In Jean for Thanksgiving, Vegas the next day

  • Jean and VegasKind of an odd Thanks­giv­ing week­end. We were in the small town of Jean, Nevada on Thanks­giv­ing Day for a meet-up with Greg’s folks, and in Las Vegas on Fri­day. We had been think­ing in terms of this being a stay-at-home Thanks­giv­ing, but on Mon­day, Greg caught the see-the-folks bug. I com­pletely under­stand — I’m usu­ally the one lead­ing the charge, to the point that Greg starts sigh­ing and rolling his eyes some­time around Sep­tem­ber. But this year, he was the one who sud­denly wanted to see his par­ents, and unfor­tu­nately, he only made up his mind a few days before Thanks­giv­ing. By that time, we had to scram­ble to get plane tick­ets, a ken­nel for the dog and hotel accom­mo­da­tions. And also by that time, Greg’s mom and dad had already made plans to do what they like to do with their days off — take a quick bus trip out to Jean for the nickel keno and inex­pen­sive buf­fet.

    So that was our Thanks­giv­ing — an easy flight out (every­one else must’ve done their fly­ing on Wednes­day), tak­ing a rented car to Jean and hang­ing out with folks at the Golden Nugget in Jean. There are only two casi­nos in Jean — the Golden Nugget and Nevada Land­ing, one on one side of the I-15 and one on the other. And to say they’re “in” Jean doesn’t seem quite right. They are Jean. There’s no rea­son for Jean, Nevada to exist apart from them. Locals from Nevada and Cal­i­for­nia some­times don’t want to bother with the traf­fic and the ambiance of “New” Vegas. They want “Old” Vegas. No big shows, no tourist mobs, no fash­ion state­ments, no state-of-the-art hotels and coun­try clubs — JUST gam­bling and cheap food. That’s Jean. And that’s where we were.

    So the Thanks­giv­ing din­ner action was not exactly out of a Rock­well paint­ing. They had turkey which wasn’t that bad and mashed pota­toes and dress­ing that were just awful. And they had beef to carve, and thank good­ness for that, because I had for­got­ten that Greg’s folks don’t regard a buf­fet a bar­gain unless there’s some carved meat to be had (and, as like as not, bun­dled up in a nap­kin or two “for later”). I had sug­gested it to give me a break from the smoke and a bad round or two of video poker, but if they hadn’t put the carved beef out early, I think I would’ve blown my Good Daughter-in-Law merit badge.

    Well, what the heck. That’s where we had to go to meet Greg’s par­ents. It would be less of a stretch for us if their way of unwind­ing was loung­ing on a cruise boat, but they’d have to be other peo­ple to do that. If the peo­ple we wanted to meet were Greg’s mom and dad, we had to be in Jean.

    In a way, that ended up being my thought about the next day and a half in Las Vegas. We had decided to treat our­selves to a lit­tle razzmatazz after Greg’s folks took the bus home, and Greg booked us into the newest and most shaz­zam new prop­erty on the Strip — the Wynn hotel. The shut­tle dri­ver told us it’s the most expen­sive hotel ever built (I love the way Vegas natives know the names, num­bers and other low­down on the big casi­nos like sports-town peo­ple know their team’s stats). I won’t even try to describe it other than to say that the silk bathrobes were a brand that was exclu­sive to the hotel. And the view of the Strip, which you got to see after you fig­ured out how to work the motor­ized cur­tain con­trols, was just spectacular.

    I tried to draw a sketch of the sun­set going on when we first set­tled in the room, but it wasn’t the kind of thing that quite works in a sketch. All jum­botron screens, head­lights and tail­lights, mir­rored soar­ing build­ings, and neon, neon, neon up close, giv­ing way to more and more flat, even, unspec­tac­u­lar build­ings going off in the dis­tance with more and more dirt and desert inter­spersed until finally the stony Sierra Nevada moun­tains pro­vided the last word, pre­sid­ing silently and age­lessly over every­thing that goes on.

    What can you say about Vegas? It loves the whole Sin City thing, basks in it, pro­motes it, because all it ever wants is traf­fic enough to pay for the last casino and the next one. I’ve heard Chris­tians deride it, and I prob­a­bly should too. But I don’t know. It is a sad place for sure, and if you believed that all the bright­ness and con­stant promise of money would make you last­ingly happy, you’d be sure to be disappointed.

