In 2002, my partner Jason had been offered film work in New York. I moved there too, to be with him. His father had just died and we were talking about marriage and I wanted a kid. His hours were long, and while he was off filming, I spent my days going to the library, seeing friends and reconnecting with family there. It was a calm period for us after some very up-and-down years. Because Jason was working, we had a bit of money and he thought it would be fun for us to go to Las Vegas.
We arrived in the evening and went to the El Cortez downtown, where we’d booked a cheap room. I was not prepared. The lights, the noise, the ping-ping-pinging, the fake sound of coins coming down a metal chute, the Ghostbusters theme tune inexplicably clanging out at regular intervals, the gamblers with their plastic buckets of change feeding the machines, the lack of windows and clocks. An image has stayed with me: a woman in a motorised wheelchair wears a credit card attached to her wrist with what looks like an old telephone cord. The card is stuck in the machine like a baby’s pacifier. She is aggressively pumping the arm of the slot machine as money is being sucked from her bank account. There appears to be no end to her losses.
After crossing the casino floor and walking up a couple of flights of stairs, we found our room. The leaking air conditioning unit had left a small puddle in the carpet. The window wouldn’t open and everything smelled of cigarette smoke. But it was the grim yellow lighting that slightly undid me. Normally, I can do crappy hotels — in fact I quite like them — but because this was Vegas, where you are supposed to have fun, I couldn’t do it. I left the room, ran down the stairs, walked through the casino, back to where we’d left the car and collapsed in a sobbing heap. We left the next morning and headed to Los Angeles.
Three years later, Jason got the idea to make a documentary in Vegas and got some backing from Channel 4. In the early 2000s, it was the fastest-growing city in the US. Homes were being built at record speed. Every month, thousands of people were showing up looking for work, mainly in construction and hospitality. Between 1970 and 2000, its population went from 270,000 to 1.3 million, and it looked set to continue rising. It was a boom time, a new kind of gold rush, and Jason wanted to see what this kind of explosive urban growth looked like. I ended up accompanying him on his shoot.
We arrived in early spring. Unlike our previous trip to Vegas, it was chilly when we landed — that night-time desert cold hit us as we stepped onto the airport tarmac. We found a cheap room in an America’s Best Value Inn & Suites. The apartment block was aiming for bland, corporate clientele, but judging from the shouting and the regular appearances by the police, they weren’t hitting their target demographic. In the grounds was a small swimming pool where kids would play in the daytime and where adults would gather to drink in the evenings. The parking lot of the nearby 7-Eleven was where the prostitutes and rent boys lined up under the streetlights. In the darker corners, people bought drugs.
Jason had placed an ad in the local newspapers asking for people who’d just arrived in Vegas to get in touch. He wanted to make sense of this place through the stories of those who were arriving to start a new life. One of the people who called us was a young woman who had escaped an abusive home and had hitchhiked to Vegas from a small town in California. She’d been picked up on the highway by a much older guy called Robert. She ended up moving in with him. They invited us over to their house for a drink so Jason could interview them. The young woman had just found a job in a bar off the Strip. They lived in one of those cream-coloured L-shaped bungalows with metal siding, so familiar to me and my Canadian childhood. It was a tract house, a cookie-cutter home, straight out of a Robert Adams photograph. The streetlights, the sidewalks, the rows of tidy bungalows facing each other across a newly paved street — they all just ended where the desert began.
This extreme interface between the built-upon and the wild recalled a passage from Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Stephen Izenour’s 1966 book Learning from Las Vegas: “Beyond the town, the only transition between the Strip and the Mojave Desert is a zone of rusting beer cans.” Here there were no rusting beer cans. Here there was only air and the lemony-yellow glow of the streetlights in which the wings of tiny moths fluttered.
I did not collapse into a sobbing existential heap on this return trip to Vegas with Jason in 2005, because I was there to be part of his documenting of the city; I was not there to have fun. I was an observer, and through this act of mediation, I was able to see Vegas in a different light. We were not living in the post-modern town described in Learning from Las Vegas, nor were we engaging with the city ironically, as a joke, as a flimsy cardboard cut-out, a Pop Art construction, the wet dream of populist pleasure makers, or a simulacrum of a city. I could and still can appreciate the “messy vitality” of the Strip that the authors of Learning from Las Vegas exalt in, along with their enjoyment of the unselfconscious creation of a popular aesthetic. I was also aware that this city is a place where people live, work, write poems, worry about their greying hair, their lack of exercise and their kids’ college fees. And yet, I simply couldn’t — and still can’t — shake my view of Las Vegas as human folly, a mistake, an aberration, and most importantly an environmental catastrophe.
