DESERT OF DREAMS

Wendover Air Force Base, War Reserve Strategic Storage
DESERT OF DREAMS
by Tom Vanderbilt

The American desert, land of lost civilizations, wayward prophets, and air-conditioned fantasy,has long been the country's last New Frontier, where dreams might be played out with a minimum of interference—if only, as in the scene in Joan Didion's "Play It as It Lays," we can keep sweeping the drifting sand back to the perimeter of the yard. It is a vast tabula rasa, where one's mark can be seen for miles—whether it be the earthworks of endowed artists, the ancient trails of primeval visitors, or the pockmarked craters of an aerial bombing range.

In this regard, the desert was the perfect home for the Cold War, not simply for its sheer size and emptiness, but because the desert, in America, has come to signify the future. The Cold War was at heart a conflict projected toward the future: the race to see who would first reach space, whose Air Force would first reach 10,000 bombers, who would explode the first 25 megaton warhead.

Despite its overwhelming aura of fatalism and apocalypse, it also concealed a perverse undercurrent of optimism, a belief that the science and technology that was being funded by the so-called "imaginary war" would someday mean a better life for all—if it did not kill us first.

It is no surprise that the place where people most often go to reinvent themselves in a country of reinvention is the desert city of Las Vegas. It is, after all, a city that has witnessed many futures—the Mormons, the Mafia, the Manhattan Project—and would not exist at the scale it does without the massive technological life-support systems upon which it rests its confidence in unimpeded future growth. The city exists as a collective delusion that it is not a desert, and such an illusory environment is fertile ground for those seeking to nurture their own illusions.

The desert has attracted all manner of dreamers, from millenarian cultists to visionary artists to the advanced weapons scientists of the United States Air Force. They have all made their mark, tested something or another on America's proving ground. Like bleached bones or bullet-ridden "No Trespassing" signs, these dreams lie in the desert sand, faded and chipped but intact, legible...
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