The house in which my working class family resided during the 1980’s was elevated slightly by a small hill. Across the street were similar looking houses, full of similar looking families, but without the same slope from this hill, these houses were not elevated in such a way. This proved, for my siblings and me, to be quite advantageous once we were old enough to acquire skateboards, bicycles, and other wheeled devices. With a not insignificant amount of courage, we would sit on our skateboards and speedily descend our steeped driveway, making a sharp left turn at the driveways base onto the sidewalk, attempting to develop enough momentum to roll all the way to the end of the block. A few of our more adventurous friends would attempt to wildly place lawn chairs atop their skateboards and descend in a less safe, but definitely more exciting manner. Another advantage this same small hill provided was discovered when a rainstorm would pass through the neighborhood. Our side of the street would gather more runoff and an instant rapid of gutter water would become the source of innumerable games, including races of found objects hastily made into competition speed boats. A storm in the Nevada desert is rare and therefore always a source of welcomed excitement… as well as a certain amount of destructive possibilities…

This hill upon which our house was configured rose steeply in the front, flattened out in the middle to accommodate the houses construction, and then rose steeply again in the back yard. Where a small patch of grass ended in the back yard, the terrain rose more dramatically and became an ascending slope of dirt bordered by a wooden fence. This hill of dirt became the settlement of a complex configuration of hand carved tunnels, roadways, and cave like structures, forming the city that my brother and I, along with various friends, began to develop. This urban network was a master planned community where the drama of action figures, hot wheels, and boyish imagination could unfold each day that we weren’t occupied with some other undertaking elsewhere in the neighborhood. With our extensive collection of plastic Star Wars action figures, spaceships, toy monster trucks, as well as more primitive objects of found stones and twigs, there was never a moment when there wasn’t something to build or rebuild. 

The ongoing operation of building and rebuilding was at times a necessity of course, for while we were out playing in the gutter during a rainstorm, our beautifully constructed urban complex was being washed away in the deluge. While it may have seemed devastating initially, we soon discovered that the overwhelming destruction only provided us new opportunity to rebuild with more vigor and imagination. With this new discovery, these natural disasters became quite desirable. Due to the long stretches of xeric conditions that are always a part of living in a desert climate, however, they never seemed to occur with enough frequency. It wasn’t long before we began staging our own disasters. A common garden hose became a perfect storm. The destruction could now be planned, and we were no longer simply laborers maintaining a habitation. We were gods who had acquired powers of both creation and destruction, so we acted.

This became a common theme for my brother and me, and it soon moved indoors. In our shared bedroom, on a day that we for some reason or another were barred from playing outdoors, our bucket full of Lego’s provided the building blocks for a similar type of city that we would spend hours building simply for the pleasure of destroying by a staged earthquake, or possibly the next world war.

My family eventually moved away from Maple Street. My parents didn’t think it was the best neighborhood in which to reside. It was an older neighborhood with smaller houses and configured somewhat centrally within the city of Henderson, complete with the lower incomes and bad reputation that accompanies this combination. We moved to a neighborhood, still in Henderson, known as Section 27. This neighborhood was only a few miles from Maple Street, but it was markedly different. Section 27 was Henderson’s most remote neighborhood. It was separated from the rest of town by a circumscribing stretch of undeveloped desert. The houses in our new neighborhood were all individually custom built and the roads were unpaved. There were no gutters, only desert washes. Not far beyond the neighborhoods last dirt road rose the River Mountains. These mountains formed the most southeast border of the Las Vegas Valley, the metropolitan region in which the City of Henderson is configured. I was no longer closely surrounded by an urban environment, and unrelated or not, my days of building and destroying civilizations ended. I made new friends and spent my time accompanying them in the endeavors they had been undertaking for years already, having grown up in this neighborhood that was brand new to me. We occupied our time roaming the desert’s mountains, exploring new terrain or hunting for lizards, snakes, and other vermin. Time spent doing this led us to a number of interesting discoveries such as abandoned mines and mountainous cliffs that provided rock climbing opportunities. My new life in a more remote, rural like location, caused me to transform from a builder of civilizations to a hunter and explorer.

After a number of years in this neighborhood, another relocation was made. Back into Henderson proper, but into a newer development. These were my High School years and my interests began to change again. My high school friends and I discovered punk music and we soon formed our own punk band. My time as a desert explorer had passed, as had my time as an urban builder. Quite possibly, it might be imagined, that it was these two former occupations of mine that in some ways lead me to the punk rock subculture. With more mobility and a new host of friends and acquaintances from bands in other parts of the city, I was now part of a network of individuals that was both attempting to build a type of culture, as well as destroy, or at least subvert a culture that we were dissatisfied and bored with. This was a process of exploration and it often led us to remote locations in the surrounding deserts of Las Vegas where loosely organized outdoor punk shows could take place with little possibility of interruption from civilizations various forms of authorities. We would gather in large caves, or simply off of remote desert trails with band equipment and generators. We created our own music, our own form of expression, in a place that through a process of exploration, for the time being, belonged solely to us. We successfully built a habitation that offered us freedom according to our terms, rather than a prescribed freedom provided by unknown officials.

When most people I meet discover that I am from Las Vegas, I am often led through a very predictable line of questioning. “People actually live in Las Vegas? What was it like? Did you live in a hotel? How often did you gamble?” Etcetera, etcetera. The relevancy of questions such as these is minimal, other than that they reveal just how easily actual everyday life can be nullified by marketing and propaganda. All of the hype and spectacular glamour that the rest of the world sees in typical Las Vegas media portrayals had very little effect on my youthful development and everyday life there. On into adulthood, the main influence the urban environment had on my daily existence involves the cities notorious growth spasms that took place just as I was finishing high school. For a graduating high school student in the late 90’s in Las Vegas, making decent money proved to be a simple endeavor. Industry was king, queen, prince and jester in America’s fastest growing city. Construction, Service, Education, Gaming, Culinary, Real Estate, Entertainment… all of these industries were booming, and a college education would hardly be convenient. Why wait four years, acquiring debt, to start making money? The job market was hungry, insatiably hungry, and the public schools could scarcely serve up any really appetizing or hardy meals in 12 short years under such demand. I was hardly an appetizer when I entered the workforce, bland, undercooked and unseasoned. My education was mediocre at best. College was mentioned only for traditions sake. But I was quickly devoured nonetheless. 

Having graduated to the workforce, I became a part of Las Vegas’s construction industry and watched the city sprawl. Developers installed neighborhoods upon the desert terrain with ferocity. I was on my own, living in apartments in Las Vegas proper, working in the far corners of the cities outreaching arms, building middle class tract housing, a first hand witness to the consumption of the ancient desert valley... and as such I can rightfully make the claim that the city Las Vegas disregards the ground it is built upon. The city is a lavishly fretted gold-framed mirror that disrespectfully reflects the sun into the ancient eyes of the Mojave Desert. A desert that stubbornly refuses to be slaked by the intrusion of minority installed irrigation system, bourgeois golf course, lavish hotel fountain, etcetera, etcetera. Having left Las Vegas I plan never to return until the desert has reclaimed itself and strategically brought the arrogant spirit of Las Vegas weeping to its knees, where it can then be rightfully decapitated and left in picturesque ruins.