I was amused by the afternoon television news here, in which the news team was all in a lather about the fact that it had rained today. It wasn't a flash-flood kind of rain, just a slow drizzle, totalling--brace yourself for this--about one-third of an inch. Wow! But they had their full crew out on alert, doing live updates from various places about this incredible breaking weather story. (Yawn.) They even featured a segment reminding people how to drive on wet roads. Coming from Minnesota, I just had to laugh. It would be great fun (a destructive, sadistic sort of fun, that is) to dump about a foot of snow on this city and watch the mayhem that resulted.
Anyway, this reminded me of a little blurb I wrote roughly a year ago for a newspaper back home, about a weather phenomenon that is moderately common here but almost never seen there. Enjoy.
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Las Vegas is a dirty city—in a literal sense. To start with, it’s in a desert, and there’s just dust everywhere. The day after you wash your car, it’s covered in a thin but easily visible layer of dirt again. But additionally, there’s more trash left around than anyplace else I’ve lived. I suppose part of that is the dependence on drunk tourists. But there’s also the fact that vendors shove all sorts of handouts and other crap at passersby on the Strip, much of which just gets dropped and left. Finally, the city appears to spend precious little on such niceties as street sweeping, and nobody seems to care much about open dumping of stuff in vacant lots.
Last week we had a windstorm. I had not previously seen the Strip in this condition, and it was eerily spectacular. There were straight-line winds blowing a constant cloud of dust from the west, and it was like the shiny mega-resorts had been submerged in murky, sandy water. The wind was strong enough to loosen a large sign on the Venetian hotel, causing authorities to shut down the Strip for a while, lest the thing come off completely and do serious damage.
But there were also wonderful dust devils everywhere, filled with more man-made debris than any I’ve seen before. I was immediately and strongly reminded of that strangely beautiful scene in “American Beauty,” in which a young photographer marvels at the elegant randomness of a plastic bag being tossed about by the winds.
Watching plastic bags and papers and other trash being lifted, swirled, buffeted back and forth, then dropped again in a new location, seemed perfectly emblematic of the city. People come here to dance drunkenly, to let themselves be tossed to and fro by the whims of chance, only to collapse in a heap when the winds of fortune and fun inevitably die down. The city has a shockingly high rate of suicide.
If you come here for a visit—and I hope you do—be sure that you remain tethered financially and by friends and family. The winds can be both delightful and destructive.
Anyway, this reminded me of a little blurb I wrote roughly a year ago for a newspaper back home, about a weather phenomenon that is moderately common here but almost never seen there. Enjoy.
**************
Las Vegas is a dirty city—in a literal sense. To start with, it’s in a desert, and there’s just dust everywhere. The day after you wash your car, it’s covered in a thin but easily visible layer of dirt again. But additionally, there’s more trash left around than anyplace else I’ve lived. I suppose part of that is the dependence on drunk tourists. But there’s also the fact that vendors shove all sorts of handouts and other crap at passersby on the Strip, much of which just gets dropped and left. Finally, the city appears to spend precious little on such niceties as street sweeping, and nobody seems to care much about open dumping of stuff in vacant lots.
Last week we had a windstorm. I had not previously seen the Strip in this condition, and it was eerily spectacular. There were straight-line winds blowing a constant cloud of dust from the west, and it was like the shiny mega-resorts had been submerged in murky, sandy water. The wind was strong enough to loosen a large sign on the Venetian hotel, causing authorities to shut down the Strip for a while, lest the thing come off completely and do serious damage.
But there were also wonderful dust devils everywhere, filled with more man-made debris than any I’ve seen before. I was immediately and strongly reminded of that strangely beautiful scene in “American Beauty,” in which a young photographer marvels at the elegant randomness of a plastic bag being tossed about by the winds.
Watching plastic bags and papers and other trash being lifted, swirled, buffeted back and forth, then dropped again in a new location, seemed perfectly emblematic of the city. People come here to dance drunkenly, to let themselves be tossed to and fro by the whims of chance, only to collapse in a heap when the winds of fortune and fun inevitably die down. The city has a shockingly high rate of suicide.
If you come here for a visit—and I hope you do—be sure that you remain tethered financially and by friends and family. The winds can be both delightful and destructive.
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