Beyond Venturi by Sawyer Brown
The proposed route pretty well mapped itself. I wanted to re-visit a couple of the small towns in the Panhandle of Texas, where I grew up. That would take me north to Dalhart (upper left corner of the state). There being no Interstate from Dalhart to L.A. via Las Vegas, a not unattractive northerly detour through Colorado and Utah seemed called for. Which would bring me into Las Vegas from the northeast, itself a highly attractive strategy. Think about it: the other way in, the road from L.A. to Vegas is special, if not sacred. Did I want to even try to follow in Dr. Thompson’s inimitable tire tracks? The thought of plunging into the Great American Architectural Icon out of the less-traveled, surely less-venerated Utahite desert sounded just right. Day 1 At a rest area near Chillicothe, featuring a few concrete tables and the only trees for miles, I was, Proust-like, transported to the past, not by odor but by sound: birdsong. I had forgotten that, for all the barrenness, the Texas plains, wherever there’s a tree or two, are haven for more birds than anyone has a right to expect. Aurally refreshed, I drove on, and on. And on. And up. The air became clearer and cooler. The inhabitants gave up irrigating, then tried for a few hundred miles to let cattle subsist on the scrub, and finally said to heck with it and just let the land be, in all its vast, cracked, brown aridity. I loved it. This was my childhood home. I was comfortable, contented in the middle of what, to the doughty Europeans who had to cross it last century, was hostile, threatening, dangerous nothingness. I drove and smiled: it was beautiful. I was home, after a fashion. Not home-this-is-where-I-want-to-stay, but home-this-is-the-place-that-taught-me-the-concept-home. I was as contented as the Europeans must have been tense when they moved across the American desert at foot- or horse-pace. Oh how, hiding their fear, they must have hated it. Oh how they took their fear out on the Indians who, by all accounts, also felt at home here. Fearing or hating, they hoped, and struggled through endless grasslands only to be faced then with endless desert, then endless mountains, then more desert, then more mountains, and still more mountains, only to arrive in California, which needed a lot of work, or so they thought. Happily, with a John D. MacDonald novel in the tapedeck, I drove through hours of not being fenced in, under not-cloudy skies, neither heard nor thought a discouraging word. Far from any Interstate, traffic was light, a car every five miles, and the towns of my childhood were—another surprise—holding their own against the onslaught of 20th century-dom. McDonald’s were the exception; carefully tended and re-re-painted Dairy King’s were the rule. Time had not stopped (the omnipresent satellite dishes offered proof), but everywhere was preserved a structural proof of the reality of the past, of my childhood: yes, Sawyer, there was a time before this time of urban leveling. Not merely preserved, but lived in, businessed in. Used. There were real buildings and houses in real towns where people were still living and working. So what if they had some problems with Letterman’s skewed coastal humor, so what if their teenagers did their best as mid-continent and Gap-less MTV poseurs, so what if even the wide places in the road now had a Chinese restaurant, so what if the fine old brick buildings that once sold Nashes and Hudsons now dispensed Toyotas and Hondas. The built environment that I remembered, and that I now remembered as having shaped me, was there, still in place, still functioning and aging very nicely. Home. Day 2 Into truck-farming valleys, more mountains, over the continental divide at 11,000 feet and fields of snow, more valleys, more mountains, and the vegetation weakened, the trees first shortened, then diminished to sage and cactus, and at last to splotches of desperate, thirsty grass as giant rock formations protruded above and dominated the parched planetary skin. By this time I was listening to Jacob Needleman reading the Tao Te Ching and guessing that the legendary Mr. Lao-Tze would also have felt right at home in this minimalist xeriscape. Might, I wondered, he have sat in the shade of similar barren monoliths in far Western China to get to that awesome internal space which he then tried to tell us about in a mere 5,000 words? I feel geomantically illiterate. A Cinerama landscape enlarged a hundred times, gigaphonic letters, words, sentences, whole books in every direction, but I’m in first grade again. "Run, Spot, run!" I stop. I look, I listen. I think: in car comfort, with the noisome natives long-since dispatched to out-of-sight, out-of-mind