    But there also seems like some­thing sort of won­der­ful about it to me. I know it’s full of fal­sity, but it still fills the eye. There’s no sky­line any­where that looks like the Vegas Strip, because not only do you have glint­ing gold high-rise hotels, but art and archi­tec­ture pulled from around the world and from all of our his­tory. Where else could you find a square mile that con­tained a Roman tem­ple, the Eif­fel tower and Arc de Tri­om­phe, the Statue of Lib­erty and New York sky­line, the canals of Venice, a medieval cas­tle, an Egypt­ian pyra­mid, an Ara­bian fortress not to men­tion all the visual ref­er­ences to the Car­ribean, New Orleans and the Old West? None of it is orig­i­nal or indige­nous of course (except maybe the West­ern stuff) but part of the way you know that it’s a fake is because it’s too clean, too uneroded by time and the ele­ments, and too acces­si­ble. (Try get­ting near the real Eif­fel Tower or Statue of Lib­erty and you’ll see what I mean.)

    And it’s where peo­ple are. It’s the thought that kept com­ing to me as I’d sit in traf­fic lis­ten­ing to a Sina­tra tune piped in for the Bel­la­gio foun­tains to dance to or wait­ing for an ele­va­tor hear­ing all the dif­fer­ent lan­guages being spo­ken around me. Of course it would be an amaz­ing thing if peo­ple wanted to get into cathe­drals and churches as much as they want to get into casi­nos. And there’s no telling what human­ity could have wrought if we fought against our temp­ta­tions nearly as assid­u­ously as we fight traf­fic and house odds.

    But occa­sion­ally, it’s worth just look­ing in on where peo­ple are. Soon we’ll hear the gene­ol­ogy of Christ read in church, and we’ll hear the roll call of pros­ti­tutes, tyrants, mur­der­ers and adul­ter­ers that Christ is descended from. It’s a shame, but it’s the truth. Christ didn’t come to meet us some­where up in heaven. He came where the peo­ple are.


    Related posts:

    1. Hang­ing out at the stone lions’ place
    2. Paris
    3. French­ness

    November 27th, 2005 | Grace | 3 Comments |

3 Responses and Counting...

  • Greg 11.27.2005

    You did such a good job of pulling the­ol­ogy into The Vegas Expe­ri­ence™ that I’d be remiss if I didn’t make my stan­dard polit­i­cal state­ments about the place:

    * Vegas is hon­est — per­haps the most hon­est city in Amer­ica, if not the world. There’s noth­ing sub­tle about the value propo­si­tion here: “If you have money to spend, we will make sure you have a good time. When your money runs out… well, we’re not in the char­ity busi­ness, are we?” That may not be altru­is­tic, but I’d be will­ing to bet that false altru­ism has done a lot more dam­age to peo­ple through­out his­tory than hon­est commerce.

    * Vegas is an eco­nomic dream for many. Where else can some­one with a high school diploma but no col­lege edu­ca­tion rea­son­ably expect to make $40k a year or more? True, the jobs are often only for the young (adult dancers) and don’t have a man­age­ment track to them (valets), but it’s an inter­est­ing look at how service-sector jobs are (at least in this mar­ket) replac­ing the role that man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs used to have for those with­out spe­cial­ized degrees.

    * Vegas should scare the hell out of our ene­mies. In the mid­dle of a desert, Amer­i­can busi­ness — not gov­ern­ment, not state-sanctioned theocrats — has built one of the top tourism des­ti­na­tions in the world. No water? We’ll pay to bring it in. No power? We’ll build a dam and then buy what­ever else we need. No crea­ture com­forts? Noth­ing but lizards and sage­brush? We’ll cre­ate the most lux­u­ri­ous hotels in the world, and then rede­fine that stan­dard upward again and again to stay on top. Las Vegas is a pic­ture of what Amer­i­cans, with their crass and polit­i­cally incor­rect focus on prof­its and long work hours, can accom­plish. If I were an enemy of Amer­ica, I’d look upon such exam­ples of our deter­mi­na­tion and think: “I do not want to mess with these people.”

    Oh, and it’s the Gold Strike, not the Golden Nugget. The lat­ter is in down­town Las Vegas and is home to the choco­late ice cream I like so much. ;)

  • Grace

    Um, yeah. I meant to say that. (sheep­ish smirk)

    Seri­ously, that’s just a fine, fine adden­dum, and I wish I had said it.

    Again, not to say that there isn’t any­thing wrong with the town, and def­i­nitely not to say it’s for every­one. But I think that if a per­son just watches “CSI” and “Ocean’s Eleven,” you don’t quite get the whole picture.

  • Michelle

    I’m glad you had a good trip, a good Thanks­giv­ing, and are home safely.

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