seemed to me at the time, so that the listener is right there with me, experiencing the sudden shifts in perception and dramatic twists, or should I tell it as I know it eventually ended up happening, embellishing and retelling with the story’s eventual goal in mind. As you might see I’ve chosen the latter for this particular event, but I wonder how this might’ve come out if I had tried the other path.
It was at about the point when I started to scrape my arms and hands crawling through thorny bushes that I began to suspect something might be wrong about the path that had seemed to me to be the trail. But what was I to do now? I had picked my trail, and certainly it was just as good as their trail, as I couldn’t tell the difference between this and it. I pressed forward, figuring that eventually I would find something that resembled a traditional path. Once I dipped into the canyon I found what I had been looking for, some sort of open path which seemed to imply a trail. And then I made what may have been my third or fourth major lapse in judgment. I deduced that the trail could not, as it seemed, simply a dry river bed at the bottom of the canyon, littered with boulders and brambles. What would hikers do, I reasoned, when the river was flowing, as it must do in the wet season? After a hike up a steep slope which seemed to be ending in a dry and vertical canyon wall I was able to get some perspective. Looking down over the valley it was not clear that there was a trail at all, but the river bed looked like the closest approximation. I headed back down , blazing a trail through the bramble adorned bushes and jagged person-sized boulders. I arrived, finally, back at the presumptive trail and paused to make what must have been my seventh or eight major lapse in judgment. At this point I had only accomplished a very small portion of the trail, but due to my Aramaic wanderings, had taken a very long time doing so. I considered briefly cutting my losses and turning back right then; the hike was by all estimations going poorly, by way of a combination of my own ineptitude and that of various others, I had managed to get lost in at least two separate ways before even finding it. It was this sting of personal failure that spurred me on, I could not give in at this point because if I did it would mean I had personally failed at hiking this canyon. I was determined to turn this trail into another in a series of imagined glowing achievements in the face of the nearly insurmountable shiftlessness and inability of others. Already hungry, thirsty, cut, and bruised, I began the trail in earnest. It was only a mile or so long after all, what could happen?
The trail was not a mile or so long. In fact I had misread the sign as 3 miles roundtrip when it was actually 3 miles one way. I to this day do not understand why the length of the trail would be represented in this manner. No one is going to hike the trail one way, they are going to need to come back. Nor will they attempt to chain trails together, as you can do at some national parks, because this one is punctuated very definitively by a sheer rock face. Through the lens of time I feel nothing but self-preservative hatred for that canyon path, but at the time I remember thinking that it was actually rather nice. A bit long. But rather nice. There was an organic element to it that was lacking in my previous day’s climb, which was manicured, marked, and secured perfectly. Perhaps I picked up on this natural vibe because it wasn’t actually a trail at all but rather a dry riverbed filled with boulders the size of small rooms and large cars. Scrambling over these rocks, pausing the squint up at the sun glaring down at me from between the high rock walls, was actually pleasant, and would have been downright exhilarating if I weren‘t so aware of my growing thirst, and for the first time in my trip I felt what I had wanted to feel in the first place; alone.
I wasn’t exactly alone, I did see two other people during my hike, at the very end of the trail. They were shirtless desert teenagers, younger and older, doing whatever it is that people of this age do when they are forced to live in this area, which is to say, wondering around in the desert. I can describe them only as lean, with long blonde hair, they looked like they might shoot at rabbits with air rifles in their spare time. I saw them when I came to the dry waterfall that had been my goal, they caromed up the nearly vertical wall with an effortlessness that embarrassed me even before I tried to follow. I found it impossible to scale with my worn sneakers so I took them off, and my socks as well, and climbed up with bare hands and feet. At the top I rested near a grimy pool of long-ago-snow water which seemed to be the only source of liquid for miles around. A frog made a small home there in the mud. I lay on my back and listened to the two boys talk about whatever things you might imagine these people talking about, skinning animals maybe, I honestly don’t remember. The dark shadows and cool breeze refreshed me enough to make me realize that I was really in quite a lot of trouble. I was disoriented and thirsty and nearly exhausted in the middle of nowhere. It was then, at exactly the moment when it had the least possible impact on my options, that I realized I had gone too far, been too reckless. I needed to get back and although the place I was currently at was nice enough, I hadn’t eaten or drank anything in far too long. I glanced at the fetid and algaed water and gave it more than a second thought, despite the fact that it had lain still in a rocky basin for more than 5 months. To give you an idea of how extreme the situation was, at this point I would have considered asking another human being for help, if one had been around. The boys had climbed an even more improbable cliff at some point and had now vanished over the edge of the canyon. Eventually I decided that my best chances lay with getting back as soon as possible.
