we were in Wendover to film for The Art Assignment, a series Sarah produced with PBS Digital Studios.* We saw an installation by the artist William Lamson, as well as some of the monumental land art of the American West, including Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. At night, we stayed at a casino hotel on the Nevada side of town. During World War II, the crew that dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima trained out of Wendover. But the Air Force left a long time ago, and these days people mostly visit for the casinos, or else for the nearby salt flats.
For some reason, I really like casinos. I recognize that they prey on vulnerable people and enable addiction, and that they’re loud and smoky and gross and horrible. But I can’t help myself. I like sitting at a table and playing cards with strangers. On the evening in question, I was playing with a woman from the Texas panhandle named Marjorie. She told me that she’d been married for sixty-one years. I asked her what the secret was, and she said, “Separate checking accounts.”
I asked her what brought her to Wendover, and she said she wanted to see the salt flats. And the casino, of course. She and her husband gambled one weekend a year. I asked her how it was going, and she said, “You ask a lot of questions.”
Which I do, when I’m gambling. In every other environment, I am extremely averse to encounters with strangers. I don’t tend to chat with airplane seatmates or cab drivers, and I am an awkward and strained conversationalist in most situations. But put me at a blackjack table with Marjorie, and suddenly I’m Perry Mason.
The other person at my table, eighty-seven-year-old Anne from central Oregon, also wasn’t much of a talker, so I turned to the dealer, who was required to talk to me as a condition of his employment. He had a handlebar mustache, and a name tag identifying him as James. I couldn’t tell if he was twenty-one or forty-one. I asked him if he was from Wendover.
“Born and bred,” he answered.
I asked him what he thought of it, and he told me it was a nice place. Lots of hiking. Great if you like hunting and fishing. And the salt flats were cool, of course, if you liked fast cars, which he did.
After a moment he said, “Not a great place for kids, though.”
“Do you have kids?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “But I was one.”
There’s a certain way I talk about the things I don’t talk about. Maybe that’s true for all of us. We have ways of closing off the conversation so that we don’t ever get directly asked what we can’t bear to answer. The silence that followed James’s comment about having been a kid reminded me of that, and reminded me that I had also been a kid. Of course, it’s possible that James was only referring to Wendover’s shortage of playgrounds—but I doubted it. I started sweating. The casino’s noises—the dinging of slot machines, the shouts at the craps table—were suddenly overwhelming. I thought about that old Faulkner line that the past isn’t dead; it’s not even past. One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can’t ever quite get rid of. I played out the hand, tipped the dealer, thanked the table for the conversation, and cashed out my remaining chips.
The next morning, I drove out to the Bonneville Salt Flats with Sarah and a few of her colleagues. Until 14,500 years ago, what is now Wendover was deep underwater in Lake Bonneville, a vast salty lake that covered nineteen thousand square miles, nearly the size of Lake Michigan today. Lake Bonneville has disappeared and re-formed a couple dozen times over the last five hundred million years; what remains of it at the moment is known as the Great Salt Lake, although it’s less than a tenth as great as Lake Bonneville once was. The lake’s most recent retreat left behind the salt flats, a thirty-thousand-acre expanse, utterly empty and far flatter than a pancake.
The snow-white ground was cracked like dried lips and crunched under my feet. I could smell the salt. I kept trying to think of what it looked like, but my brain could only find highly figurative similes.