All Gone to Look for America

by Peter Millar

  Sean stops polishing the glass he’s holding for an instant, looks at me in mystification as if he’s not quite sure what I could possible mean, and then when I wave my arm in a general circle indicating the casino, the whole ‘get-rich-quick’ dream at the heart of Reno, he suddenly laughs, shakes his head and says: ‘No. No, no, no. I just work here. I take my money home.’

  A man after my own heart, I tell myself, as he moves away to serve another customer. Then again, as a rare visitor to a casino – my brief experience in Niagara notwithstanding – there’s no harm in risking a dollar or two on the touch-screen poker machine winking seductively from the glass bar surface underneath my martini. It’s blackjack, so why not? Just for a laugh. If you play the odds right, you can hardly lose. The machine even tells you how it – the dealer – plays: it always sticks on 17. It’s better still, safer, I’ve read somewhere, to stick on just 16. That way, over time, and if you don’t do anything silly, you’re bound to come out ahead. If not, what the hell? It’s only a dollar.

  Hey, what do you know, actually, it’s eight dollars for the price of one, after only a few minutes. Easy as can be. Slide in the note, hit the buttons and out slides a ticket I can cash later. Double or quits? No thanks, sucker! I wish Sean luck and head off to cash my winnings. If only it had been a hundred to start with instead of one, now that might have been something to celebrate.

  Nonetheless, with eight nice clean dollars in my pocket – spewed out by another machine with either better security clearance or more important friends – I’m off to the Brew Bros in Eldorado, or wherever it was in the labyrinth, your very own in-casino microbrewery for a swift beery nightcap. Just the one.

  Brew Bros have a band on, playing cover versions of old Oasis hits, so I have a couple, like I’d probably planned to all along, and how can I resist taking another stupid machine for a ride. There’s one there, of course, lurking as always under the glass, even in a microbrewery. You don’t just get the chance to hand your money over the bar, you can feed it into it.

  And I’m on a roll. Ten minutes later it feels more like I’ve been rolled. My eight dollars is down to just two (which means annoyingly that the beer has been paid for out of my own cash and not, as intended, the casino’s). Well, there’s no point in sitting here with just two dollars, especially when I’ve already proved I can turn one into eight. Magic. Just like that!

  Except of course that I’ve also just turned eight into two. How did that happen? This is where I – and probably every other sucker – start to suspect the machines of being in the casino’s employ. I mean, it may say that each game is played with one pack of cards, but come on, they’re virtual cards, aren’t they. How do I know the machine hasn’t got a whole stack of whatever it fancies concealed up its virtual sleeve? Short of it committing a real howler, like dealing up two identical cards – and these machines aren’t that stupid, they’d have holes blown in them if they were – how on earth would I know?

  I start to get suspicious when the machine deals itself a lucky run of ‘blackjack’ – by this time I need another beer – and the way it keeps getting 20 or 21 every time I’m sitting pretty with a promising-looking 19 or 20. The way it keeps winning with a 17 when I’ve gone bust because I’ve broken my golden rule of sticking on 16. Not that it would have helped, of course, would it? As if the machine didn’t know, smirking there beneath its bulletproof glass, flipping cards at random inviting me to try another hand, as if the night was young and I didn’t have a bed to go to. Okay, machine, you asked for it. I slide in another five-dollar bill. Put up or shut up, you inane piece of plastic-shielded electronics. Let’s see the colour of your chips, Intel or otherwise.

  Three five-dollar bills later, I tell myself it’s not about winning or losing, just playing the game. It’s not gambling, it’s entertainment, something to do while you’re having a social beer to stop you having to talk to another human being.

  I put my fourth pint glass down on its electronic smiley face and head for my bunk in the stratosphere. I know it didn’t really say, ‘Y’all have a nice night now!’ That was my imagination.

  RENO TO SALT LAKE CITY

  TRAIN: California Zephyr

  FREQUENCY: 1 a day

  DEPART RENO, NEVADA: 3.51 p.m.

  via

  Sparks, NV

  Winnemucca, NV

  Elko, NV

  ARRIVE SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH: 4:05 a.m.

