A few elderly people are sitting on a bench on a quaint cobblestone street by charming village shops, gazing out at the Mediterranean, enjoying a cup of Italian ice cream.
They got here from Henderson, four miles beyond Wal-Mart, past a stretch of trailer homes and a splotch of ragged desert. Here, at this moment, in the shadow of Old-Country-inspired flats with flower-pot-adorned balconies, they're at the heart of 2,200 acres of lies. Absurd, fantastic—and growing—lies.
Lake Las Vegas Joint Venture is buying up more land. In addition to the 2,600 acres of "unparalleled golf courses, world-class hotels, luxury residences and lifestyle amenities, all centered on a spectacular 320-acre lake," it'll soon eat up another 983 acres of desert. Developers earlier this month put down 20-percent of a $41.6 million purchase price; they have six months to pay the remainder to the BLM before building.
What this means is the expansion of a perplexing fantasy, at the cost of ... well who cares what the cost is to the larger environment—we're talking fantasy, the repudiation of reality.
Buying into this development marks more than a jaunt through a fairy tale, it marks a solid commitment to denying the authority of nature. People are paying millions of bucks to live here—there are 18 separate developments at prices ranging from the $300,000s up to Celine-levels—in what was once considered a throwaway piece of inhospitable desert. Although it's possible that the developers close their doors at night and laugh heartily, Lake Las Vegas is not built with the tongue-in-cheek folly of the Strip's resort casinos. It is meant to be taken quite seriously, despite the bald-faced revision of regional natural history in its sales materials:
"I am enamored with the temperament and beauty of the Mediterranean. In our newest home on the lake near the mountains, we have this … and more," says a manufactured quote from an imaginary resident in the home sales material.
"Here we live the life we have always wanted, in the desert and the mountains, on the fairways, near the shimmering lake. We feel the sand along the shore slide under our feet, like warm sandals. We eagerly make wet footprints in the cool water." There's a photo of a gray-headed white man and a woman surely 15 years his junior, holding hands, laughing and skipping through water with their pants legs rolled up.
"At Lake Las Vegas Resort, live your life exactly as you like. Enjoy the excitement of sailing, fishing, swimming, kayaking and canoeing in the cool lake. Hike in the magnificent mountains … Relax on the terrace of your waterfront villa. Observe bighorn sheep, herons, and eagles in their natural habitat …"
"Here, your life is anything you want it to be. Sports. Exercise. Pampering. Rejuvenation. Residents enjoy the endless excitement that the pristine lake offers: swimming, sailing, kayaking, canoeing, wind surfing, snorkeling, scuba diving and sport fishing. The carefully maintained lake is balanced within nature and sustains its own aquatic ecosystem. On land, play golf or take the family to the beach. Bike, hike and explore in the federally protected mountain ranges that rise high above this private retreat."
The artifice of Lake Las Vegas is surely not a first. It marks, on a smaller, amped-up scale, our continuing insistence on changing the desert into something it is not—on making place conform to desire.
The additional land that its developers are buying round out property that is not so far from our other Great Fake Lake, Lake Mead—the greater Las Vegas area's own perplexing aquatic fantasy.
Of course, Lake Mead was not built specifically to create a resort lifestyle, but a manageable one. Hoover Dam was seen as a way to limit Colorado River flooding and drought, regulate the whims of Mother Nature, employ a slew of Depression-era workers, celebrate the brains of mankind and distribute water according to a political contract—a historical high note in man's efforts to conquer nature.
"Two powerful and uncompromising forces created this fantastic place," says a Lake Mead National Park Service brochure handed out today. "Nature, working slowly over millions of years, built the foundation. Humans, working feverishly over the last few decades, remodeled and rebuilt a landscape that better suited their modern needs and desires … [After Lake Mead was formed], people flocked to the desert for boating, fishing, swimming and waterskiing."
Drive around Lake Mead today and you'll see a bathtub ring some 80-feet high. The lake is at its lowest level in 30 years: 1,139 feet.
At Lake Mead's Las Vegas Bay, the boat ramps end in dry earth. Muddy lake bottom is everywhere where lake once was. Rocks jut out of the water in many places, all scarred with the white-wall water mark that makes them seem half naked, as if their pants have been dropped, as if we're being shown something we're not supposed to see—some bit of reality we'd like covered up. At the Lake Mead Marina, dozens of people are crowded onto the squalid floating pier, tossing popcorn to freakishly large schools of freakishly large carp whose home just happens to be shrinking.
Around the lake, giant yellow bulldozers and cranes move the dirt to accommodate the loss of water, while over the hill at Lake Las Vegas, similar machines work toward the inverse goal—they prepare for the arrival of more piped-in water, more luscious grass.
At the Lake Mead Visitor Center, the ranger explains to a group of visitors that the larger lake's level is down because of a lack of snowy winters in the Rockies. She says the snow melt has been east of the Continental Divide, and less water is making its way down the Colorado as a result. And, she tells the crowd of out-of-towners, there is the matter of a growing Las Vegas.
Development is the biggest new use of Lake Mead water, she says.
"Is it true that 6,000 people a month move to Las Vegas?" a woman from Arkansas asks.
"Yes it is. And you'll find that people who move here want grass, and golf courses, and swimming pools in their back yards because it's very hot in the summer," the young ranger says.