The spring and summer that Jason and I were living in Vegas coincided with the 100th anniversary of what some referred to as the “founding” of the city in 1905. Birthday celebrations had been brewing for months, culminating in the baking of what would be the largest cake in the world. The seven-layer, 130,000-pound vanilla cake measured 102 feet long, 52 feet wide and contained 23 million calories. On the day of the great cake slicing, Jason and I lined up outside Cashman Center, a large building which looked like a cross between a storage facility, convention centre and a high school gym. We were with Matt, one of the people we had been filming with. He was a soft-spoken and thoughtful gambling addict who’d been cast out of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for falling in love with a non-Mormon. He was currently homeless and often slept in one of the storm sewers or in the Salvation Army shelter when they had a bed.
Thousands of people showed up for cake. Some clutched Tupperware containers, others cardboard boxes, suitcases, even giant plastic garbage bags to lug their chunks back to their kitchens, offices and rented rooms. The scene was like a demented children’s picnic directed by Tim Burton. The planners of this birthday celebration had wildly overestimated how many Las Vegans would want to queue up in 40-degree heat for free cake. On that evening’s news, I watched in horror as dump truck after dump truck brought mountains of leftovers to a local pig farm and shovelled it into pens for the animals to “pig out” on. If there were ever a film clip needed to illustrate overabundance and society-as-spectacle in the US, this would be it.
“The scene was like a demented children’s picnic directed by Tim Burton.”
Consumption is one of the engines fuelling the Vegas that many people come to the city to experience. The year Jason and I were there, the hotels, casinos and restaurants alone were creating over half a million tons of garbage a year — enough to fill an American football field 10 metres high every day.
Like all built environments in the American West, you cannot talk about Vegas without mentioning the element on which its existence depends: water. When I think about Nevada, my mind immediately moves towards that 100th longitudinal meridian first observed by John Wesley Powell in the 1870s. This east–west divide runs from the Canadian border in the north to the Gulf of Mexico in the south, through the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. Powell had been commissioned by the government to explore the western territories to see if it were viable to continue carving up and handing out 160-acre parcels for farming and homesteading in the West.
After years of travelling, Powell argued that due to its aridity, it was almost a separate country from the East. A lack of fresh water and rainfall would not sustain high levels of population or intensive agriculture. The government ignored him and, ever since, precious waterways across the West have been dammed, reshaped, exploited and poisoned in the service of progress, development and unsustainable human activity.
The vast Colorado River, the major waterway in the West and Southwest, became the irrigation source for cities and communities springing up in deserts and on arid lands. Its water was so in demand that in 1922 something called the Colorado River Compact was created, which essentially divided the river into two parts, allocating set amounts of river water to the seven basin states. In order for this to happen, the Colorado would need to be dammed. This is where the Hoover Dam comes in, and the creation of Lake Mead. This body of water is called a “lake” but really it acts as a reservoir and a site for recreation. In America Day by Day, Simone de Beauvoir describes it as
“a large sheet of fake blue water that clashes sharply with the pink rocks. This water is as out of place in the desert as a grove of orange trees on a moor, as a fresh stand of birch trees in reddish sand dunes. It’s an unreal landscape … and it has the deceptive colors of Gauguin.”
Lake Powell (note the ironic name), a reservoir 300 miles away in Utah, is supposed to provide the more northern states with water, but it functions as a holding tank for Lake Mead. No one really understands why we’ve ended up with this set-up. All we do know is that these enormous reservoirs are running out, and at least four million people rely on Lake Mead for their water. There is now a “bathtub ring” running around the rock walls of the lake, showing how much the water level has dropped in recent years.
There is another lake in Vegas that isn’t being drained at such an alarming rate. Lake Las Vegas in Henderson, a well-off southern suburb of Vegas, has its water replenished from Lake Mead. In 2020 it provided 1.2 billion gallons of water to the people of Vegas. Some of this went on golf courses, some for the canals in the Venetian and some went to private residences, like the mansion in Spanish Trails owned by a prince of Brunei, which used 12,327,000 gallons of water in 2020. All this for one single house in the desert.
Back in 2011, after eight years of drought, golf courses started waking up to the problem of keeping their lawns green. In a 2012 article called “Water Hazard” in Golf Course Management magazine, Mark Leslie talks of the water police who can fine you for misusing the precious commodity, and how even watering lawns at the wrong time of day can land you in trouble. He mentions the fact that the evapotranspiration rate in and around Las Vegas is probably the highest in the country and that golf courses in Vegas pay over a million dollars a year for their water. Golf courses are trying to minimise evaporation by making use of the correct nozzles on their irrigation systems and covering remaining bodies of water with something called Aquatain, “a silicone-based product from Australia”. Basically, using Aquatain is a bit like spraying liquid saran wrap onto your pond. According to the company who makes it, it is harmless to people and aquatic life.
