Consider the storm. Ancient peoples thought it was an act of the gods, or that it was a god, itself, badly behaved and running rampant. The Storm God was surely no one’s first choice for dinner guest, but that didn’t matter. If you live, walk, or breathe on this planet, you are the Storm’s subject. Gods of the Sea, of the Heavens, of particular crossroads or holy sites or hearths or what have you may have their little spheres of influence and stay busy enough, but the Storm travels everywhere and bends us all to his will.
In Las Vegas, where there are fewer than ten inches of rain, on average, in a year, the storm appears rarely but makes a bigger splash than in most other places. Sammy and Deano and Juliet Prowse all used to save their best material for Vegas, too, but that was because the town paid them better, and had bigger stages than anywhere else. For the storm, it’s a geological thing.
Consider, if you will, the desert: unaccustomed to outpourings, it is most at home with stillness, with subtlety, with faint movements and slight alterations that take eons to build up into recognizable change.
As far as water is concerned, the desert takes stinginess as its religion. It is utterly unprepared for the deluge. Its air is dry as a bone and its land knows none of the etiquette of absorption. Green lands may seem soft and naïve, but they know enough to cover themselves with shielding turf and trees for when the clouds gather. Plants think they’re the jewelry of a landscape, and some romantically-minded humans may agree. But the land knows they’re its insulation, its meteorological Hazmat suit, its tiny little collection of bodyguards which steal the storm’s thunder and render his pounding powerless.
In the 1950s, the military set off atomic bombs in the desert outside of
Vegas. Their clouds boiled up and out, expanding from a single point too small to see into huge mushrooms which spread and diffused until they touched the whole earth. In the year of our story, the exact opposite happened, and it happened over and over. Clouds of water vapor gathered from the far corners of the world. They compacted themselves into huge, dense blankets over the Mojave, crowding tighter and tighter until, like tourist carry-ons after a kleptomaniac convention, they were simply too stuffed full to continue. Then they exploded. And then the water fell. It fell all at once, in huge masses. It fell with the grace of a plummeting anvil. It crashed to earth and ran through the streets and disappeared into the desert to regather its strength, and then it rose up into the air again, joyfully greeted all its vaporous brothers and sisters just in from wherever, and began the whole silly cycle again. It was a wet year.
Las Vegas is not built for wet years. Interestingly, large areas of the city of Las Vegas have no storm drains or sewers, a fact which many residents were discovering for the first time. Why no storm drains? Well, money talks in Vegas, and often what it says is, "This rule doesn't really apply to me, does it?" And thus many daring and fascinating new shortcuts in construction, design, and planning are taken.
Water is the 500 pound gorilla of any desert, though. It goes where it wants, and takes as much of the land as it wants with it as it goes. It sluices anywhere that looks like a channel. It careens around corners, it sheets over dirt lots. It floods sidewalks and swamps parking lots. In the year of our story, there had been six big cloudbursts before Valentine’s Day, and the city was waterlogged. Whole construction sites had been washed away. Four wheel drive trucks whose owners had never navigated anything more challenging than a speed bump in the Kmart parking lot were stranded and abandoned in overflowing intersections. Casinos leaked. Dancers and exotic circus performers dripped as they paraded or contorted or hung from trapezes high above the crowds.
“When do you think this’ll stop?” Rachel moaned to Testy. “All my feathers are getting moldy.”
“I don’t know, babe,” Testy told her, “But it’s making me claustrophobic. I came here for the wide open spaces, and the only space I’m seeing these days looks like a giant public swimming pool full of tourists and pee.”
“Testy! Yuck,” said Rachel.
NEXT POST: COME HERE OFTEN, BEAUTIFUL? (Monday 7/20)
