I'm driving up I-95, maybe 25 miles northwest of Vegas, when I see their cursive written all over the sky—loop-de-loops, swooping, swirling, wild trails of smoke.
I've just come through a thousand Joshua Trees, past the Paiute Reservation/smoke shop/golf resort, past the "Prison Area, No Hitchhiking" sign and the prisons—all on this road to nowhere, this road to Area 51 and the Nevada Test Site, this tour of left field. Weirder still, my radio station starts playing Paula Abdul songs, apparently on purpose, and then, there are these F-16s barreling down, cracking open the sky, swimming through it upside down and sideways, causing my stomach to lurch like I'm on a roller coaster.
So I pull off the road in Indian Springs to take in the show. A half-dozen people are standing in the steak-and-eggs casino parking lot doing the same, hands on hips, heads tilted back. They are bikers in leather chaps and chicks in suede. Behind the casino, by an RV lot, there's an old guy in a lawn chair making a sport of it. I get out of my car and head over.
I had actually come up here to gauge for myself the possibility that Indian Springs is about to become a boomtown. I read it in the Las Vegas Sun: "Boomtown in the Making?" (January 20). I wanted to doubt it, because to my recollection, Indian Springs is a trailer park anchored by a prison and this come-and-go Air Force auxiliary field. It's less of a destination than Pahrump. But, then, it was only a few years ago that reporters traipsed to Pahrump to write the fastest-growing-town-in-the-nation stories; now Pahrump has a Wal-Mart, which doubles as a giant tombstone for the town's quixotic charm.
Sitting in a woven green lawn chair, Bill Linsey has a hardback copy of The Founding Brothers on his lap and a giant pair of binoculars up to his eyes. He's wearing a red flannel shirt and has a trim gray moustache.
A sharp crackling comes from skyward. I duck and look. The red-white-and-blue belly of an F-16 shoots by.
"Yeeeahp. They practice every day," Bill tells me without lowering his binoculars. Then a black hawk glides by. The bird, not the helicopter. It seems slow and awkward. Things are definitely awry here, the mix of nature and technology is whacked out, evolution seems somehow out of sequence, very little conforms to expectations.
Bill says he comes out here for the peace and quiet. Five jets rip through my eardrums.
"I see," I say.
"Sometimes, I come out here at night and watch Area 51," he says. He lowers the binoculars and looks at me. Implied in our quiet eye contact is the spookiness of a great X-File tale. "I saw something once."
I raise my eyebrows.
"I don't know what it was. It was something moving real fast, back and forth, with lights on it. I don't know." We look at each other some more, exchanging seconds full of high drama and suspicion about the government.
Bill is from Yakima, Washington, a retired highway worker. He and his wife winter here sometimes. He points to his crème-colored RV in the front row of the ragged RV park. "It's a wonderful place."
The F-16s crack by. We turn our heads to follow them.
"Come to me all who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest—Matthew 11:27," says the sign outside of Indian Springs Baptist Church. It might well be the Welcome to Indian Springs sign.
At this writing, I'm delighted to report, Indian Springs does not have a Wal-Mart. Or a stoplight. And it is, in fact, sandwiched between a prison on one side of the highway and an Air Force base on the other. It's home to about 1,600 people who, by and large, live in uneven blocks of unmatching mobile homes, homes with chicken-wire-enclosed yards dotted with flat soccer balls and milk crates and scrapped bicycles. Tilting swing sets are in plentiful supply. U.S. flags appear in very many windows; at least one home bears a Texas flag. Dogs are off leashes here; they come bounding out from porches to bark off my car. "No Trespassing" signs are wired to mailboxes. Huge satellite dishes sit in front yards, and in side yards, and in back yards, adjacent to septic tanks. On this crisp, sunny January day, freshly washed flannel shirts and jeans and bras hang on clotheslines.
I am comforted by places like this. Here, I think, is a place for lone wolves. A town full of people who have found a compelling reason to own a couple of goats, or a horse and cement mixer, and who seem to prefer the haphazard arrangement of sheds and junked pickup trucks to neat lawns and matching storefronts.
Indian Springs' commercial district, should one choose to stretch that term, is on the east side of I-95 and is made up of the Indian Springs Casino and Motel, Auntie Moe's Gift Shop, a general store and the RV park, all in front of the Air force base. The casino is home to Moe's Bar—a diehard little nook that on this day welcomes a healthy mix of portly bikers and gruff truckers—bikes out front, rigs out back—and down-heel residents and retirees from the RV park. Adjacent to the bar is Springs Café, home of the $3.49 steak and eggs special and a small assortment of slots and poker.
I head over to Auntie Moe's gift shop, mostly because the sign out front says, "Expect to be impressed."
Inside, Michelle Thompson greets me kindly and tells half a life story: The store is her sister's, her sister is out traveling, looking for Native American artifacts to purchase and sell here. "We are one-sixteenth Indian," Michelle tells me. The store is festooned with Native American souvenirs, feathers, knives, rattles, rocks, art. Thompson wears a crucifix around her neck.
A map on the wall is covered in colorful straight pins—each marks a place on the map that is home to a visitor to Auntie Moe's: South Africa, Netherlands, Icleand, New Zealand. All right through this tiny, tiny town, this tiny, tiny shop. It's part of being on the open road—of being the only place between wild space and the balloon of civilization.
