My own private Nevada: Thanksgiving, 1999

My flight had come in to Vegas the evening before, and I had just enough time to take a spin up and down the Strip. Over the last five years, I had wound up in this city at least once a year, either on business or for the sheer guilty pleasure of the city's utterly unironic tackiness. With each visit, I'm amazed at how much the place grows, but never changes. Lavishly themed, but basically identical, casinos continue their march southward down the Strip, seemingly intent on stretching to Mexico.

This year, I checked out two new ones with very distinct personas -- "Paris" and "The Venetian." The Venetian was basically a "greatest hits" version of the real thing, with scale model replicas of the Palazzo San Marco and real, swimming-pool-clear canals that were plied by gondolas, complete with cam-corder-toting tourists and singing gondoliers. (Yes, they were singing "O, sole, mio!" as were most of the middle-aged tourists when they first came upon the canals. I had to run screaming from the building.) Paris was similarly distilled to its tourist-trap essence -- miniature scale versions of the Arch de Triomphe, Place de la Concorde, Champs Elysee, and a one-third scale replica of the Eiffel Tower, which straddles the whole casino, puncturing it with one metal leg.

Apparently, one can no longer simply build a big lavish casino and lure the suckers, the drunks and the loutish conventioneers with showgirls and free slot machine pulls. Now, one must think of the wives and the kiddies, too. Staying in Vegas is more like a theme-park experience than the "lost weekend." One must go to Atlantic City to find that kind of old-fashioned debauchery these days. Today, a trip to Vegas is like a trip to the Disneyesque TV version of the world, which is about all that most Americans can handle.

The first noteworthy feature I passed was the entrance to the infamous Nevada Test Site, where America first learned to start worrying and build The Bomb. Before I had arrived in Vegas, I had called the facility since I had heard they were considering opening much of the once-top-secret base for tourism. After nearly 1,000 atmospheric and underground detonations and thousands of acres of radioactive soil, who wouldn't want to take a tour? They said, however, that the tours only run about once a month, and Thanksgiving weekend was not about to be the time they had planned for November. Still, that didn't deter me from seeing how far I could go in. I figured that, in the post-Cold War world, they'd probably ask questions first before they riddled my car with automatic gunfire.

At the perimeter fence of the facility, there was no closed gate, but there was some intimidating signage. The words "NO TRESPASSING" in black and white were as big as the words "NEVADA TEST SITE" on the main sign. Undeterred, I continued down the dark road to the yellow-lit town of Mercury, which is where most of the nuclear technicians lived back in the good ol' days of battlin' toe-to-toe with them Russkies. Other, smaller signs warning of power lines, hazardous chemicals and complicated arrays of required security badges dotted the roadside to further scare away the faint of heart. On the left, in pre-dawn gloom, I could make out the deserted and rusted holding pen where they used to lock up the many hippie, anti-nuke protesters who used to frequent the site back in the day.

A little further down the road, amid the various warning signs, was one simple black and white hand-painted sign, driven into the ground with a single stake. On the front was written:

"Be a Modern"

Huh? What the heck's a "Modern," I thought. Was this some kind of cryptic code? Was it actually some kind of art piece leftover from the protesting days? Or was is just an encouraging, positive, daily affirmation from the boys at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission?

A few feet down the road, I saw another, similar sign that said:

"Paul Revere"

Puzzled, I thought maybe these were names of different bomb tests. Then it dawned on me -- it was a riff on the Bromo-Seltzer highway ads from the 1940s. A few feet later:

"Practice Safety"

And later still:

"From Year to Year"

Even though I got their weak attempt at cuteness, I still had trouble linking Paul Revere's name with safety. Instead of a cautionary "We better be careful about those British" kind of guys, I see Revere as more of an "Oh, shit! We're in trouble now!" kind of figure -- someone who's reactive to a bad situation, not proactive, so to speak. Also, is this really the type of message our nation's nuclear brain trust should be getting from highway road signs? Shouldn't that be a more basic lesson to be learned on the first day of rocket scientist school? Something like: "Step 1: Be careful not to blow up the world."

I can picture one of the nuclear engineers driving back from an all-night bender in Vegas with a gin and tonic in one hand and a blonde in the other. He's careening back and forth on the road to Mercury, singing and laughing, while an armed thermonuclear device is rolling around in the trunk. Then he sees the signs and starts to slow down, saying to the blonde, "Whoa, Toots! You'd better put yer damn seat belt on b'fore RuPaul Pervert comesh an' arrests ush... hic!...."

- To be continued... -