On Leaving Las Vegas

I don't think anything could have prepared me for Las Vegas, where I just spent 3 days for a company conference. It was both grander in scale and brightness and more devestatingly awful than I'd expected. I'd been told that Las Vegas is "Something I Should See"-- a part of the American Experience, but nothing prepared more for the improbability of its existence. Cavernous rooms full of slot machines screaming "Wheel of Fortune," people playing blackjack at 4:45am, casinos plastered with garish, tread-worn carpet saturated with alcohol, the lights of the strip flashing at all hours of day and night. And surrounding this barely controlled mahem is a ring of mountains that look like an alien landscape--striated red and purple peaks, their colors filtered through dust and sunlight.

The landscape itself is stunning. I suspect that in the mountains life is very different than life on the Strip, and wonder whether the people who actually live in Las Vegas ever go to the hotels and casinos. But that begs the question: how is it possible that the city exists in such a a landscape and climate at all? How in the middle of a desert can the Bellagio create a choreographed water fountain show that runs every 15 minutes, and though stunning, uses an obscene amount of water (much of which seemed to evaporate into the dry air)? (Not to mention the hotels and their daily laundry alone). Why does the Strip exist at all?

I felt very much an outsider in Las Vegas. Most of my colleagues enjoyed themselves at the casinos and went out for drinks, but I couldn't bring myself to do it (yep, I couldn't even bring myself to put two quarters in a slot machine). I thought I had inured myself from shock living in New York, where you never know what you'll see next, but Vegas shocked me with the sheer number of people wandering the streets drunk at all hours, people sitting with glazed looks on their faces, eyes lit up by slot machines; the girlie cards inserted into the chain link fences on the pedestrian bridges; the men slapping their hands with flyers advertising exotic "pleasures." Who benefits? Who really is having fun? And should I even bother to care? Part of me wants to think that my trip there was a bad dream--I can just pretend that it was all just a jet-lag induced hallucination. But I know it exists now. I've had my "American Exprience" and am left thinking about life out of balance.