About a Mountain Read online

  ABOUT A MOUNTAIN

  ALSO BY JOHN D’AGATA

  The Next American Essay

  Halls of Fame

  The Lost Origins of the Essay

  ABOUT A MOUNTAIN

  JOHN D’AGATA

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  NEW YORK • LONDON

  Copyright © 2010 by John D’Agata

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  D’Agata, John, 1974–

  About a mountain / John D’Agata.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-393-06818-4

  1. Radioactive waste repositories—Nevada—Yucca Mountain.

  2. Las Vegas Metropolitain Area (Nev.)—Social life and customs.

  3. Yucca Mountain (Nev.) I. Title.

  TD898.12.N3D335 2010

  979.3'13503—dc22

  2009039295

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

  Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  To whomever I did not help.

  It seemed to us that we were a very great people.

  —THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  Contents

  WHO

  WHAT

  WHEN

  WHERE

  WHY

  HOW

  WHY

  WHY

  WHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  WHO

  If you take the population of Las Vegas, Nevada, and you divide that by the number of days in the year, there should be 5,000 people in the city and its suburbs with a birthday on the same day that Las Vegas began.

  On the hundredth anniversary of its founding, however, Las Vegas had only gathered twenty-nine of those people.

  One of them arrived in a beaded blue headdress, her eyelashes sequined, her ruffled skirt torn.

  Another stood smiling as he watched her while she preened.

  There was a child in a knapsack. Its mother on the phone.

  An Elvis showed up briefly. Turned out that he was lost.

  A small family arrived carrying posters of their daughter: 1979–2005…IT WOULD BE HER BIRTHDAY TOO!

  All of us were there awaiting guidance from the city, assembled in a downtown fast food parking lot, seven thirty in the morning, the beginning of the summer.

  This was May 15. And I had just turned thirty.

  “You of all people,” wrote the city in a letter, “know how special our city really is…[because] Las Vegas is literally in your blood! Won’t you help us celebrate your bond with Las Vegas by marching in this summer’s Centennial Parade?”

  When a city official arrived, we were told what we should do.

  “Smile!…Be psyched!…This party is for you!”

  My mom was there to wait with me, but they asked if she would march.

  “When’s your birthday, by the way?”

  “Late July,” said my mom.

  “Close enough,” she was told.

  We were positioned behind the mayor, and he behind six horses, and they behind the color guard from Nellis Air Force Base.

  A young man with a shovel and a wheelbarrow marched beside us, stopping every now and then to scrape up the horses’ shit.

  “I’m from Atlanta,” said the guy who marched beside my mom and me. “But me and my wife come out here once or twice a year to play. Guess that’s why they asked me. I don’t care, right? I’ll march in their motherfucker.”

  We marched past Kostner’s Cash, and we marched past Super Cash, and we marched past Gambler’s Pawn and Loan, and then an empty lot.

  Past Drive-Up Wedding, Bail Bonds Now, 45% OFF ALL OUR LADIES’ STOLES AND FURS.

  We marched into an area that locals call the Naked City, a neighborhood once inhabited by the city’s many showgirls, and then by many vagrants, and now by seven signs for Adopt-A-Block Las Vegas.

  SMILE! blinked a monitor as we neared some TV crews.

  YOU ARE NOW ENTERING A LIVE TELEVISION PERFORMANCE AREA!

  SMILE!

  SMILE!

  SMILE!

  SMILE!

  “What do you want to say to America today?” asked a woman in a pantsuit while gripping a microphone, beside her a man in tight blue jeans, an open shirt, a ponytail, a camera on his shoulder with its black cord twisting up the street into a van.

  “This is wild!” yelled the man who marched beside my mom and me. “Happy Birthday, Vegas, yo! I love you all, Atlanta!”

  We passed the bank of cameras and waved the posters we were given. Twirled some streamers, tossed confetti, shot compression-powered string. We stood and sang the birthday song to a grandstand in applause.

  “You guys rock!” yelled a woman from the grandstand as we passed. And then we reached the end of the grandstand, and were done.

  We turned around, joined the crowd, watched the others march.

  The Sons of Norway’s Viking ship rocked sideways on its chassis.

  The public library’s Book Drill Team passed out their branches’ hours.

  Seven Chinese boys held aloft an orange dragon.

  There were women marching silently behind a plastic banner: 1-800-BETS-OFF…CALL IF YOU NEED HELP!

  Men who drove old cars.

  Girls with 4-H calves.

  Old women wearing pageant crowns.

  Congressmen, dairy carts, ballroom dancers, Meadows Chevy, the Organization of Ladies Kazoo Post-92 from Laughlin—over two hundred different entries marching past us for three hours.

  All of them being applauded, waved at, snapshot.

  Broadcast on the news, on local public access, on video-phone recordings that were posted to the Web.

  The parade was called by one newscast “the happening of the century!”

  A local blogger wrote that “something special happened here!”

  A radio host asked listeners if “all that really happened?”

  And the mayor swore that this parade was going to be remembered “as one of the greatest things to ever happen in Las Vegas.”

