Vegas Foreshadowing - October 17, 2004
by Brandon Nickerson

     For weeks we had braved the weather, the wildlife, and each other's aroma. Now it was time to brave Sin City. As we rolled into Las Vegas at sunset one October evening our usual sights and sounds were replaced by what were now foreign entities. Instead of wind whispering through aspen leaves the cacophony of the Strip filled our ears. Instead of our eyes rolling across mountain ranges our gaze was instead caught up by casino lights. In its own way, Vegas was as wild as any place we had seen on our adventures in the West. To help us make sense of the neon and concrete that played out before us we needed an experienced guide, and we were lucky enough to have Hal Rothman come to our rescue. Mr. Rothman is a professor of history at the University of Nevada and is also the author of Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the Twenty-First Century. We spent a day exploring the city with him as he showed us how Las Vegas has indeed ushered in what America can come to expect in the next century.

     We began the day in the parking lot of the Circus Circus casino where we all piled into a tour bus that would be our chariot for the adventure. Having spent the previous two nights doing "ethnographic research" on the Strip, it was now time to visit another entertainment mecca: the Freemont Street Experience. Nestled in downtown Vegas, this monstrosity of artificiality is something to behold. What was once a public street has been turned into a private entity and commercialized to the hilt. Shopping, gaming, and dining all can be found under a metallic canopy which runs for blocks down the street and provides a synthetic light show every evening. As Hal said, Las Vegas offers something for everyone.

     Having overdosed on entertainment, it was now time to see the city's other side. Gaining the highway, our motor coach carried us through the seemingly endless sprawl of the nation's fastest growing city. The houses began to blur together and power lines marched like sentinels to the horizon. Up to this point the semester had concerned itself with showing us where the natural resources that made this possible came from and the local issues surrounding the extraction sites. Now, however, we saw the end result, the sinkhole into which the goods flowed. It was unsettling at best. Having endured several miles of suburbia we turned around in a retirement community and began our journey back to the Circus Circus where we picked up our vehicles and headed once more for solace of wide open spaces.

     It would be difficult to argue that Las Vegas is not unique. There are few places where New York, Paris, and Egypt exist across the street from one another. That said, the city encapsulates what America is becoming to an extent that is disturbing. As a nation our economy is becoming more service-oriented every day. In our travels we have seen how this has translated to the West. Communities that had revolved around ranching or timber now find themselves providing financial services or catering to tourism. Las Vegas exemplifies this trend. Furthermore, the city is taking on the demographics that we can expect to be a future reality. Twenty percent of the city is now of Hispanic ancestry and a comparable amount of the population are retirees. Like it or not, as Mr. Rothman suggests with his book's title, Sin City has indeed opened the new century and may parallel what we should be prepared to see in times to come.