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March 1, 2010
By Edmund P. Klein
The maitre d’ is a woman of stature. Perhaps in her 70s, nearly six feet tall, she presides over the modest cafe of the Bellagio Hotel, off the hotel’s Conservatory. Between seatings, we talk.
Courtesy www.journeyetc.com
She tells me she’s a Las Vegas native but has never been to the top of the city’s Stratosphere Tower. I tell her I’m from Portland. She says she’s never been to Portland but that her son-in-law knows a lot about it. “He’s done a lot of research.” Both her daughter and son are dead, she says, and now her daughter’s husband wants to move away. He is legally blind and he dreams of Portland, where he can get around on mass transit and he’s not so far from the ocean.
Las Vegas is a five-to-seven hours’ drive from the ocean, depending on the traffic. Located in an arid basin surrounded by arid mountains, water does not come in the form of endless blue horizons and crashing waves. The surface water here is carefully orchestrated in fountains and artificially created falls, lakes and canals at the casinos. When real rain occurs, the runoff in the heavily paved basin creates torrents in the streets. Sometimes you see doorways two feet above the pavement to prevent leakage.
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I am staying three February nights at the brand-new Aria Resort & Casino. The rooms are huge and beautifully appointed with wood and marble. The floor-to-ceiling curtains can be set to swing open automatically when you enter the room. The lights come back on exactly how you set them. So does the flat-screen or 30-channel music system. One button on a screen by the bedside turns everything off and closes the drapes at night.
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The view from my 23rd-floor room faces away from The Strip, toward the snow-dusted Spring Mountains. I count 21 traffic lanes and one sidewalk. I see two people use the sidewalk. I see two small parks, each with a piece of art in it. Walking into the parks doesn’t seem possible. One is encased by fencing. The other is roped by a traffic circle. On The Strip, parks seem to be strictly for glancing at.
From up here, I also see a brand-new monorail and assume I can take it downtown, to the “original” Las Vegas along Fremont Street. I am wrong. This monorail, called a tram, while free, goes only a few stops, to other casinos. It also doesn’t connect with the “real” monorail, which itself only goes seven stops, costs an astonishing five dollars to ride, and also doesn’t go anywhere near Fremont. It is perhaps the only mass transit system in the world that doesn’t go downtown. The hotel concierge informs me a taxi will cost about 15 dollars each way.
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Just getting to the monorail can be daunting. Signs saying “Monorail Entrance” are invariably entrances to casinos where a maze of signs typically lead you past armies of slot machines and gaming tables for hundreds of yards, until you reach a back door and a sullen concrete platform.
The Strip is called The Strip for a reason, and it’s because it grew up along a stretch of desolate desert highway outside of the city limits. Today, the highway footprint is still formidable. Most places, pedestrians are faced with extra-long traffic lights weighted heavily in favor of vehicular traffic. At some intersections the walk signal never appears. It goes from solid “Don’t Walk” to flashing “Don’t Start Walking” and back again.
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The maitre d’s son-in-law, wanting to cross here, must listen for a halt in a dozen lanes of traffic and hope to make it to the other side. Taking the monorail requires navigating an impossible casino obstacle course, costs five dollars and won’t even get him off The Strip. Buses are few and far between. A six-mile cab ride is 20 dollars, including tip.
And so you close your eyes and imagine you are he, listening for traffic to stop or the rattle of an approaching empty train to nowhere. And you understand why somewhere in the Nevada night a blind widower dreams of Portland.
Photo and copyright by Bruce Forster
© Edmund P. Klein. All rights reserved.
