For the next few weeks, we’ll be observing an anniversary: 10 years since we left San Francisco and moved to Ann Arbor. I’ll repost articles Frank and I wrote at that time for our Ann Arbor blog, aSquared. Bittersweet, very definitely they will be, bittersweet.

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

‘I know that that’s one big-ass dam, lemme tell ya!

‘Hoover Dam National Historic Landmark (NV/AZ)

‘Built at a total cost of $165 million between 1931 and 1936, the Hoover Dam is 726 feet high. Lake Mead, the reservoir created by the dam, covers 247 square miles and holds 46 trillion cubic yards of water.

‘The dam, at its inception the largest public works project in US history, was the brainchild of many: Major John Wesley Powell, a one-armed Civil War veteran and geologist who undertook a huge project to topographically map the Grand Canyon and Colorado River region in 1869-1871; his nephew, Arthur Powell Davis, who spent over twenty years exploring the Colorado River and authored the main engineering report on the dam project, only to be forced to resign his Bureau of Reclamation post and go to Turkestan for work; Harry Morrison, Charlie Shea, Harry Kaiser, and Warren Bechtel, who organized the various financing and bids on the proposed project; Frank Crowe, who supervised the building of the dam in the face of punishing heat and harsh conditions and broke a workers’ strike in August 1931; Walker “Brig” Young, who surveyed Boulder Canyon in 1921 to find the best spot for the dam; and Gordon Kaufma , who planned the imposing Art Deco architecture of the dam.

‘The project was first named the Boulder Dam, but in September 1930, Secretary of the Interior Ray Wilbur a ounced that the dam would henceforth be named the Hoover Dam, an apparent attempt to gather much-needed credit to the administration for drumming up jobs in what was an otherwise dismal record. When Franklin Roosevelt took over in 1932, his Interior Secretary, Harold Ickes, changed the name back to Boulder. In April 1947, Harry Truman signed a Congressional resolution restoring the name Hoover to the dam.

‘The dam, which we had to pass on our way between the states of Nevada and Arizona, was an incredible thing. All you had to do was stop at one of the vista points, get out of the car, and take a look at the sweep of the dam to get a sense of its grandeur, a perception of the sweat and pain and money and time that went into the construction of this behemoth of human engineering. “Standing on the edge of the Hoover Dam,/I’m on the centerline between two states of mind,” go the lyrics to the Sugar song.

‘Now I know how true that expression is: the dam doesn’t just hold back water, it is a border between the Left Coast (if you include Clark County in that definition) and the rest of the country. The guards stationed at the checkpoint along the highway leading up to the dam are not just guarding the dam; they’re guarding a state of mind, a marvel of machinery, a massive expression of human labor that defies you not to bow before it and feel humbled.

‘—Posted by Frank at 16:30:00 | 15-Aug-03

For the next few weeks, we’ll be observing an anniversary: 10 years since we left San Francisco and moved to Ann Arbor. I’ll repost articles Frank and I wrote at that time for our Ann Arbor blog, aSquared. Bittersweet, very definitely they will be, bittersweet.

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

‘Wild, woolly Las Vegas. Whatta complete hoot. So very unreal and otherworldly …

‘Las Vegas, NV

‘Population 478,868 (2000 census). Seat of Clark County.

‘The first settlement at what is now Las Vegas was, ironically, a Mormon outpost, founded in 1855 and abandoned two years later after repeated raids by the Paiutes. Las Vegas itself was incorporated in 1905. In 1931, gambling and quickie divorces were legalized in Nevada, and construction was started on the Hoover Dam. The rest is history.

‘The first casino on what the world knows today as The Strip, the Hotel El Rancho Vegas, was opened in April 1941 by Tom Hull (no, not Bugsy Siegel) across the street from what is now the Sahara. The event that prompted Hull to open the Rancho was, the tale goes (is this a recurring theme or what?), a flat tire. He had a flat on Highway 91, his traveling companion hitched back into town to get help, and Hull stood on the shoulder, started counting cars, and became convinced that this was a great spot to start a place for exhausted motorists to rest along the highway to his properties in Los Angeles. (He had already started other Ranchos in Sacramento and Fresno and owned the Mayfair in Los Angeles and the Roosevelt in Hollywood.) The El Rancho burned down in a fire in July 1960.