  And while I wasn’t born there, and have since then moved away, during the summer I lived in Vegas I began to feel those claims, appealing in their hopefulness the way parades appeal, the way a list appeals to those with faith in withheld meanings: the dream that if we linger long enough with anything, the truth of its significance is bound to be revealed.

  WHAT

  When I helped my mother move to Las Vegas that May, we lived for a couple weeks at the Budget Suites of America, a low-rise concrete pink motel with AIR COND and WEEKLY RATES and a Burger King next door.

  We started to look for houses in developments called “Provence,” “Tuscany,” and “Bridgeport Landing,” wandering through their model homes on plastic carpet runners.

  In the master bedroom suites there were books displayed on beds, their dust jackets removed, their spines always up, their titles too faint to clearly read at a glance.

  In the mud rooms there were chalkboards with the reminder, Buy milk! Mason jars of pasta in the kitchens neatly spilled. Ceramic white bowls for family pets on the floor. Silk flowers in blue vases on the dining room tables sparkling with little specks of round plastic morning dew.

  There were terra-cotta tiles.

  There were screened-in lanais.

  There were entertainment centers in every living room.

  The model called the “Amador” had columns
beside its door. The “Palomar” had room for four cars in its garage. And “Versailles,” gleaming white, came with an optional motorized gate.

  In every house the smell of cookies wafted golden brown from a stainless-steel oven that hadn’t been plugged in.

  “All you have to do,” said one hostess in a house, “is pick your model and your lot, and then leave the rest to us!”

  During one of those summer mornings upon first moving there, my mother and I stood in the sand of Las Vegas, listening to a broker around some wooden stakes and flags, some white-chalked land plots and orange-painted pipes, trying to see what he was seeing as he motioned with his hands, as he motioned with his wrists and wriggly fingers in full circles, motioned before his face, above his head, and to my mom, motioned toward the west, and then to me, and off the lot, then motioned past the stakes, the whipping flags, the lines in sand, beyond to where some pocks of little yucca plants were blooming, their tiny white flowers that never open all the way, their wobbly tall stalks of puffy million-seeded pods, their sword-long fronds that always indicate a desert, fanning out beyond the yellow of the lot in which we stood, fanning north above the shadow cast down by a mountain, fanning up and fanning over, fanning down and fanning out, then fanning off the private acreage that defines Summerlin, the walled and gated community my mother came to live in: orange houses, green parks, a white clocktower at its heart.

  “You gotta imagine the land out here without all these weeds and stuff,” the broker told my mother as he kicked a yucca plant. “You’re on your back lawn, easy tunes, iced tea. Maybe a little water feature bubbling in the distance.”

  We stood there on a $100,000 one-eighth-acre lot because Ethan, my mother’s broker, had said that living in this community would be like living in New England, my mother’s home for the previous sixty-seven years.

  “I like to tell people,” Ethan told us, “that more trees line the sidewalks of Summerlin per capita than any other neighborhood here in Las Vegas.” It was a fact he seemed particularly sure of as he shared it because, according to Ethan, the builder of Summerlin had surveyed the number of trees in the neighborhoods of other builders, divided that by the number of residents in each, then ordered 15 percent more trees than the highest of those estimates.

  In the Spanish, we learned, las vegas means “the meadows,” a lush haven that was named in 1829 for the “miles of green peace” it offered early pioneers. That first Spanish scout who wandered into Las Vegas said that it appeared “like a godsend” to him, “a great lie within the desert,” “unbelievable,” “unexpected,” “surely the truest proof that this land is touched by God.”

  We walked through the sand, onto sidewalk again, up the two steps into Ethan’s red Chevy S-10, then drove across the yellow lots of yucca-dotted desert, past gray concrete walls that were still being stacked, then finished concrete walls being painted further in, beige concrete walls keeping yuccas off of lawns, beige concrete walls lined with saplings, lamps, and shrubs, beige concrete walls with red swing-set tops behind them.

  “This was all green at one point, as far as the eye can see. Meadows…meadows…green meadows,” Ethan said. “That’s what Summerlin’s all about, bringing all that nature back.”

  Now, in Las Vegas, there is a Country Club at the Meadows, a Golden Meadows Nursing Home, Meadows Coffee, Meadows Jewelry, Meadows Mortgage, Meadows Glass, Mead ows Hospital, Automotive, Alterations, and Pets. The Mead ows Country Day School is a private K through six. Mead ows Women’s Center is in Village Meadows Mall. Mead ows Trailer Park has a waiting list for lots. And the Mead ows Church of Light has a Christ on its marquee.

  Barefoot, white-ankled, he’s teaching in a meadow.

  When Summerlin was started in 1988, its developer said that it wanted to create “the most successful master planned community in America,” and as we entered the town’s center, called The Town Center at Summerlin, Ethan explained that the goal of the builder had already been surpassed, even with only two thirds of the development complete.

  “Someone moves into a new Summerlin home every two hours and twenty-two minutes,” he said.

  We circled in The Town Center at Summerlin’s parking lot, idled behind a Lexus, beside a fountain, under sun. Then Ethan led us deeper into the center of the town, past Jamba Juice and Quiznos and Starbucks storefronts, past the life-sized bronze statues of a shopping mom and son, and into a green expanse called Willow Park at Summerlin, a three-acre fluffy stretch of shrubs and white flowers and a long mattress lawn toward which Ethan spread his arms.

