Shelf Life — Scott Dickensheets: Writer casts gaze on ‘Blue Mountains Far Away’

Friday, June 23, 2000 | 9:25 a.m.

Scott Dickensheets' books and magazines column appears Fridays. Reach him at dickens@vegas.com or 990-2446.

My fingers soldered to the steering wheel in my car the other day, I found myself wondering if it was this hot when the mob ran Las Vegas. I find it hard to believe.

As it happens, even if I wasn't sizzling in my own juices, questions of the natural and human history of this city were on my mind: I'd just finished "American Byzantium," an essay about Las Vegas included in "Blue Mountains Far Away: Journeys Into the American Wilderness" (The Lyons Press, $22.95), by Tucson, Ariz., writer Gregory McNamee.

By "American wilderness," McNamee clearly means untamed cultural territories as well as the outback kind -- although he loves the desert Southwest and the lovely blue horizons that give the book its title, he's no nature writer, no desert-rat poet of the outdoors, like Edward Abbey. "Instead," he writes, "I am your typical conflicted Taoist-aspirant aesthete with passions for punk rock and classical Greek poetry who also happens to like desert places more than any other, who finds solace and succor in the arid venues of the world." So when he comes to Southern Nevada, it isn't to write about the desert tortoise and the creosote. He's got -- what else? -- social anthropology and cultural critique in mind.

McNamee follows the by now well-established pattern for such pieces. He quilts some observations about the city's inhospitable desert location (specifically the wind: "The wind blows always, incessantly, in Las Vegas, apocalyptic and unsettling, stirring up the detritus of an unfinished desert civilization ...") together with capsule histories emphasizing the baroque (the mob, an overlong dwelling on Howard Hughes) and early harbingers of our hubris (the sucked-dry springs that initially gave life to the valley), then stitches on some lacy sociology.

The result, I'm sorry to say, is neither a penetrating profile of Las Vegas nor an incisive biopsy of its mystique. It's pretty much the same bundle of theory-wrapped virtual reality put together by so many previous out-of-town writers intent on decoding Las Vegas without bothering to get the little things right (it's Shadow Creek, not Shadow Valley). He hits all the metaphorical high notes (Vegas as a city of the 21st century, Vegas as the new Byzantium, Vegas as the easternmost city of the Pacific Rim) but never types his way into the vicinity of the Las Vegas I live in.

Then again, I'm probably not his target audience; neither are you. He admits that the Las Vegas experienced by residents is mostly off-limits to visitors and, more to the point, of no interest to them. They want the city of the 21st century, the new Byzantium. It is to those people that McNamee addresses his essay.

This isn't to say it's a lame effort. He gets in some good bits. For instance, McNamee argues convincingly that Las Vegas, contrary to our carefully cultivated image, is not a class-free society; the democratic melting pot of the casino (everybody's welcome, regardless of social standing, as long as you're gambling) is largely a fiction. No matter how high I roll with my mortgage payment, I'll never be allowed to gamble alongside Kerry Packer.

He also notes that the city's carpet of suburban enclaves, rolling in every direction toward the edges of the valley, are essentially Middle Ages-style villages surrounding the fortress of the Strip. True enough, and a way of looking at the city that hadn't occurred to me before.

And McNamee includes a funny passage about what he'd do if diagnosed with a terminal illness: bazooka down the glass wall separating Siegfried and Roy's tigers from the viewers in the Mirage. "The tigers will have a long overdue feast; visitors to the Mirage will enjoy an unanticipated spectacle far more interesting than the usual exploding volcano and pirates on parade; and all concerned will test the balance between risk and security in a new game of chance."

In other essays, McNamee ventures again into Nevada for "Growing Up Nuclear," a tart report on the American West's atomic legacy, particularly in light of the end of the Cold War. After a few words about downwinders (residents downwind of the Nevada Test Site's above-ground testing who were exposed to fallout), he winds up by describing a chilling tour of a decommissioned ICBM missile silo and Cold War museum near Tucson.

"Fire in the Sky," meanwhile, is an entertaining and informative piece about the workings of lightning, a tremendous ongoing issue in the kindling fields of the dry mountain West.

Despite my disappointment with his Vegas tale, McNamee generally exhibits a curious, connective mind that can make his essays a delight. The fact that he's neither a pure nature writer nor entirely a cultural critic, but some of each, and a good reporter to boot, serves him well. "Blue Mountains Far Away" is an uneven volume, but there's more good stuff here than bad. Recommended reading.

Reading matters

Don't miss the July Esquire, which has a package of articles about men in danger. Sean Flynn weighs in with the story behind the story of a Worchester, Mass., warehouse fire that killed six firemen; Bucky McMahon dives the turbulent wreck of the Andrea Doria; and, in what is being touted in some quarters as the best magazine story of the year thus far, Michael Paterniti examines the plunge and crash of Swiss Air 111.

Paterniti's story does, indeed, pack a wallop, with his typical bravura style and emotional immediacy. I'm not quite ready to hang Article of the Year laurels on it yet; his style occasionally becomes just a little too mannered. Paterniti, in the grip of his own prose poetry, declines to name the victims, instead identifying them as "the girl with Persian eyes" or "the son of the famous boxer." That may be one lyrical touch too many. But don't let that dissuade you from reading "The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy." You'll be so caught up in it you won't even mind the heat.

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