‘Coming into Vegas was a breeze until about 5 miles from town. It’s somewhat amusing that the stretch of Highway 95 just north of Vegas is occupied by a bunch of upstanding little towns like Indian Springs with sturdy churches and signs warning darkly of the consequences of sin, as though they were the last bulwark against the inevitable descent into hell. Where do I suspect that the folks stationed at Nellis Air Force Base spend their free time? Indian Springs? Yeah, that’s it.

‘The traffic coming into town was not unmanageable, but it was rough for a non-local to negotiate the zooming cars and trucks and the exits and byways (not to mention the tangled Spaghetti Bowl), so I got out off an exit near the Convention Center and let Steve take the wheel while I snapped shots and gawked at the overstimulating panorama of the Strip. The Sahara, Circus Circus, the Stardust, the Frontier, the Venetian, Treasure Island, Harrah’s, Caesar’s Palace, the Mirage, Paris, Bellagio, MGM Grand, New York New York, the Tropicana, Luxor, Mandalay Bay—all you can do is gawk, gawk, and gawk some more, or close your eyes once you get a headache from all the neon and flashing and excess. Driving in a car along the Strip for half an hour obviously doesn’t do it justice. If I had wanted to do Vegas justice, we would have stayed for a night or two and wandered the Strip and gone in and out of all the big casinos.

‘But even as a passenger in a car down Las Vegas Boulevard, you get a quick sense of the city, its rhythm, its flavor, its style. The Strip itself is ostentation at its most marvelous and unabashed. I noticed a huge billboard advertising Gladys Knight at the Flamingo and marveled at the fact that a once semi-gritty Atlanta/Motown soul singer like Gladys was now a glitzy headliner at a Vegas casino. Then again, ZZ Top is at Mandalay Bay, so ….. Once you get off the Strip you see the real Vegas, if such a thing exists, because what is Vegas without the Strip?

‘Along and around Charleston Boulevard, you see boarded-up storefronts, gritty boulevards, hot, angry-looking drivers, car salesmen in too-tight shirts and strangling ties, homeless men pushing shopping carts full of their belongings down the street, lots of other evidence that the city’s commitment to its infrastructure outside of the Strip is inattentive at best.

‘We stopped at a bank branch off Sunset Road, not far from McCarran Airport, a part of town which was somewhat more business-park-like, and a group of homeless men were taking a breather on the bank lawn near the sidewalk. A pissed-off-looking man hopped into his white Porsche and gunned it for all it was worth to make it to the stop sign at the other end of the adjoining mall parking lot, as though the Prince of Darkness himself were riding his bumper.

‘Vegas is an amazing place, but I don’t know that I’d want to live in the shadow of the Strip on a permanent basis.

‘—Posted by Frank at 14:00:00 | 15-Aug-03’

For the next few weeks, we’ll be observing an anniversary: 10 years since we left San Francisco and moved to Ann Arbor. I’ll repost articles Frank and I wrote at that time for our Ann Arbor blog, aSquared. Bittersweet, very definitely they will be, bittersweet.

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

‘Hitting the road with some tunes and enjoying the countryside. I love it …

‘Soundtrack, Day One

‘John Cougar Mellencamp’s Scarecrow. Obviously out-of-date yet somehow appropriate. Then a Columbia compilation called The Golden Age Voume 1, with old-time forties music by likes of Gene Autry, Bob Willis, The Chuck Wagon Gang, and Patsy Montana, which was a lot of fun. Followed by an album of Ella Fitzgerald sides with the Chick Webb Orchestra. And on the way down Highway 6 into Nevada, Neko Case’s Black Listed, a pretty damn good CD by a great alt-country songwriter from Vancouver by way of Alexandria, VA.

‘—Posted by Frank at 23:59:01 | 14-Aug-03

‘Also, here is the photo gallery of Day One of the trip:

‘

‘« Our Move to Michigan – Day One »’

For the next few weeks, we’ll be observing an anniversary: 10 years since we left San Francisco and moved to Ann Arbor. I’ll repost articles Frank and I wrote at that time for our Ann Arbor blog, aSquared. Bittersweet, very definitely they will be, bittersweet.

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

‘Tonopah (I still don’t how to pronounce it properly) is the very definition of ‘Middle of Nowhere’ …

‘Tonopah, NV

‘Population 2627 (2000 census). Seat of Nye County, the third-largest county in area in the United States.

‘Founded in 1900 by Jim Butler (whom one Nevada historical site describes as the “laziest mining tycoon of all time”). Folklore has it that Butler, while prospecting, lost his burro in a windstorm. The burro cowered beneath a rock outcropping. When Butler found the cowering beast, he noticed something unusual about the rock, chipped at it, struck paydirt, and started the last silver rush in Nevada.