concentration camps, the word for it, for this this-ness, this big earth/little person/really big sky duality is not "hostile" but "austere." A geographic sackcloth and ashes. Day 3 Mount a rise, the land falls away into one of those basins which surely seemed endless and uncountable to the Europeans trekking this way. This one must be at least fifty miles across to the mountains in the west, and its north-south dimension belies guessing. The last mileage sign had said: Las Vegas 25. I look, and I look again. Finally, I squint and there in the middle of the bottom of the basin I make out a tiny, sort of gray-to-black smudge. I squint some more, and I see tiny buildings in the middle of the tiny smudge. Aha. Las Vegas. A tiny nothing in the middle of a vast something, a profound much-more-than-something. Las Vegas: A mote in God’s eye? I stop, and look, and think, and feel. The stopping, looking, thinking, and feeling coalesce into one short sentence: The continent and with it, the earth, may win after all. Will win. The continent as teacher: a huge powerful and very patient though not entirely unforgiving teacher. It had taken me two and a half days of driving to get to my goal. This grand American creation of something out of "nothing" turns out in the larger, significant scheme of things to be, well, not nothing, but about as close to nothing as you can get. A tiny, tiny smudge on a landscape whose age mocks everything we hold dear. Las Vegas: us doing our ultimate European impression of hubris. Desert? What desert? Nothing a few dams and airports and highways can’t fix. Heat? Nothing a few mega-b.t.u.’s of a/c can’t handle. Shelter? Nothing a few sheds and ducks (built to proportions the Gothic cathedral builders never dreamed of) won’t take care of. The Europeans pretty quickly filled up Europe once they began to get the hang of urban civilization. Among their many mistakes, one of the least bloody was geographical. They started talking about Europe as a continent when in fact Europe is, as the old gag has it, only a minor promontory on the west coast of Asia. It’s a gag but it happens to be true. And the Europeans’ geographic blunder turned out to be costly. Because they came to think that a continent was something they could handle, manage, subdue, and civilize, and finally urbanize. They did that to their little promontory, with much warfare and also much hubris. Then, after the word "Mediterranean" turned out to be an embarrassing and provincial misnomer, they crossed a real ocean. First they encountered exploitable forest. No problem; we’ll make a little Europe here. Next they found a thousand miles of farmable land. No problem; we can do a large bread basket here. But then came mountains, more mountains than a hundred Switzerlands, and enough desert to swallow and digest a million, a billion anchorites without burping. Sitting by the highway on that rise, squinting at my goal, I had to ask, What did we learn from it all? Sheds and ducks. Robert Venturi's terms, in his benchmark book, Learning from Las Vegas, for the absurd architectural simulacrums and false-fronted re-creations that now line the Strip. After a while, I drove into Las Vegas proper. Boy, did we ever learn sheds and ducks. One can only be impressed that Venturi saw with such clear eyes thirty years ago when, before American optimism had to face the challenge of a decade of greed which would have made even J.P. Morgan wince, the world still seemed quite doable in whatever way we sons (and parenthetical daughters) of Achilles and Odysseus and Oedipus et al. might decide was proper. Such as the way of ducks and sheds. Where others who bothered to look at Las Vegas saw at best pop culture gaud, Venturi glimpsed not just irony, but American irony, the irony of the American past, present, and future unless we change our ways. So, in the same decade that Mailer figured out why we were in Vietnam, Venturi figured out why we were in Las Vegas. His book, published in 1968 and still in print, is called "Learning from Las Vegas." Now as our un-self-conscious, adolescent irony of that time is forced to become self-conscious and adult and responsible, Las Vegas still has something to teach us. Not of course what Bugsy Siegal had in mind and not even, for all his extraordinary, almost preternatural insight, what Venturi had in mind. The lesson this time is, I think, rather more what the continent has in mind for any creatures who happen to set up housekeeping on it. What is it? I don’t know. Try Lao-Tze for starters. Better: Get thee to a desert.
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I recently got it into my head that I needed to drive from Houston
to Los Angeles. 