Afterwards, you told me it was part of what you loved most about those weeks. You got up every morning and you just drove, with only the vaguest sense of where we would be sleeping thatnight. You didn’t have to make any decisions, and you didn’t have to think about what you were doing each day. I sat beside you, navigating from the map on my phone even when we were out of range. My left hand nearly always held on to your thigh. I didn’t know how to drive.
You collected the car. I sat on the bench in the waiting room of the airport Hertz office, listening to the final notes of A Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack, then “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” although it was a little over a week before Thanksgiving. Six days until I turned twenty-nine, though by my birthday we’d have crossed through Nevada and California and entered Arizona, according to the itinerary. You didn’t know what was on the itinerary because it had been me who planned the trip. You said you would drive me wherever I wanted to go.
When you’d collected the keys and signed the forms, we found the designated car in the lot and made our way out. It was almost midnight by my body clock, but nine o’clock on Pacific Time. I watched the city draw near in the window. The yellowy glow across the valley floor cast the big desert sky a dark purple. Las Vegas a valley of artificial light ringed by the black shapes of mountains. Billboards stretched all along the Las Vegas Freeway: Absinthe, Opium, Céline Dion, and the Backstreet Boys. “Report prescription opiate abuse,” “Great cannabis deals, next exit.” Palm trees, everywhere.
There’s something fucked-up about Vegas streets, you said.
*
We’d both been to Las Vegas before, but it was the first time you’d driven a car there. I don’t know now whether it was the streets that were fucked-up, or if it was the feeling you had, ever present, that there was something fundamentally fucked-up about this big Southwestern desert you never felt comfortable coming from.
The car came to a stop outside Malik’s house and a motion-sensor light flicked on over the concrete path running alongside the bungalow down to the casita. I had supposed a casita might be cute, and more redolent of vacation than a granny flat in his yard, which is what I realized, just then, that it was. Malik wasn’t home, but we didn’t need a key, because the locking mechanism was PIN-dependent. The casita was bigger than our entire apartment in New York. The floors were a cold cream tile, and through the sliding glass doors we could see the illuminated brambles of a Texas Ranger, one of the few things growing in the yard’s hard clay.
Neither of us had eaten on the plane. I dropped our stuff by the door, changed, and you drove us Downtown. It was the only place we knew to go. Atomic Liquors on Fremont Street was still open, and they served food late. Not much: fries and pickles, chicken wings, and curried cauliflower hush puppies. Nothing that I wanted.
Look, see, they have a whole plate of harissa carrots, you said, looking at the laminated menu displayed outside the door. You can have a big plate of carrots and a glass of red wine; you’ll be happy as a clam.
We were escorted inside by a waiter and seated in a leather booth. You ordered a burger and a cocktail with gin. You knew that I would pick at your fries as well as eat my carrots, and you didn’t mind. After we finished, you paid and went to the bathroom, while I walked outside to wait. Downtown was the only part of Las Vegas I was even a little familiar with because it was where your boss had previously booked our accommodation when you’d needed to visit for work. It was an extension of the Fremont Street Experience, just a few blocks away. The entire neighborhood was the target of a clean-up effort. The city wanted to do to Downtown Las Vegas what they’d done to Downtown L.A., you had told me when we’d first visited. Meaning: sanitize it, inject money into it, paint the shopfronts turquoise and rose, clear the homeless population and the baseball-capped retirees away. Make way for young people like us, and whatever it was they thought we wanted. For a couple of blocks, it really did seem as sterile and prosaic as they had hoped for. The bougainvillea that climbed the pastel walls, the wide streets, the big sky and the palm trees and the warmth. But the further east I looked down Fremont Street the dustier and more deserted it became. It was a weeknight. The population would swell over the weekend; all of the looky-loos from San Diego, or Denver, or Kansas City driving and flying in. Weeknights were quieter, and at eleven o’clock Fremont Street was almost peaceful. Small groups of young people passed by, laughing. I stood on the pavement by speakers that played tinny pop music into the open-air dining area.