As you turn from Lake Mead Drive into the Lake Las Vegas property, desert immediately turns to grass. On this day an enormous Hispanic man is hanging off the sides of a gasoline-powered riding lawn mower, trimming up a swatch of totally misplaced lush green grass. A few hundred yards behind and above the lawn mower, atop a hill, a piped-in waterfall that looks less natural than would a glacier falls down some 20 stair-step gradations in the dry desert scrub, creating a small pond below. To the left, a giant electric box and dumpster are camouflaged by palm trees shooting out of the grass, hanging over another pond on a golf course. To the right, two ducks bathe in another pond.
Further into the development, three more men are mowing patches of grass. The lawn gives way to more water, and more laborers, and more water. Across the street, across the lavish fairway on which a foursome drives two golf carts, a giant earth-moving machine tears up the desert, preparing to add more green.
Everywhere, construction and contraption stand side-by-side with manmade nature. The Wizard and Oz seem to be standing here at once offering a choice: Do you see the Oz—the luxurious fantasy—or do you fixate on the tinkering Wizard and his land-altering minions?
Again and again, we opt for Oz. We opt for it even though we know—don't we?—that ultimately nature must win. Just maybe not on our watch. So we opt to live on credit.
We opt to live in an illusion. Behind the development's public centerpiece, the Casino MonteLago, is the Mediterranean village, with cobblestone (brick) streets, a quaint café (Starbucks) on the corner, plentiful benches, carefully potted trees, buildings with tasteful awnings and chic boutiques. All of this is lakeside—a small stretch of Lake Las Vegas' 10-mile shoreline abuts the village.
La Contessa, an 80-foot yacht, is parked by the 20-foot pier. "That's an awful lot of boat for this pond," says a Minnesota visitor upon seeing the vessel. An American flag hangs off the back of La Contessa. There are paddleboats: one says Future Beach and another, Escape. There is a man in full fishing regalia teaching another man the basics of fly-fishing; the lake is stocked with fish. There's a gondola piddling through the water; and another small boat toting tourists around, under a pedestrian bridge that spans this finger of the lake.
Two old men are strolling on the boardwalk. One asks another: Where do they get this water? Lake Mead, his friend says. That alone seems to satisfy him. There's no follow-up question. Nothing about water shortages or forcing eco-system changes. It's as if he can't remember where this is all taking place—here, in the Mojave Desert, one of the driest places on the planet.
The Lake Las Vegas development uses about 1,784,000,000 gallons of water a year, making it the second-highest user of Lake Mead water in the Valley, behind the school district. There doesn't appear to be a lot of xeriscaping here, not with three golf courses and one on the way.
Lake Las Vegas itself is created by a dirt dam about 18 stories high, 4,800 feet long and 700 feet wide. (When the ranger at the Lake Mead Visitor Center is asked about Lake Las Vegas, she said, "People think it's part of Lake Mead that has been blocked off, but it's not. I'm not sure how it was created.") It was, in fact, created from Lake Mead, but not in any natural way. Although the lake sits in the path of the Las Vegas Wash, which daily carries 150,000 gallons of treated sewage and run-off water from the city, that water isn't deemed clean enough for Lake Las Vegas' swimming and gondola-riding, so developers channeled it under the lake in two cement pipes, where it empties out east of the development and flows back into Lake Mead. Then Lake Las Vegas developers pump cleaner water in—ultimately water that comes from Lake Mead—to create the Mediterranean.
That's not to say that a lot of thought wasn't given to the environmental integration of a hunk of Minnesota into a stretch of the Mojave desert. Lake Las Vegas developers hired biologists who ended up handling various ecosystem challenges, such as what to do with pesky birds that are drawn to the grass but who annoy golfers. The truth is, the lake is expected to create a self-sustaining eco-system in another few years—a successful man-conquers-and-tames-nature story.
As was Lake Mead. But today, the booming city that was allowed by harnessing the Colorado River water, Las Vegas, is beginning to undergo a few rebuttals from Mother Nature. On January 1, Southern Nevada will officially enter "Drought Alert" as identified by the Southern Nevada Water Authority. Car-washing at home will be banned. Misting systems that hang over outdoor cafes will be banned. Grass will be prohibited in the front yards of new homes and limited to 50 percent of back and side yards. And water fountains larger than 25-square feet will be banned—except at resorts.
Overall, the effects don't, at this point, threaten the fantasy lifestyle. It doesn't appear that anyone will go thirsty. It doesn't appear that anyone will even have to forgo a round of golf on a carpet of Kelly green. Recent water restrictions seem to be working—this fall, efforts to educate residents about water usage and limit outdoor watering brought water demand down a few percentage points.
But learning to manage the drought doesn't yet signal a shift in consciousness. An uncanny ability to deny the reality of a dry desert persists—an uncanny ability to deny reality, period, flourishes.
Last weekend, visitors to the Village at Monte Lago oohed and aahed over the body of clean water, and construction workers worked doubletime on half-million-dollar home lots that have already been purchased.
Up on the hillside looking down at the lake, on a patch of grass, near a flowing water fountain, less than 10 miles from the depleted Lake Mead, on the edge of a Mediterranean village not far from Wal-Mart, on a parcel of one-time throwaway BLM desert now prime real estate, a man learned to tie a fishing line. He wanted to catch a bass in the Mojave Desert.
And he probably will.