Across from the commercial district is the stretch of homes, a small community center and Clark County's only K-12 school—complete with a weathered old Air Force jet set in the schoolyard as a mascot. And southwest of the community, in the foothills, are the prisons.
To some, Indian Springs is an eyesore, no doubt. And as of yet, I haven't chosen to live here, either. But I feel a deep exhale here today, the shaking off of the tight compartmentalization inherent in living closer to the city.
Townspeople seem divided over the prospects of growth—some like the idea of cash flow, some cherish the small-town flavor and want to preserve it, some want to see it grow but want to maintain control over that growth.
"There are developers who are trying desperately to develop here," says Mike Bingham, town advisory board chairman. "They want to put another mobile home park here. But we don't need another mobile home park. We have too many mobile home parks. I'd like to see more middle-class homes.
"We just recently had a visioning process, which was fabulous," Bingham says. "Who knows what's in the future, but Vegas has got to grow."
Everyone I ask about Indian Springs starts off by saying something like—if not exactly—this phrase: "It's a boom and bust town."
"Indian Springs is always bracing for some growth," says Gene Pasinsky, Clark County planner. "Since the beginning of time."
The Mormon and Santa Fe trails went through Indian Springs, the railroad briefly. It saw a rise in population during World War I, when military men were stationed here; similarly during the Cold War, when Test Site workers lived here. But each time the missions faded, the population withered, and Indian Springs was nearly abandoned.
In more recent years, the town has been home to some employees of the nearby prisons, High Desert State Prison, Southern Desert Correctional Center and the Indian Springs Conservation Camp. High Desert was built in 2000; this month, there has been talk in Carson City about turning 22 acres near Indian Springs into an industrial park that would employ 1,000 prison inmates. The land would be purchased from the BLM, but as of yet, no industry has expressed interest in the project.
The Air Force is overhauling its base at Indian Springs, as well, with plans to expand its unmanned aircraft program, Predator, among other projects. While it is estimated that fewer than 100 civilian base employees live in Indian Springs, the Air Force still has a large impact here—and it will continue to, should the town become the focus of development creeping in from Vegas, in order to protect its airspace.
Indian Springs has been driven by this push and pull from a host of buttoned-up institutions, and yet what has emerged is a small community apparently devoid of leash laws and association rules.
"Visitors register here," says the sign in the parking lot of the High Desert prison. I'm up on the hill now, in a parking lot that unexpectedly holds a Ferrari, a Cadillac, a Porsche and a Volvo. This lot abuts the prison's pristine outer façade and offers a breathtaking view of the vast land below.
Suddenly, prison seems like a master-planned community. Juxtaposed with the gnarly trailers, the well-kept, minimalist appearance of the foothills prison is disturbingly appealing. Clean. Through razor-wire prison fence, I can see the inmates in the yard—everyone's in a matching uniform. It's absolutely organized.
I had asked Bingham whether he would like to see master-planned communities in Indian Springs, and he said he "didn't oppose" that idea. Pasinsky said he "wouldn't count it out."
I envision pink and beige Vegas neighborhoods here: Indian Springs Estates, Indian Springs Golf, Indian Springs Condominiums. There is a Smith's and a Blockbuster and dozen babied SUVs backed up at the stoplight.
What strikes me as I look into the prison is how this institution and residential gated communities have more in common than uniform appearance and security needs. They are both about the homogenization of residents and the segregation of populations and the behavioral compliance pushed by each community. Like the military base, these places are separated from the whims of less compliant, or less disciplined, people.
The freest people in this area seem to be those in the RVs and trailers, and yet, that's not where most of us would choose to live. Judging by the pace and type of new developments, we choose the inverted prison—the master-planned community.
So Indian Springs, slow patch on the road to nowhere and budding boomtown, offers more than a lament about rabid development and the loss of small-town charm. It's a vivid portrait of social control and lack thereof.
I can't help but think, as I stroll through its trailer-strewn streets today, that if I were hiding from the law, or from anyone for that matter, I might do it here. And somehow, when I think that, I mean it in a good way. But it's telling that I would associate it with lawlessness—that living outside of architectural norms or without matching mailboxes indicates some sort of greater deviance. It says more about the conforming nature of observer than about the reality of the observed, and I come to this place from my home in the matching suburbs.
Even though this little town is right out here under the U.S. Air Force's finest, down the road from the top-secret military installation and near a cluster of corrections observation towers, it feels rebellious, it feels free.
The missing authoritarian force here, for now, isn't lockdown disciplinary institutions. It's commercial development—bigger manifestations of the free market. Funny that the clonish commercial developments—retail chains, big-box stores, strip malls and master-planned neighborhoods—may end up being the institution that finally homogenizes Indian Springs.
We take hold of things and put them into small boxes and categories and line them up. It's as if randomness disturbs a great many of us. Freedom, actually, is treated as untrustworthy. Maybe free things pose threats, or maybe freedom is difficult to capitalize on. Ultimately that seems ironic—as Americans, we view freedom as a condition that enables capitalism. And yet, to a significant degree, we get ahold of freedom and set about locking it down, making boundaries, homogenizing everything in sight, eliminating all trace of randomness.
I head back to the casino, park, and head inside to check out the $3.49 steak and eggs. A jet nearly rips my head off. Where do they come from? They sneak up with some amazing force. I stop and watch this one dance—up and down, twisting, twirling—indulging in the freedom of a wide-open sky. It is practicing for a time when it will be used to enforce great control over someone.