  DURATION: 12 hours, 14 minutes

  DISTANCE: 394 miles

  15

  Heavens Above

  WE’VE ALL DONE IT. I have. You have. We’ve hidden from them! Lurked motionless behind the curtain at the first sight of the pair of serious clean-cut young men with scary US marine haircuts and sober dark suits marching up to the front door like a recruiting detail. Which is what they are, of course.

  Of all the people you really don’t want to open the door to – Jehovah’s Witnesses, Conservative Party canvassers, squeegee-sellers, the gas man – the Mormons have to be absolute top of the list. The worst thing about them is that they’re so polite – unlike the gas man or Conservative Party canvassers – so instead of shouting ‘get the hell out of here you insane alien proselytising god-squadders’, you end up wetting your hair and wrapping a towel round you and pretending to be just getting into a bath, and then feeling guilty because the look in their eyes tells you they know you’re lying. They are – they want to tell you, and for a moment you wonder if the dark suits and sunglasses are deliberate – ‘on a mission from God’.

  Of course, out here ‘God’ puts on rather a better show than he routinely manages in South London or even the English countryside at most times of the year. Just the train journey from Reno to Salt Lake City is one of the better arguments in favour of the wonders of creation. There is just one word for the Nevada desert: awesome. In the most literal sense: it inspires awe. For a start there is such a lot of it, such a lot of nothing: I have never seen so much nothing. And believe me, that’s awesome. For mile after mile after mile after mile after mile, just rocky scree and scrubland, brown and grey and occasionally russet, or streaky white where salt has dried on the surface, with distant silhouettes of low mountain ranges on the horizon. At times the mountains come closer, the highest already in early autumn dusted lightly with snow on the summits, but most just furze-covered ochre slopes rising to barren eroded crests.

  This is the vast, wild, inhospitable and still largely unconquered wilderness of every Western you’ve ever imagined. And the one thing you really, really would not want is to be out here alone on a horse. The emptiness – so easily forgotten in the heart of the world’s most developed nation – is genuinely astounding. Amtrak’s big silver double-decker trains are dwarfed by the immensity of the emptiness around them, their tracks no more than a scratched line across the surface of the desert.

  The journey between Reno/Sparks, Nevada, and Salt Lake City, Utah, takes 13 hours by train, and there are just two other stops – Winnemucca (named for a Paiute Indian chief and once the scene of another Butch Cassidy bank robbery) and Elko (which means ‘white woman’ in the local Native American language). This is not because the train in question is an express; on a network with only one train every 24 hours, as the conductors are keen on reminding us – ‘if you step too far away from the train, folks, we may go without you, but don’t fret, there’ll be another one along tomorrow’ – the simple fact is that there is nowhere else to stop!

  Nothing lives here and it is easy to see why. Now and again you might spot a buzzard wheeling above in vain search for prey, or a sign of movement when the train line briefly travels the same route as trucks on a distant interstate. It is easy to see how the aircraft of Richard Branson’s favourite pilot, the global circumnavigator Steve Fosset, could have gone down unnoticed, unimaginable that anyone ever thought he might easily be found.

  It is also almost impossibly beautiful, with sunsets beyond compare. Great swathes of pink, grey and orange-tinted cloud march at
oblique angles towards the crimson bands and golden sky beyond the purple mountains. If it sounds almost garish, that’s because it is. As if to put the bright neon lights of Reno in their place the evening sky seen travelling east across the Nevada desert puts on a show that is almost heart-stopping. The lights of Vegas must seem second-rate compared with the evening entertainment that the desert has put on for free for millennia.

  Somewhere in the night I could tell we were approaching the state line – when it would be time to put watches on an hour, meaning Salt Lake City is an hour closer than I feared – because out of the darkness a great neon explosion occurred. For no more than 15 seconds the uninterrupted black is awash with red and white light and the inevitable flashing gold that reads ‘CASINO’. I’m missing my last chance to throw $50 out of the window. I have left the state of legal gambling, legal whores and loadsamoney, and entered that of the Tabernacle, genealogy and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I’m not sure whether to cry ‘Hallelujah!’ or ‘Help!’