  “This is what living in Summerlin is all about,” he said.

  Acrobats in sequined shorts flipped backward down the lawn. A mime followed behind a man who licked an ice cream cone. A stilt-walker, burger stand, barbershop quartet. Children chased each other with their faces brightly painted. Dogs chased the children with their eyes as they heeled. Above the park on two white poles two banners stretched and waved:

  SUMMERLIN NUMBER ONE!

  and

  GUINNESS BOOK OF RECORDS WORLD’S LARGEST GROUP HUG!

  “Okay,” Ethan said, “I’ll be honest with ya, right? It won’t be like this every day that you’re living in Las Vegas. But I just wanted to show you how much spirit we all have! You can tell that everyone’s really psyched to be living here, right?”

  Of the 335,000 acres that constitute the valley Las Vegas occupies, only 49,000 remain undeveloped. According to the Nevada Development Authority’s annual brochure, Las Vegas Perspective, 8,500 people move into the city every single month. It is the fastest growing metropolitan area in America. As a result, the Las Vegas valley’s shortage of land has become so pronounced that a local paper once reported that two new acres of land in Las Vegas are developed every hour, on each of which are squeezed an average of eight three-bedroom homes.

  Indeed, even as early as 1962, when the population of Las Vegas was one thirtieth its current size, the natural springs that fed the city’s growing population began to noticeably dry, and then to be depleted, and then to sink forever beneath the reach of Las Vegas.

  The city built a pipeline through the desert, therefore, running fifty miles into the city from Lake Mead, the artificial lake that was formed by Hoover Dam, the largest artificial body of water in the world. Today, the pipeline carries 97 percent of all the water Las Vegas uses, although the lake that it’s been tapping for over fifty-five years is now ninety feet below what it normally should be, 58 percent of its usual capacity, losing about a trillion gallons of water every year.

  According to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, there’s a 50 percent chance that within a dozen years the lake will be completely dry.

  During that summer when my mom and I arrived, the lake’s surface reached what was being called by locals “a potentially low level,” but which hydrologists from everywhere else were starting to call “an absolute ecological disaster,” something symptomatic of “a cataclysmic drought” or “the worst drought in a century” or “the worst drought in North America in over 500 years” or:

  “I’m not even sure this actually qualifies as a ‘drought’. This really might be closer to what this valley’s naturally like: dry and brown and no place for human beings.…What we know is that over two centuries ago an extraordinary cycle of rainfall was just beginning in the valley. And as would be expected, such unusual increases in precipitation brought with them the appearance of ‘meadows’ in this valley, shallow-rooted shrubbery that are usually indicative of something aberrant going on…at least when it comes to a desert…[for] what should be in Las Vegas is sagebrush and creosote and hundreds of thousands of yuccas. But Las Vegas isn’t the kind of place that takes ‘no’ for an answer. The city wanted to exist. The city got what it asked for.”

  Indeed, as warnings of a drought proliferated that summer, the general manager of the Las Vegas Water Authority said that “the notion that we have only a finite amount of water, and that when that water is gone we’ll have to stop o
ur city’s growth, is a notion that belongs in the distant past.”

  And so, we settled in.

  We moved my mother’s cat, her books, her pinball machine, the three floors and five bedrooms of boxes from home. We planted a tomato in a large pot outside, bought green plastic chairs and a table for the deck, hung drapes to frame the view of the fairway in the back, the green promise we couldn’t play on but paid extra to live beside, and took a trip to see the lake that had made that promise possible, the blue shock in yellow rock that attracts more campers and boaters and fishers and swimmers and skiers and hikers and divers and Scouts than any other National Recreation Area—7 million annual visitors on average—an estimate that the National Park Service raised to 8 million visitors by the end of that summer, an increase which one ranger tried to explain was not caused by more campers or boaters or fishers or swimmers or skiers or hikers or Scouts, but by amateur archeologists, owners of metal detectors, history buffs, photographers, and those who used to live there. For what attracted the extra million visitors to Lake Mead that year was not the usual lure of the lake’s artificial beauty, nor its recreational usefulness, nor even just the novelty that such a lake could exist, but rather the simple fact that the lake was slowly dying, that as the city quickly drained it the lake’s level lowered, and there slowly reemerged from its sinking blue surface that far distant past of the city of Las Vegas: a chimney stack from a concrete plant poking higher and higher above the water every day, part of a giant complex of mixing vats and grinders that was built in the thirties to help pour Hoover Dam, then was flooded by the lake that the dam had helped form; there was the B-29 bomber that crashed into Lake Mead, left there by the Air Force in 1949 because at that time it was so deep that divers couldn’t reach it; there was the sundae shop; there was the baker’s shop; there was the grocery store; a bank; there were 233 crypts and tombstones that were stripped bare of clothing and necklaces and bones when every deceased resident of St. Thomas, Nevada, was ziplocked and carted north and reburied upriver, just days before the growing lake would swallow their town whole.