Despite the pretence that “much of our waste gets recycled”, most of it ends up in landfill. All across Nevada, the stuff we no longer need or know what to do with has been sent into the desert to be incinerated, buried, left to rot, decompose or, in the case of plastics and forever chemicals, left there to sit out the end of time. It isn’t just the “normal” waste — the Styrofoam cups, chicken bones, water bottles and candy wrappers — that are exiled to the desert near Vegas: there is plenty of the more insidious stuff, the stuff which decomposes over hundreds if not thousands of years.
The Mojave Desert has been blown up, blasted and poisoned by the US military since the first aerial atomic bomb was detonated there in 1951 in a place called Frenchman Flat. There are two tourist reviews of Frenchman Flat: “Not the best hiking spot,” one reads. “Felt nauseous for some reason and now I’m slowly losing my hair. Would not recommend.” A more recent review reads, “Nice hiking spot, felt nauseous but later my muscles started to grow and I didn’t need to wear my glasses anymore. Only annoyance, my skin is getting greenish when I get angry.”
The famous Nevada Test Site, in which Frenchman Flat sits, is about an hour’s drive from the Vegas Strip and occupies an area slightly larger than Rhode Island. Over the span of 40 years, almost a thousand nuclear bombs were detonated here. This land belongs to the Western Shoshone — a fact often overlooked when people talk about the atomic programme in Nevada.
Between 1951 and 1992, nuclear testing on Shoshone lands created 620 kilotonnes of nuclear fallout. As a point of comparison, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 created 13 kilotonnes. In a 2020 Al Jazeera article, Ian Zabarte, the Principal Man of the Western Bands of the Shoshone Nation, lists the people he knows with cancer — some of whom are toddlers. “Every family is affected,” he writes. “I watched my uncle suffer from horrible cancer that ate away at his throat and my grandfather die of an auto-immune disease that is known to be caused by exposure to radiation. They say he had a heart attack, but when your skin falls off, that puts stress on your heart.”
Incriminating documents were discovered in 1978 in the state archives of Utah. These documents revealed that 18,000 sheep were grazing only a few miles to the north and east of the Nevada Test Site in the early Fifties. None of the ranchers or shepherds were alerted to any dangers before bombs were detonated, and their concerns since have mostly been dismissed. In 1979, The New York Times reported that, after grazing in Nevada, “the sheep were returned to Utah in the spring of 1953” where “ranchers noted that many were sick and dying. Ewes had spontaneous abortions and showed burnlike lesions on the face, neck and ears. The majority of lambs were born dead and stunted, and ewes died either during lambing or a few days later, according to the documents.” Two autopsies on sheep showed that the concentration of iodine-131 — a radioactive isotope — in their thyroid glands exceeded “by a factor of 250 to 1,000 the maximum permissible concentration of radioactive iodine for humans”. None of this was enough to convince the US Atomic Energy Commission that these illnesses and deaths were related to atomic testing.
During the Fifties, Vegas promoted what it called “Atomic Tourism”, with one casino owner declaring that the nuclear blasts were the best thing to happen to Las Vegas. Guests would stay up all night to wait for the spectacular desert sunrise and sip their final highball as nuclear bombs were detonated at dawn. Bikini-clad women jostled for the title of Miss Atomic Bomb. The winner modelled a bathing suit with ruffles up the front emulating the famous shape of a mushroom cloud. It is still possible to experience a simulacrum of all this in the National Atomic Testing Museum, where for a few dollars you can experience your very own imitation bomb blast or learn how to survive an atomic explosion by going beyond the basic “duck and cover” position.
Gone are the days when the Rat Pack and fellow cocktail drinkers would watch atomic testing from the roof of a casino as a form of entertainment, but we are still living in the Atomic Age. The fallout is all around us. Those who grew up downwind of the bomb blasts do not need any of this simulated for them because they are living with the cancers, the deaths and the birth defects. For most people today, the Atomic Age is less of a spectacle or a beauty pageant and more of a slow, poisonous drip, drip, drip.
It took my return to Vegas in 2006 for me to unpick my initial reaction to the place, to put it in the context of a kind of ground truth — the reaction one feels to a place based on observable, or sometimes invisible, information. In my case it manifested physically. Riding in a gondola in the Venetian is quantitatively but not qualitatively different from watching atomic blasts from a casino rooftop. They both spring from the human urge to consume and destroy. Sinking a mojito at the Wynne or playing the slots at the Bellagio is an act of participation in this destruction. Having fun in Vegas is a problem for me. None of it should be here. And that includes me.
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This is an edited extract from Joanna Pocock’s Greyhound, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