  Either way my prayers are answered when we pull into the station and find there actually are cabs in attendance. I’ve booked a hotel in the city centre, a two-mile walk away down deserted dark and dodgy streets. Except that they can’t be dodgy really, can they? Not here in the hometown of the Latter-day Saints? But I’m glad to see a cab, not least because it’s almost 4:00 a.m., never the best time to arrive anywhere. It certainly wouldn’t have been my choice but then there are only two times you can arrive at Salt Lake City by train: 11 at night or four in the morning. And you only get the 11:00 p.m. option if you’re heading east. That’s the thing about only having one train a day in each direction: it spares you complicated decisions.

  Except of course, where on earth to lay your head when you arrive at that sort of time. I’ve pre-booked a hotel that let me have the room from whenever I arrived for just half rate. I would get some sleep rather than plunge into the hedonistic delights of Salt Lake City bleary-eyed. This is sarcasm, in case you hadn’t recognised it. The Mormon capital has a reputation for being one of the most staid places in America, where it’s hard to get a drink at any time. Happily, it doesn’t live up to it.

  Emerging into bright sunlight later the same morning, I’m surprised to find myself in one of the prettiest cities in America. The roads are wide – founder Brigham Young decreed they should be spacious enough to turn a horse and wagon in without ‘cussing’ – and, a whimsical touch this, the pedestrian crossings chirrup birdsong at you when it’s safe to cross. The architecture runs from Victorian Gothic – the city hall – to the neo-classical Capitol (yet another replica of Washington’s) to modernist mall, but at least there are more buildings than parking lots. And behind them rise the serenely beautiful Utah Mountains.

  The first thing I notice is the air: it almost sparkles. There is a clean, crisp, crystalline clarity to the Salt Lake City air that is unmatched anywhere on the planet, even in the Alps. Part of it is the altitude – it’s 1,228 metres (4,226 feet) above sea level – but it’s also to do with being located in the middle of a high desert plain (the Salt Lake itself is some miles away across mudflats to the north of the city) that strips the air of moisture. Coming from Britain, where we don’t just have moisture in the air but in our bones, there’s initially something initially incredibly invigorating about this dry clarity. It’s only gradually that I start to become aware of an effect that will be at its most obvious after a couple of days in this sort of atmosphere: it is ferociously desiccating of the sinuses. The problem I had begun to experience in Chicago is coming back to haunt me over the next few days, with a vengeance. We low-lying coastal dwellers aren’t cut out to survive up here on the high central plains of a continental land mass. I began to sympathise with Leonardo the dinosaur. Maybe eventually people here will evolve into a different species, with larger, self-lubricating nostrils. I wonder what the Book of Mormon would have to say about that.

  No better place to find out! After all those years of hiding when the Mormons came to the door, it’s my turn to go and ring their bell. Which turns out to be a completely different experience to anything I’d anticipated.

  Salt Lake City is not an exclusively Mormon city. The transcontinental railroad, which ensured its incorporation into the rapidly expanding United States, saw to that. Freedom of religion is allowed as it is everywhere else and there are other churches scattered all around town including Roman Catholic, Anglican and Greek Orthodox cathedrals, which is a lot of religion for a city of only 180,000 souls, especially when the Mormons occupy a 35-acre site in the middle of it. In fact, every distance in the city is calculated from the southeast corner of Temple Square, the edge of the walled site of their most sacred buildings.

  With its strangely unfamiliar uniform design – soaring vertical white granite with only arrow-slit windows high above head-height and three spires at each end – the Salt Lake City Temple, though not the first of the Mormons’ places of worship (there were others built before they began their great trek into the desert), is today pre-eminent. It forms a strange contrast to their second most important building, the great aluminium-roofed tortoiseshell that is the Tabernacle. Dwarfing both, however, is the monolithic skyscraper church headquarters.