Across the street I could see a woman walking alone. I saw her stumble, and hurry on. She was moving towards me from the dusty end of Fremont Street, looking not quite dressed, in flip-flops, a baseball shirt, and grubby black leggings with a hole in the knee. She was calling out, Max, come on, boy, come here, boy, looking around, trying to spot her dog somewhere in the shopfronts and patios. She gazed out into the cavernously empty parking lot across the street. A tall red neon sign skirted by a ribbon of yellow light declared it a “Motel,” but there was no building which might accommodate a motel, just a lot with some inexpertly parked cars. “Llamas stay for free,” the sign said beside the L of “Motel.” The traffic island palm fronds rasped. Max, she called out into the car park. She was across the street, but I could see that tears were streaming down her face. There was panic in her voice, making the long vowel of Max waver whenever she called it out. She was still holding the leash in her hand. I watched her head turn abruptly, towards shouts that penetrated the roar of the praying mantis fire show up the street. Two men and a woman were calling out and trying to move a dark shape into the gutter from the middle of the road.
Does this dog belong to anybody?
I looked back towards the woman, still standing beneath a floodlight. I watched the knowledge hit her.
I had known such moments. The brief, quiet instant when you know the flood of pain is coming. But you are still on dry land. Wishing with all your will that you might not have to go through the ordeal of getting soaked. You try to stay in that instant and ward off the flood, knowing you won’t be the same on the other side of the pain. Nothing will be the same.
Then it hit, sweeping over her face, crumpling its features. She opened her mouth and she screamed. Everybody looked. Her body seemed to unlock, and she began to run.
I’m coming, she shouted towards the lump of fur in the gutter. I’m coming!
As she ran, the leash fell out of her hand, and she did not stop to go back for it. I watched the shapes of people rush to comfort her, the muffled screams of her grief, but they were far away, and I could not see whether the dog was dead or not. I thought it was. I had heard that scream.
The tinny pop music still played, and when you came out of the bar you put your arm around me, we walked towards the car, and I didn’t tell you about what I had just seen. I didn’t think you could handle any more death.
We drove back to Malik’s and fell into bed. I had forgotten the way it is in warm places when the weather gets cold. How those cream tiles that cool the house in mid-summer only serve to intensify the chill on late-autumn evenings. Malik had left a space heater for us in the casita, but the big glass doors onto the yard let the heat out, and in bed that night I wore two sweaters and huddled against you for warmth. It was funny, the way we had learned to sleep together after five and a half years. I was always in a sweater, under a duvet and an extra blanket, and you always in boxers and a T-shirt, beneath a thin sheet, embracing the pillows. There was barely any room for me in the bed with all the pillows you needed to get to sleep.
*
We drove in the morning to a coffee shop. I ordered a tofu scramble, which I ate quickly from a paper take-out box on the street, wiping my fingers on my jeans while you took a phone call from your boss. The silhouette of Frenchman Mountain was visible through the haze of Downtown. A brilliant desert sky. The old neon signs and motels gone to seed, desiccating in the wind behind barbed wire and cracked cement. “We offer affordable senior living,” advertised an abandoned lot, weeds climbing towards the faded plastic banner. I felt a kind of loosening in my chest, as though the petals of a flower were easing open to receive the light. I loved it here.
We drove through the sprawl with your take-away iced coffee sloshing and threatening to spill, into flat land adorned with nothing but creosote and electricity transformers. I scanned the dial through power pop and Spanish-language hip-hop before landing on the news. Overnight the Golden Knights had beat Anaheim in the Pacific Division, there were no credible reports of election fraud in Nevada, and a former Las Vegas baker had been identified as a victim of the fires raging in northern California. The fire had by then spread to 140,000 acres, which was a number so large I couldn’t quite fathom it. It was as big as the city of Chicago, of Manila, of the entirety of Malta, Barbados, and Guam. There was another fire burning north of Los Angeles. People were trapped between beach and mountain, the radio said softly, while you told me you were anxious about the emails you hadn’t answered. You were worried about the tone of an artist in one of those emails, who, your boss had reminded you on the phone call, it was your job to keep happy. Neil Young’s Malibu home had been destroyed in the fires, the radio reported.
Poor Neil Young, you said.
You shifted awkwardly in the seat. Are you okay? I asked.
I slept weird and now my hips are tight, you said. Which meant, I knew, that driving might be uncomfortable, that sitting down for long periods would hurt you. Our bad days often started when your hips were tight.
We don’t have to go all the way out there, I said. If you don’t want to.
Of course not, you said, that’s the whole reason you wanted to come to Nevada.
Which was true. I wanted to see the dam.