‘Tonopah grew within two years from a rock outcropping to a bustling mining town of 3000. Wyatt Earp ran a saloon here from 1902 to 1905. The big news in town the day before we arrived (according to the Pahrump Valley Times) was that a defendant company planned to appeal after a jury had awarded $136 million, the largest judgment in Nye County history, to Equatorial Tonopah Inc., a US subsidiary of the Sydney, Australia-based Equatorial Mining Ltd, in a judgment against Kvaerner Inc., a US subsidiary of a Lysaker, Norway-based engineering construction firm. Equatorial Tonopah’s lawsuit alleged that Kvaerner had made faulty projections on the feasibility of a copper mine 17 miles north of Tonopah that Equatorial Tonopah had bought for $15 million plus $32 million in equity from Cyprus Amax Metals in 1997 (and, after the yield proved far less than what Kvaerner had projected, closed in July 2001).

‘I drove us into town around 8.00. As we came in off Highway 95, from twenty and ten miles off the town looked like something out of a mirage, there one minute and not quite there the next. The town and its surroundings were undoubtedly awe-inspiring physically. The San Antonio Mountains, which turn pink and amethyst in the sunset, are stark, lonely, and majestic. The town itself is like something out of a John Ford Western. The Mizpah Hotel, the town’s main landmark, founded in 1907, sits in the middle of Main Street with a huge ghost-town sign announcing its presence.

‘Among the people illegitimately claimed to have connections with the Mizpah: Jack Dempsey, who allegedly worked as a bouncer there (although, according to the Nevada State Library and Archives, he “only” fought a match against Johnny Sudenberg in Tonopah in June 1915 and didn’t actually work at the Mizpah in any capacity), and Howard Hughes, who allegedly married Jean Peters there (although, according to the same source, Hughes actually married Peters in January 1957 in his apartment at the L&L Motel, not at the Mizpah).

‘As we came to our hotel, the Best Western Hi-Desert Inn, we were greeted by ominous glares from a bench full of well-wishers on the sidewalk in front of the hotel. The sound of yowling children sailed in the window when I rolled it down to get a breath of fresh air. The bellboy cart we dragged out to the Jeep to load our overpacked possessions nearly collapsed under their admittedly copious weight. A bunch of kids who apparently lived in the neighborhood behind the hotel favored using the parking lot as a skate park.

‘After we settled in, we decided to go try to find something for dinner. No restaurants looked open, so we stopped at Scolari’s, a supermarket at the south edge of town (which, essentially, was about a quarter mile down Main Street from the hotel). The supermarket had a big parking lot, but like the lot, the market was almost deserted, except for a few shoppers and the handful of employees staffing the place. It was 9.00 on a Thursday night but it felt like Sunday around 11.00. We grabbed a few frozen comestibles and went to the checkout counters, where a strapping brunet clerk asked Steve whether he was “ailing” because he grabbed at his belly while trying not to drop the pizza package in his hand. The clerk was almost painfully polite, in a sickly kind of way that would have seemed sarcastic if it had not been so seemingly ingenuous (and if it had not been almost anywhere but California).

‘At the other end of the spectrum, the main drag seemed to be a public meeting space for the area’s bored teenagers, who screeched up and down it in their souped-up cars and noisily marked their territory with testosterone-laden skid marks. The absinthe-green Silver Queen Hotel sign and the lit-up neon cross from a generic Protestant chapel behind it added a final bizarre touch to the evening.

‘I was content to spend the rest of the night in the hotel room watching the Weather Channel. I guess it was the xenophobic and suspicious California Blanche DuBois in me realizing that I was 355 miles from Oakland and that Tonopah marked the point at which there really was, barring some unforeseen emergency the nature of which it would be impossible to conceive, no turning back.

‘Tonopah reminded me of nothing more clearly than the eerie, vaguely hostile tiny towns along the highway that Inger Stevens encountered in the 1960 “Twilight Zone” episode in which she is traveling cross-country, has a blown tire outside Pittsburgh, and begins getting tailed by a silent porkpie-hat-wearing hitchhiker wherever she goes, eventually realizing somewhere in Arizona that she actually died in the blowout and that the hitchhiker is the Grim Reaper.

‘—Posted by Frank at 23:59:00 | 14-Aug-03