The trip back flew by in relatively short order because I no longer stopped along my way to admire rocks or plants or unusual and poisonous looking lizards. I was on a mission for survival now and I had become aware that I did not have an unlimited source of energy. Time was of the essence. It wasn’t long after I descended back into the thick of the canyon when I realized something disturbing. How on earth was I to know when to exit the trail? I knew for a fact it wasn’t marked in any coherent way, the riverbed would simply continue indefinitely on into the desert. And so, realizing this, I took to scrabbling my way through vegetation and loose sand up to a vantage point where I could look for signs of civilization, and then back into the valley, where the hiking was far easier. It took me 4 or 5 of these desperate climbs before I recognized the gleaming of car windshields, disconcertingly farther away than one in my condition might hope. As expected I had missed the intended way out, and was faced with the prospect of plodding through unshaded desert for another couple of miles. I wasn’t thrilled with what lay ahead of me, but I had made it. Triumph over the wilderness doesn’t feel nearly as good as you might expect it to, at least when the fight is that close. More like tired resignation than joy.I staggered through the flat desert, looking half dead under the weight of my exertion and hubris. The car was close enough to walk to now, and I never for a moment thought I wouldn’t get there, but it wasn’t easy. I was lurching forward now, as fast as I really could manage at the time, sensing some of the urgency of mortality that should have been buzzing in my ears the entire time. I gave pause to a group of well-prepared looking hikers coming the opposite direction, into the cursed canyon. Their pace slowed in awkward hesitation and they stared at me, as if I might collapse and ruin their day, or cough on them and transmit whatever ghastly illness I so clearly was overcome with. I gestured half-heartedly behind me and offered “it’s not very well marked” as a kind of explanation for my condition. I never looked back after passing them, but I assume they went on to their doom. I didn’t care.
In my car the air conditioning blasted like an open oven, the steering wheel nearly liquid hot. Everything in the car had cooked so thoroughly in the sun in my long absence that had I placed any raw food in it before I left, it would certainly be ready to eat by now. Eat. And, more importantly drink. The act of physically operating a car, of pushing the pedals and turning the wheel, had never been something I never realized could be difficult. I wrestled with the weariness of my muscles on the long, speeding drive to the nearest gas station, listening to static on the radio I was too exhausted to bother changing. I parked diagonally in something that I can be almost sure wasn’t a parking space and dragged my body into the cool store. I headed straight for the beverage case and fished out one, no 2, no maybe 3 to be safe, of the 2 liter water bottles and chugged one of them right there at an oddly placed but convenient indoor picnic table. Although the danger was more or less over at this point my actions were all still gripped by a sense of fear and suddenness. I practically clutched the bottles to my chest as I foraged for something substantial to eat, as if someone would try to take them from me. Eventually finding a sandwich and an oversized cookie with pink sprinkles (to restore my sugars, I remembered thinking to myself), I paid the furrow-browed cashier, who I then realized had been watching me the entire time I’d been in the store with no small amount of concern. I mumbled something about hiking and went back to my vehicle. There is no pride in consuming a gas station sandwich, and I devoured it appropriately in as few bites as possible. It was, I’m sure you’ll understand, one of the best things I’ve ever eaten. The cookie too, disappeared quickly, as did a second bottle of water. At that point I collapsed utterly, napping in my running car outside the gas station for the next 2 hours.
That night I went back to Las Vegas. The rest of the last day of my trip passed like you might expect it to, the throngs of people hurrying around me while I drifted by like a ghost, into and out of ancient Rome, a pirate ship, the great pyramid. The unreality of the Vegas lights and sounds washed over me and gradually ebbed away, beaching me on the shore of the world of the living. I never did sleep that night, opting instead to just walk around the town. The 5 am absurdities of dancing shadows, plastic Venice, wax Nicholas Cage surrounded me, and all I could do was take them in, alive in the waking dream.