I had wanted to drive out to see it during the last trip we had made to Las Vegas, but back then we had not thought to rent a car. I couldn’t say when it was that I got into my head that the Hoover Dam—the entire Colorado River—were sites worthy of a kind of pilgrimage. I don’t think, then, that I understood what it was that drew me to images of the dwindling water in this drying-up landscape. Yet for years I had been full of stories about the Colorado River. I brought it up in conversation with sort of the frequency that people find ways to mention their lovers to acquaintances when relationships are new. I talked about the streams and creeks and canals, the artificial lakes, the salty blue miracle of the Pacific edging up against so much desert. The miracle of it, and the tragedy. Long before I met you, I had read something by a writer from the West about dams in this part of the country. What I remembered was that by her reckoning the counterpoint to the dam was the swimming pool. She longed to see water under control—in a pool, in a dam—and not because there isn’t a kind of transcendental power in a wild, undammed river, but because she felt in the marrow of her bones the terror of the town submerged by flood, and the terror of the tap running dry. For a while, I had thought when I enrolled in my doctoral program that I would write about swimming pools. Indeed, that was the original proposal. But my interests evolved, and now I knew I wanted to write about the River, about its imminent loss. Even though, until this trip, I had never seen it.
And didn’t you understand about swimming pools? You were from the West. Like me, you had grown up in an arid place, although my place had been a eucalyptus city of tanned bodies, king hits, and Harbour views. I had never had a swimming pool as a child, but you had, at the center of the desert garden your mother had grown in your childhood yard. It had not occurred to me that the pool would be something more often observed through the glass back doors than swum in. Your parents seemed surprised that I wanted to. It had been so hot the first time I flew to Phoenix to meet your family that the sun had warmed the water to the same temperature as a human body. It felt, you remarked, like swimming in bathwater. You got out, while I stayed in, safely contained between the blue-tiled walls.
I was telling you all this, recalling to you that swimming pool in your mother’s garden which I never once swam in after that baking summer, when right then you swerved a bend in the road, and ahead of us was Lake Mead, and I felt tears in my eyes. The impossible blue wonder of all that water in the middle of all that desert.
An inspection point. A ranger pulled us over. He leaned towards the driver’s side window.
Jesus fuck, you said.
You fumbled at the buttons of the rental car, looking for the one to press to get the windows down. Eventually you just opened the driver’s side door. The ranger was annoyed.
Every car has a window lock, bud, the officer said, like you were an idiot.
It’s a rental.
What kind of car do you drive at home? Your car’s gotta have a window lock.
I don’t. I live in New York.
He paused a moment, then began to laugh. Okay, bud. Any firearms or drones?
We both shook our heads.
Have a nice day, he said, then leaned in and pointed. It’s that button. And then he closed your door.
*
You raced me down the stairs from the car park to the concourse, for no real reason, you said, than that it felt like winning.
I’m not competing with you, I pointed out, and you shrugged.
I turned to look out at where we were. On one side the thin trickle of blue between the steep rock face rolled on south to California. To the other, northward, lay the great stretch of Lake Mead. Red-brown volcanic rock rose up on either side of the water like a cradle, but between lake and red rock there was a distinct bleach-white band; the mark of the old waterline. There was not enough water running in the River anymore.
I followed you to the left, into a low white building which looked as though it were originally meant to be temporary. An elderly woman manned a ticket counter inside, but it wasn’t for the dam. What I saw through the door behind her was a kind of makeshift cinema, which housed not a screen but a diorama. The woman smiled, held out her arm, and nodded to let us know we were in for a treat. We went in. We didn’t even need a ticket. We sat down, the only attendees of the diorama room, to watch the show.
Rising in the snow-capped Rocky Mountains, the Colorado River runs 1400 miles through the desert towards the gulf of California, said a great, American, male voice. The voice of advertisements for Camel cigarettes, Velveeta, Campbell’s Soup. The light over the diorama brightened, a counterfeit dawn casting its sun over the length and breadth of the river system.
