Woe and Wonder

On a Saturday morning in early June, just before the heat spikes, I set out with my eight-year-old son from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. We start the way I drive to work—north on Spencer Street past rows of midcentury ranch houses; left around the playgrounds of William E. Orr Middle School; then right on East Katie where, just past Algonquin, I see two burned-out truck trailers at the edge of the Boulevard Mall parking lot. One has holes in its sides like white paper someone held a lighter to, blew out the flame, and burned again and again. Still, standing on its wheels and struts, it seems positively stalwart compared to its companion, collapsed on its belly—a gesture of abjection, it feels, but also prayerful? Inside the trailer shells I glimpse blankets and bottles and a plywood shed. I don't dwell, though. I'm on my way to get waffles for my boy.

At TIABI Coffee & Waffle, we walk through a glass door into the other side of the Las Vegas Valley. I show the clerk a picture of a face-waffle they made for us several years ago. The woman at the iron glances over. "I can top that," she says.

The burned-out truck, the face-waffle: These are the poles between which my experience of Las Vegas is strung. This is a place of woe and wonder. It's where you see a man at an interstate off-ramp asking for change with a full-grown pit bull slumped on his back, a paw draped over each of the man's shoulders. It's also the place where a couple—one very tall and bearded, one short and wispy and clean-shaven—created an independent bookstore and sanctuary for artificial birds on East Fremont Street, among a cluster of hipster retail, neon, and street art that feels like Marfa meets Burning Man.

In Las Vegas, I've gathered with writers at the edge of the desert, heard songs of lament and praise as the light dims from high-beam-in-the-eyes bright to soft orange to purple-blue. And I've driven past an elderly woman in a wheelchair-scooter, rolling down a side street, under full desert sun.

The word for this place is strange—and wonderful, I hasten to add, though it makes me a bit sad that I need to, that people don't understand the meaning of the word strange.