Jackson Hole News

Weekend Essay

Las Vegas: The Great Sucking Sound

By Christian Probasco, 6-30-07

You may have heard it.  You may have thought, “what if I moved to Vegas?  It’s booming.  There are plenty of jobs.  What might my life be like in Sin City?”

My wife, Sarah, and I just spent three years in Henderson, which is south of Vegas and bleeds into it, so you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.  We both worked in Vegas, and when her teaching contract was up, we bought a house in Mount Pleasant, Utah for a fraction of what it would cost in the Vegas Valley.

I don’t mean to imply by the title of the article that Vegas sucks, though it can, for various reasons.  Outside of the Strip, it’s a lot like any other big city in the southwest, only newer, with slot machines in the convenience and grocery stores.  The subdivisions are mostly cramped and bland, unless you’re wealthy enough to afford a real yard.  The traffic is awful, the road construction is dangerous and never-ending, the smog is thick and there is plenty of crime. 

But the Vegas of the Strip is a vision.  Driving it at night is like being on a great, slow ride, surrounded by Ferraris and Dodge Vipers, bullet bikes, brand-new Harleys and stretch-Hummer limousines.  You pass by an Egyptian pyramid, the Eiffel Tower, a Roman palace, a Japanese palace, a suburb of Venice, complete with canals, a giant circus tent, a medieval castle and the whole New York skyline. Huge crowds migrate between these adult playhouses and open-air shows just off the street; the Bellagio’s fountains, the Mirage’s erupting volcano and the pirate ships sinking off Treasure Island.  There are billboards with women’s’ asses over a story tall.  Video screens as big as buildings scroll through the action; the shows, the performers, the odds and the skimpy outfits and jiggling boobs.  And all the buildings are brightly lit different colors, so that all-together, from a distance, they appear like the brilliantly colorful coral reefs you see in nature movies.  It’s all fake.  Who cares?

There are probably more celebrities in Vegas at any given moment than there are in Hollywood.  If you’re single and naughty, I am told, there are plenty of ways to spend your paycheck.

Las Vegas is a union town.  If you don’t have anything beyond a high school education—even if you don’t have a high school education—you can still make a pretty good living there. 

But not if you’re a teacher. Sarah’s wages at the brand new Del Sol High School were better than what she could get in Utah, but still not great.  Rookie cops earn $13,000 more per year than starting teachers in Vegas. No surprise, there’s a teacher shortage, and class sizes can reach more than fifty students.

I took delivery jobs to supplement my writing.  Friends and relatives encouraged me to become a card dealer, but I’m uncomfortable in any environment where the surveillance cameras are so powerful that security can count the hairs up your nose. 

It was hard to find an affordable apartment, though we did, finally; a one-bedroom.  And when Sarah gave birth to our son Bryce eleven months ago, the place became seriously cramped.  But we couldn’t afford anything bigger.

We never got to know anybody in Sarah’s LDS ward very well, with the exception of a couple missionaries who came by once in a while to try and convert me from my native Probascoism.  They failed. There are a lot of Mormons in Vegas, but the population is fairly transient and it’s difficult to build long-term friendships.

If we were gamblers, Vegas would be heaven for us, or hell.  We tried our luck a few times on the slot machines.  They ate our money and spun their wheels and then our money was gone.  Not very exciting.

We took in a few shows and wandered the malls on the Strip staring at merchandise we couldn’t afford.  We rode to the top of the stratosphere and ate at the Paris.  There are no windows inside the casinos themselves, and no clocks, so you can’t tell what time it is.  The sky is painted on the ceiling and the lights are dimmed to simulate night. 

Every week or so I would take off into the nearby mountains in my Jeep.  First it was to Red Rock Canyon west of town, then the River Mountains east of Henderson. Don’t let the name fool you; the River Mountains are parched and dead-sloped, the eroded remains of an old stratovolcano.  They’re sickly-gray and desolate, dusty and craggy too. The roads through them are mostly worn ATV tracks up narrow draws and impossible inclines. They are inhabited only by coyotes and mountain sheep, and I love them.

But they weren’t enough to keep me in Vegas.  When Sarah’s contract ran out, there was nothing keeping her either.  Sarah’s parents, Pat and Wayne--bless their souls--drove their suburban “Big Red” down, towing a U-Haul trailer from Fountain Green, near Mount Pleasant and we crammed them full of our stuff and they took off for our new home.  Then we stuffed the rest into a pickup bed trailer that I’d found out in the desert and reconditioned and I hooked it to the Jeep and took off for Utah with Sarah and Bryce trailing behind in our compact car.

It was slow going for three reasons.  First, the trailer was eight feet high with our mattresses strapped on top. It was never meant to carry such a load, which I would estimate at about four thousand pounds, so it swayed dangerously from side to side and jerked the Jeep all over the road.  Second, the Jeep only has a four-cylinder engine.  And third, the Jeep wasn’t registered, so we couldn’t stay on the main highway long for fear of being spotted by the authorities.  So we had to take the back roads, and the back roads between Las Vegas and central Utah are hilly.

We came up through Shivwits, Gunlock, Veyo and Central, past petroglyphs right along the roadside and Mormon Meadows where the Latter-Day Saints, and possibly Paiute Indians, massacred a wagon train full of settlers back in 1857.  It’s a deceptively beautiful valley.  En route, the baby would occasionally sleep and then wake up screaming.  Sarah had to pull over to comfort and/or feed him.  In the afternoon we found a shady spot beneath a juniper by the side of the road and took a nap. 

From Enterprise, we caught Highway 18 up to 56, past the huge tailings of old mines, the Jeep doing about fifteen miles per hour over the passes, and headed east to Cedar City. We stayed at the cheapest motel in town.  Bryce’s legs turned black from crawling across the dirty carpet and the air conditioning conked out in the middle of the night.  In the morning Sarah bought a portable DVD player and set it up to run before Bryce, who was mesmerized.

Onward we pressed, over Highway 20 and down to 89, and then through a dozen tiny Utah towns and Richfield and finally home on the evening of the second day.  Late that night I walked out into the front yard.  The sky was filled with stars. 

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