The voice intoned: The Colorado, for centuries, was one of the world’s wildest rivers. Melting snow in the mountains each spring swelled the River’s flow, transforming it into a raging torrent. Time and again the low, flat valleys in Arizona and Southern California were flooded. Early settlers tried to protect their lands from floods by constructing levees, but levees were useless as safeguards. But flood was not the only problem posed by the unruly River. After the springtime floods, the River’s flow generally dwindled, and at times its tributaries dried up completely. The only solution to the problem was to construct a dam to eliminate the cycles of flood and drought. You shifted beside me, and I looked at you to see if your hips hurt, or you were bored. But you, like me, enjoyed the strangeness of it all. The reservoir created by Hoover Dam is named Lake Mead. Measured by volume, it is the largest man-made reservoir in the United States, and can hold and store two years’ normal flow of the Colorado River. How current do you think those numbers are? you asked me. I shrugged. The diorama, and the audio recording, didn’t look or sound like it could have been updated since the 1970s. And so today, Hoover Dam stands like a mighty sentinel in Black Canyon, keeping guard over downstream regions. Lying calmly above the dam are the waters of Lake Mead, waters that once carried the threat of devastation, but which are now harnessed to serve mankind.
We stayed until the show was over, when the artificial sunlight illuminated everything from the Rockies to Los Angeles, stretching out over the tamed waters. We made our way out through the door and walked out into the blinding light atop the dam. Ahead of us we could see a steady trickle of people making their way to what we could now see were the actual ticket counters.
We drifted towards them. Should we go on a tour? I asked. Isn’t that what you’re meant to do here?
It’s weird they don’t mention anything about the water level in that diorama, you said as we walked.
Well, if it was recorded in the 1970s, maybe they hadn’t realized it was a problem yet, I said.
We paid for our tickets and assembled at the waiting point. When the guide arrived, he ushered a group of thirty of us to an elevator door and escorted us inside. Khaki shorts and baseball caps and sandals; we all crushed in. The elevator ascended down through the dam. My ears popped. The guide gesticulated and brushed the arm of a man beside him.
Sorry for assaulting you, said the guide. Then he laughed at his own joke.
I could feel you tense up beside me, feel you reach for your phone to start scrolling, even though there was no reception in the elevator. Just to have somewhere else to look.
Down in the heart of the dam, on the terrazzo marble floor, the tour guide collected us together. The Hoover Dam, he said, is held together by the sheer weight of the concrete. Las Vegas, the guide said, uses more power than any other city per capita, and that’s where most of the electricity goes. Most of the water, however, flows on to Southern California. But don’t worry, the tour guide said, none of your tax dollars are going to the dam, which is remarkable for a federal building. Any questions?
A woman piped up and asked if the dam ran on Arizona or Nevada time.
The dam, the guide said, runs all the time.
A Canadian man at the back asked, What does reclamation mean?
If the dam was built by the Bureau of Reclamation?
To reclaim the land from flood and drought, said the tour guide, in a tone that suggested he might like to hold his hand over his heart. To make it useful, he clarified. I wrote the word “useful” into the notebook I had in my hand and put a circle around it.
He performed a dramatic clap of the hands, rubbing them together. Has anyone told you what our photo policy has been since 9/11? he asked.
People shook their heads.
That’s good, he continued, because we don’t have one! Take all the photos you want, folks, and he opened his arms to let us loose.
We wandered, looking at the machinery neither of us really understood. It’s certainly very big, you observed.
Very dammy, I agreed.
At the end of the tour, back at the top, I leaned over the edge and looked down through my grubby sunglasses to the place where the waters of the Colorado spat out. I felt my heart flutter, just watching it. It was strange to imagine the River running unimpeded down below. Associations piled up in my mind, stories I’d read about this place. The story, for instance, about the grieving chief who lost his wife. A god, taking pity on him, took a ball of fire and used it to make a path to the land of the dead. The chief followed the path and recovered his wife. Kissed her, smelled her smell again. Promised that just one visit was enough. But the god didn’t trust him, and rolled a roaring river down the path, a River which would overwhelm anyone else ever trying to reach the land of the dead before their time had come.
Look at the way it gushes, I said. I turned to find you.
You were standing with your phone held out, aiming its camera across the vista of the dam. You said you were sending it to your father, to say hello. Across the other side of the ravine was where Arizona began. We were so close, but it would take nearly a week for us to arrive back there.
Nearby, a long concrete bas-relief was carved into a hunk of concrete. It showed muscular, shirtless men demonstrating the many benefits of the dam: flood control, water storage, irrigation, navigation, power. The illustrative image of “power” was of a man flexing over the round curves of the cogs that controlled the dam.
They look like characters in an Ayn Rand novel, I turned to say to you, but you were looking at your phone and I don’t think you heard me.
__________________________________
From Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine Watts. Copyright © 2025 by Madeleine Watts. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