  Although the Temple Square complex is walled off, it is open to the public – though the Temple itself is out of bounds to non-believers – to wander round, and on any given day there are a series of weddings taking place, though these days to only one woman at a time! Nonetheless, the woman at the gatehouse who was more than happy to fix me up with one of their regular free tours of the publicly accessible buildings, does an impressive job of finding me guides: not, as I anticipated, one of the Blues-Brothers-cum-Secret-Service lookalikes we get in the UK but two extremely personable young women in their mid-twenties, one from the Philippines and one from Peru: Sister Wang and Sister Anna. Just for me! The Mormons may have long since officially abandoned polygamy but there must be something deep-seated that still goes by that old Beach Boys motto: two girls for every boy! And who was I to complain?

  So off we go, me and my two ‘Saints’ – which they inform me is how Mormons prefer to be known – Sister Anna taking me by one arm and Sister Wang by the other, we make our way into the Tabernacle. The strange low domed roof gives the Tabernacle excellent acoustics, making it well fitted for its prime use as a concert venue. It dates back to the early days of Salt Lake City – 1867 – an antiquity my two Saints refer to with awe, though there are Catholic churches in both Lima and Manila (from which they have both converted) that are nearly 300 years older. But then there is context to be taken into account: this dates back to a few years after the birth of their religion.

  Right now it is hosting a rehearsal for a concert later in the week: a few hymns that have an interesting jazz feel to them thrown in with a bit of Gershwin. Hey, this is – or was initially – the first all-American religion. It’s being played on an absolutely stupendous organ and the Saints tell me how many pipes it has which means nothing to me, other than that Sherlock Holmes used to class mysteries by the number of pipes it took him to solve them. Happily I remember not to mention that. The one Holmes adventure that includes an episode set in Salt Lake City1 depicts the Mormons as kidnappers and white slavers, and the city’s founding father Brigham Young as an out-and-out villain.

  The girls – sorry, Saints – clearly have a different view of old Brigham, telling me the story of his heroic 1,350-mile wagon-train trek out to Utah, how 250 of his followers died en route but 3,000 made it. Of their early travails including a plague of locusts that descended to consume their first crops, and how the fledgling Saints’ city was only saved by a flock of seagulls which suddenly appeared to gobble up the locusts. Hence the monument outside: a pillar with a couple of golden gulls on top. Seagulls? Em, excuse me, but aren’t we hundreds of miles from the nearest coast, inland, across a desert. Precisely, they beam: a miracle! (I have since discovered that my cynicism was misplaced: California gulls do
indeed travel as far inland as Utah.)

  We round off my tour in the purpose-built Visitors’ Center which features a history of the church with a series of displays, uncannily like wandering around Madame Tussauds: waxwork figures not only of Brigham Young and the church’s founder Joseph Smith but even of the angel Moroni who revealed God’s word to him. Then it’s up to the top floor where, standing proudly before a giant alabaster Jesus against a vaulted dome painted to look like a cross between a planetarium and a sci-fi cover, the saintly sisters give me a brief – obviously well-rehearsed – formal welcome and a wish that I might learn more about the true religion. It’s a bit cringe-making and more than slightly embarrassing given that they’ve an audience of just two – by this stage a Japanese bloke who was being escorted up to the top by another pair of Sisters has joined me – but it’s the closest they’ve come to hard sell all morning. Then they say goodbye and tell me I’m free to wander round the exhibits as long as I like.

  And so I spend the next half hour or so doing just that: staring at the waxworks and watching a brief video of the spiritual descendants of the prophet himself: today’s church leaders. These are mostly elderly gents in black suits who look spookily like a cross between German bankers and the old Soviet Politburo. It’s less than reassuring to find it works a bit like that too: ‘Today only the President of the Church receives revelations for the whole Church. He is a prophet of God. Members of the Church should obey the prophet.’ The President is chosen from The Twelve Apostles who themselves are chosen from the Seventy. As a former reporter in Soviet Moscow it just sounds uncomfortably like First Secretary, Politburo, Central Committee. I am not saying that the LDS are crypto-commies; I can think of few churches more instinctively drawn to the tenets of capitalism and big business. But there are some interesting structural similarities in the hierarchy.