August 26, 2005 – Journey to the City of Sin

August 26, 2005 – Journey to the City of Sin

IM’s family in Scotland always viewed the U.S. and California in particular, as a long distance from their mist-enshrouded, heather-covered wee bit hill and glen. IM’s mother’s generation remembered cousins and uncles who left for America, never to return and never to be heard from again. Scots fall into two categories, those who leave and spend a lifetime longing for the green hills of Caledonia and those who never leave. You can imagine what IM’s family thought when their 18-year old, second-born daughter proclaimed that she was immigrating to America to seek her fortune. IM fell into the first category. Each time we would visit, we would invite IM’s parents and siblings to make the journey by plane and be our guest for a couple of weeks. We would show them the sights of the great southwest and of the magnificent coast of California. In 1980, IM’s brother WS, sister-in-law YS, and niece LS all came to visit. It meant a great deal to IM that her brother braved the journey to visit her in her adopted land.

When they arrived on Thursday July 17th 1980 at San Francisco Airport, we were there to meet their plane. Two weeks earlier, I had purchased a 7-passenger Pontiac diesel station wagon. We were in the last throes of another gas shortage and you would encounter lines at gas stations, but there was no shortage of diesel fuel, which was also cheaper than gasoline. About the only disadvantage to the wagon was the burst of diesel exhaust that accompanied each time the car accelerated from a full stop. Never mind that diesel advocates proclaimed the exhaust was less harmful than gas, it smelled, looked terrible, and it couldn’t be good to breath. The adults sat around the kitchen table after dinner and talked until the early morning hours. I left the group 1:00 o’clock. I had one more day of work before the start of my two-week vacation. IM was in such a deep sleep when I left at 7:30 in the morning she didn’t stir when I kissed her goodbye. ME, RD and their cousin LS were sleeping away, the untroubled slumber of youth on summer break from school.

We had dinner out on Friday night at Charlie Browns in Sunnyvale, on North Mathilda Avenue just north of the California Highway 101 and 237 junction and we all turned in early to get a early start on our journey through the California desert to Las Vegas. The restaurant was just north of the Sheraton Sunnyvale. We rose the next morning and packed the station full, bags of luggage on top, two kids in the third seat, two adults and one child in the middle and IM and me up front. We set out on California Highway 101 heading south, cutting over on California Highway 152 to Interstate 5 heading south. My brother-in-law has an insatiable curiosity. Just a bit taller than me at 5 feet 10 inches tall, with a slim build, a head of thick black hair, blue eyes that always appear to be smiling, and a prominent nose. When he talks—earning and engaging even when discussing the most mundane of topics—he always appears to be racing to keep up with the thoughts that rush through his mind.

YS is also an eager conversationalist—the difference between Americans and Brits is the latter have mastered the art of conversation—who at times has to compete with WS to get her point across. Pensive when not talking, animated when she speaks, YS is petite under 5 feet, 4 inches tall, with short blond hair and blue eyes. On this trip, she amused our daughters ME and RD with tales of Thor and Tai, their dog and cat, who had secretly stowed away and were accompanying us on our journey, always ahead of us as we arrived at each new destination. The girls were completely fascinated with the tales and during the trip, had begun to look forward to the latest exploits of the imaginary dog and cat. LS was the quietest of the group, taking in the scenery and occasionally questioning. The petite young thing, a bit shorter than her mom, had inherited her mother’s blue eyes, though hers required glasses. She was fresh out of school and wondering what she was going to do with her life. The trip was her vacation before having to deal with the realities of adult life.

We arrived in Barstow, California late on Saturday. It was named after William Barstow Strong, president of the Santa Fe Railroad, which came to town in 1888. I’ve always thought of the town as a place for passing through, which is what my family and I did when we relocated from El Paso, Texas to Tacoma, Washington. Historic Route 66 runs through its downtown. In the great depression immigrants in their possession-laden cars and trucks passed through as they sought to escape from the dust bowl and find work in the land of gold and silver. After spending Saturday night in Barstow, at a Best Western with a swimming pool and air conditioning, perfect for a late afternoon temperature, close to 100 degree Fahrenheit, we headed east toward Las Vegas on Interstate 15. However, we were stopped shortly after getting underway by the little town of Calico, a ghost town converted into a tourist attraction, six miles north of Daggett— which began life in 1860 across the Mojave River from Barstow. The small town of Calico in the Mojave Desert experienced its cataclysmic birth in 1882 when silver was discovered in Calico Mountains, thus beginning one of the largest silver strikes in California history—the golden state had its unfair share of precious metals. Light-complexioned Scots in shorts and T-shirts, exposed skin reddening in the mid-day sun, wandered through a 100-year ghost town with hundreds of others. This was before “sun block” had become part of our lexicon.

From Calico, we loaded up the air conditioned Pontiac and headed east toward Las Vegas, where we had rooms at the Mardi Gras Inn at 3500 Paradise Road. It’s one major intersection south of the Las Vegas Convention Center and it has a pool. After relaxing after the hot two and a half hour drive, we began our wild night in Vegas with a buffet dinner at the Sahara Hotel. This was not the family-friendly Vegas of today but adults-only before Steve Winn began remaking the strip into a fantasy land for adults and children, that derived more dollars from other services than gambling. However, back then gambling was what kept the lights on and our guests tried their hand at slot machines until all had lost their limit. The kids not permitted on the gambling floor watched the adults lose their money from the sideline, our youngest RD completely swept up in the sensory overload. She was convinced she would grow up and open her own place on the strip—thank God she got over that crazy notion.

Las Vegas is about that part of every person's psyche that is kept in check for most of the time. Within that psyche—that which is responsible for one's thoughts and feelings; the seat of the faculty of reason—are these images of exotic places we'd like to visit and pleasures we'd like to indulge in once we've arrived. Las Vegas is our imagination realized: Paris where everyone speaks English, Venice without the reality of a city under siege by the sea, the Great Pyramids at Giza without the fear of being a victim of terrorism, Italy the way Steve Winn knows you want it to be. Of course this is the Las Vegas born in the last decade of the 20th Century. The latter Vegas had stopped dressing itself with apparel from Fredericks of Hollywood turning instead to Haute Couture houses of Europe. But underneath all that expensive outerwear was the same trashy broad that had been seducing us all along.

After our buffet dinner, we drove downtown and walked out onto daylight bright Fremont Street and I watched the faces of everyone in our group fill with amazement at the visual and aural overload they were experiencing there at 10:00 PM on a hot July Sunday night—temperature in the upper 80s or low 90s Fahrenheit. I had been in Las Vegas several times but had never left the Strip to explore the wonders of Fremont Street. The Vegas that we were showing our guests from Scotland right then was the one of the Rat Pack, the smoking, drinking, gambling Vegas of the 1950s and 1960s. This was the Vegas of The Godfather movies, where women were dames and lady luck was the only woman a man wooed and seldom won. It reflected the fantasy of its age, where vice was the pleasure we all sought and after we had our fill, we felt guilty and rightfully so because we had been “bad.”