Las Vegas is a city in the middle of the desert. Far from an oasis, the sprawling city reeks of alcohol and cigarettes. The sun beats down, relentless, the stone of the buildings radiating that heat, the open mouths of their entrances blasting strange-smelling conditioned air. But once you’re out onto the highway the strange only amplifies. Flatland for miles, fuzzy green from shrub and bush, stretch out far as the eye can see until the great shadows of the mountains rise out of the landscape. It’s like the grit in the air and glare of sun suffocated any hopes of leafy deciduous before it could burst into a forest.
The highway is fresh cut through the mountains and sometimes we ride across hills torn through, seeing rock and rubble, fragments of mountain blasted and piled by the side of the road. Other times we are winding through a range, the slanted rock faces rising at either side of us, jagged and striped from sediment deposits.
In the GTA you see the blur of suburbia, stretches of farms lined with trees, or forests of skinny pines rushing past. Further south you go, it’s the rise of buildings and construction cranes, and as you near downtown, always always you peer out your windows seeking the fineline tip of the CN tower on the skyline. Here it’s shoddy mountain, planted huge in the distance, hulking giants to that thin pin on the horizon, rising impossibly higher. I cannot imagine giants as big as mountains, I’d be too frightened.
I can’t imagine these as bodies of fallen earthen warriors, like in the stories my father tells. I am barely believing that these peaks are tectonic plates pushing and grinding together to fold outwards by only millimeters annually. The idea of eons taken to build these peaks, not one singular catastrophic collision that shook the earth to make every creature cower, fills me with a dread I don’t understand. Imagine a hand grabbing the side of it and peaking past a long-dead god waking to a changing world, a lifetime to us, and a nap to them.
I see the appeal of monster movies. How could you not constantly fear when something so vastly powerful is unshielded before you? How could you not marvel at your own insignificance in the infinite unknown? What other refuge do you have from that fear than to give it name pattern, behavior, face to the things you don’t understand?
Southern gothic, cosmic desert horrors.
It’s easy to imagine Night Vale now, a pitstop between mountains. The glowing neon of the Arby’s sign stretching into the sky, pickup trucks and trailers at the edge of town. A spookiness somewhere in the middle of nowhere, cradled in the palm of the humongous. It’s harder to imagine living in a community isolated by these features, living day-to-day at the whim of climate, of water shortage, of separation from another town, if just to hear you scream. Harder still to imagine how little league games, school children and library life goes on. Walking your dog in the shadow of the mountain in the oppressive vastness of a plane that only gives rise to more mountains on every horizon.
The wild in the west.
The homes and car parks at the foot of the mountains look like trash strewn in the grass. We’re the single-use moment trying to make forever out of a couple of seconds, and it’s hard enough for the green to grow here, without us encroaching in with delusions of grandeur. When it does manage to flourish it’s close to the ground, simply shrubbery. Maybe that’s ’cause they’re just as scared as I am. Staying close to the ground, eyes down, building a life with elements, creating their own little worlds, playing at something like understanding, with the great and yawning forevers stretching out above.
