The Oasis This Time. Rebecca Lawton
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in the 1800s with the advent of the railroad (steam engines needed a lot of H2O) and the 1905 formation of the Las Vegas Land and Water Company. Growth followed, then military and industrial development, then gambling, then Boulder Dam and “Lake” Mead to water it all. A steady rise in population followed in the 1940s and ’50s. About Las Vegas, the US Geological Survey writes in modern reports, “By 1962, the springs that had supported the Native Americans, and those who followed, were completely dry.”
To recapture the precious, natural oasis ecosystem that had once characterized The Meadows, those supplying Las Vegas with water perform a sleight of hand that fits the illusory quality of the place. The Colorado River, harnessed at the dam that hoovers water toward Mead, fulfills eighty-six percent of the valley’s water portfolio. Groundwater pumped from beneath the city and its sprawl supplies what the river cannot, contributing another ten percent to metropolitan and urban use. Recycled water makes up the last four percent. The Southern Nevada Water Authority estimates that casinos and resorts use an annual thirty-two thousand acre-feet of river water piped from Mead and four thousand acre-feet of groundwater from private wells (thirty-six thousand acre-feet in all, nearly twelve billion gallons).
With 603,000 residents within the city limits in the most recent census, and over two million in the greater metropolitan area—as well as forty-two million annual visitors brought in by successful advertising—the once-abundant surface and ground-water of the valley hasn’t met Last Vegas’s needs for years. Wells have been so systematically overdrawn that the water table has declined more than three hundred feet. The associated subsurface rock and soil, naturally hydrated when groundwater stays in the ground, has “deflated” and sunk some five feet in places. Resulting earthquakes, irreversible ground collapse, and property settling have caused billions of dollars worth of damage in the Las Vegas valley. Ground failures will worsen, says the US Geological Survey, as current use continues.
Far worse than any property damage is the sobering fact that, once depleted, groundwater won’t replenish for millennia. In the Las Vegas valley, natural recharge of the aquifer system—or replenishment from rainfall permeating the subsurface soil and rock—ranges from twenty-five thousand to thirty-five thousand acre-feet annually (only a quarter to a third of the more than one hundred thousand acre-feet or thirty-three billion gallons of subsurface water that we withdraw each year). That the water balance sheet is out of whack is not a new trend. In 1911, Nevada State Engineer W. M. Kearney advised against the region’s “lavish wasteful manner [with water], which has prevailed in the past.” Not many took him seriously.
Where does all the water go? Largely toward the creation of faux oases. The Water Authority estimates that sixty percent of drinking-quality water delivered to homes and businesses in Las Vegas irrigates landscaping and fills water features. In short, more than half of water that could be left in the river or under ground spews into fountains and onto lawns. Some seventy percent of residential use and twenty percent of casino and spa use is applied outdoors, for landscaping and swimming pools, or evaporated with the gusto of any arid region. Water use in Las Vegas is largely consumptive—that is, it’s fully used. It can’t be treated and recycled to bolster that measly four percent of recycled water (which is great for landscaping) or reserved for the river ecosystem in return-flow credits (conserved acre-feet that go back on the river’s side of the balance sheet). Consumptively used water is lost water.
So what? So Las Vegas is thirsty for more. The Water Authority is actively looking for new sources throughout Nevada. The US Geological Survey has said that piping water from the Virgin and Muddy Rivers to the north is a leading option for supplementing water-demand shortfalls in Vegas. Natural wetlands farther from The Meadows will be drained. Wetland species in remote reserves, like a species of tiny fish known as the Moapa dace, are already threatened by environmental changes that include drought. They hang on in little green refuges where one can stop to watch birds and wildlife, like the wetlands of the Desert National Wildlife Refuge Complex. If voracious Las Vegas has its way, such real oases may go dry.
And we play our part. We whose need for water is to this day lavish, we whose spirits soar at the sight of green in the desert, we who ooh and ahh at the miracle of fountains where no rain falls. Rather than steward and care for the oases nature gave us, we bask in the poolside shade of transplanted palms. Who among us doesn’t? We prefer efficiency to conservation—so say the water authorities—because the latter feels punitive.
We want to be free. We want to be distracted. We’re the Romans who smile and soak, play low-return games, and laugh when they send in the clowns.
MIKE’S FATHER RICHARD WAS BURIED IN A VETERAN’S CEMEtery outside of Las Vegas. In his final days, Richard had been reminiscing about his World War II service and may have even requested the honor guard that he’d earned. He’d flown C-47 supply planes in Burma at the time when airmen were crossing “The Hump” over the Himalayas from India to China without navigation systems. Taking inordinate risks, routinely pushing aircraft rated for eighteen thousand feet another ten thousand higher, the soft-spoken Richard had been a badass pilot at age twenty.
Even so, Mike found the military funeral surreal. “There were the marines and their starched, stiff outfits. They folded the flag and took it to The Widow, as she was called, and then saluted her. It reminded me of John F. Kennedy’s tribute or something.” Most of Richard’s surviving friends were hundreds of miles away in Los Angeles and too elderly to travel. All the other attendees were Annie’s family and friends. Of the elegies read, only Mike’s described a Richard from a different time and place. “I concentrated on the father I knew growing up.”
Richard’s resting place lacks anything wet. “It’s very modern, with flat plaques right on the ground. There aren’t gravestones or anything. There are just markers on concrete and no greenery anywhere. And it’s 110 degrees.” Not the emerald fields of Arlington or Golden Gate National Cemetery. Richard probably hadn’t dared to hope for a long life in those heady days of transporting explosives over too-high mountain passes guided only by the sun and stars. Now his gravesite roasts under unrelenting sun, at a concrete cemetery that he wouldn’t have chosen on a bet, had he been a gambling man.
As Mike was leaving Las Vegas, he helped a friend of Annie’s with her bags at the airport. “Jean and I were standing in line outside the terminal when a taxi pulled to the curb. A woman literally fell out of the car. She was dolled up, but her makeup was all streaked. She’d obviously stayed up all night gambling. I’ve never seen anyone so drunk in my life.” The woman cut in front of Mike and Jean in line. “Jean spoke up, saying that we’d been at a funeral. The drunk started swearing and bitching. ‘I don’t give a fuck about your funeral, I’ve had a really bad week.’ I realized that she’d probably lost everything gambling. And this whole scene just summed up the sadness of the place. That really capped it for me. Farewell to Vegas.”
Mike hasn’t been back. “Vegas is supposed to be this big, decadent party place, but it’s so depressing. People like this drunk woman go home broke. It’s not like anybody’s really having fun.”
He lost touch with Annie, who worked quickly to consolidate her husband’s multi-million dollar estate. Mike did consult with a lawyer and had asked his father in earlier years about some valuable family properties that predated Annie and even Richard. In the end, though, Mike’s soft-spoken accountant father either failed to act or did so passively: he didn’t write a will or trust. All his wealth went to Annie—or rather to Las Vegas, where she now lives and, Mike believes, gambles. Her short jaunts to the escape of an adult playground became one long trip.
He is mostly contemplative about it. “She was always so meek and nervous around me, but clearly she had this other side. She wanted to be treated like a queen, in the casino’s VIP lines and such. They’re just these phony preferences, though, and she can’t see through it.”
Mike grieves his father and his strange end. “What’s awful is that Dad’s soul has to bake in a hell like that. But there he is.”
AND THERE WE FOUR KIDS WERE, IN A LAS VEGAS ALLEY WITH our folks, coming closer