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| The deserts of Nevada |
This week's Camino a Ítaca stretches back 20 years and rides the highways that line the deserts of Nevada. Wondering what went wrong and why few things will genuninely change. Read the English version below or click over to the original in Spanish in el Hoy. Tambien se puede ver el original en castellano abajo en PDF.
The highway that connects the 700kms (400+ miles) between Reno, Nevada and
the gambling capital of the world, Las Vegas, runs through some of the bleakest
desert in the world. Towns with names like Indian Springs or Amargosa Valley dot
the flatness but only get noticed if the one traffic light in town makes you
come to a stop.
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This lonely highway also happens to run parallel to one of the
country’s most sensitive military areas, the Nellis Air Force Range,
affectionately known to sci-fi movie fans as Area 51. A place that seems to a
magnet for UFOs and perhaps more precisely, those who are prone to seeing them.
A place that the CIA only recently admitted to even existing. I spent my 20s travelling the highways, big and small, of the
United States as an itinerant musician. Sometimes we played more than 200 shows
a year and rarely stayed more than one night in each place. The lines that traced well-thumbed Rand & McNallys became familiar faces outside the moving picture window. Nights started late in Vegas, at least for those of us who
worked off of the Strip in dives where the bartenders, dealers and strippers from downtown came to unwind and let their hard-earned tips down when they had finished their late-night shift.
I was sitting outside between sets, catching some fresh air as the dawn began
to light up the horizon. The lights of the strip continued to blaze somewhere behind me, throwing strange shadows into the darkness, when a man sat down beside me. By the way he spoke, he was obviously at the end
of his evening. “Where are you from?” he asked between drags of his cigarette,
“you don’t sound like you’re from around here.” I told him I was from Canada
and he stopped for a long second and thought. “Where 'bouts is that?” he puzzled
as he drained his plastic cup of whiskey. This wasn’t the first time this had happened to me
while living there and it wouldn’t be the last. My answer was usually something
along the lines of, “somewhere pretty big just north of Montana.” His eyes remained on the horizon and then said, “In just a
couple hours, I’ll be flying an Apache out over that desert. What I wonder is if the
desert looks the same over there in Iraq where I’m headed in two weeks?” We sat
and watched the sun grow stronger in silence until I had to go back in and
start the next set. I never managed to exactly figure out Americans during my
years there. It's a place so vast and wide, a place they have tried their best to homogenize with their cut and paste strip malls and replicated restaurants, but iremains a place where the spirit of the people persist in being violently independent. It seemed unbelievable that someone who had the skills to fly
complex aircraft wasn’t be able to locate their neighbour to the north. Often,
in conversations with university-educated people the floor would sometimes drop
out from under you without prior warning. Conversations would turn very sideways when they told you
that they needed their automatic weapons to defend themselves against the
government. The very same government that controlled those Apache helicopters. It seems inevitable to smirk this week. The bogeyman lost and
for hundreds of hours, Spanish TV forgot the skyrocketing deaths and the stasi-like
manoeuvres by the government to control the media. The Orange Monster had been
defeated and everything would be good for awhile. We may have regained some
civility in international discourse and the armies of fact checkers may be
looking for work, but area 51 is going nowhere. Bookshelves may return to the White House, but the view out the window won't really change. Before long, more sad men and
women will watching the horizon, taking their last drink, before shipping out to another
‘intervention’. |
