Photoblogging Seattle: June 2007

Heading south on the strip is an interesting experience. At the southern end, the road is 10 or 12 lanes wide, with turn lanes in either direction, and four pedestrian overpasses linking the sidewalks on each corner. MGM, New York New York, and the Tropicana are the main indications to visitors that they have arrived. Head north and you reach the Bellagio, Caesars, Ballys, and other mainstays of the Vegas strip. But head further south than this the traffic thins out almost immediately past the Luxor, and Mandalay Bay, with McCarran airport on your left and the freeway veering off toward Los Angeles on your right. The road remains wide until you reach South Point casino and resort a couple of miles down the road, and beyond this a most amazing thing happens. The road immediately narrows to two lanes, one in either direction, devoid of lights, roads, signs, or people. Less than 6 miles from the strip, and it is like traveling back in time, when the strip was just highway 604, and Las Vegas was something entirely other than it is today. Turn around, and you see how the strip was imposed on the landscape. Underneath it all is the same desert soil, devoid of life - an illusion dropped onto the earth, placed in a vacant space in the middle of nowhere. People come here to escape their own reality, and their own life, to a place where there was none, and the illusion of something else was put in its place. Want the illusion of love? It's for sale. Want the illusion of happiness? It's in the form of a jackpot and a promise. Want life? Nothing feels more alive than the drunken energy of the masses pulsating up and down the strip. I'm sure in a few years, this corner of the valley will become developed as well, and this nothingness will fade into memory like the rest of the emptiness that used to occupy southwest Nevada, and the last thing in this valley that is perhaps authentic and real will be replaced with a different kind of emptiness. There is something about the starkness of that road, on the edge of the illusion that is Las Vegas, that reaches into the emptiness of the desert, reminding everyone who sees it that this place is merely a waystation between the past and the future. To get stuck here would be forever in transit, neither existing where you were, or getting to where you are going.

Man, poker will mess with your head, I tell you.