All Gone to Look for America (28 page)

‘Yeah, it’s a kind of German,’ one of the women says, when I dare to ask. ‘We call it Pennsylvania Dutch, but that’s really “deutsch”. Our testament is in German,’ she adds with that disarming beaming smile.

Ben explains their holiday route. I know the Amish, who keep mostly to themselves on their farms in and around Pennsylvania, prefer to shun most aspects of modern life, including cars, television and certainly aircraft. It just hadn’t occurred to me that they would have embraced the train. I guess it just
depends at what stage you put history on hold. They have already crossed the country twice, visiting Chicago and Texas, and are planning on doing it again. The Amish turn out to be the only American travellers I meet who have been on more American trains than I have.

I’ve been assuming that the card game is something like Snap or Happy Families. I can see it does not use traditional playing cards – the sort my own staunch Presbyterian Northern Irish grandfather routinely referred to as ‘the devil’s cards’. But the women explain to me that it’s actually a form of rummy, with suits and wild cards of its own. Sin, like beauty, it would seem can be wholly in the eye of the beholder.

There was more than enough sin in our next stop; the docent interrupts our conversation over the microphone. Truckee owes its quixotic name not to being a truck stop but to Chief To-Kay of the Paiute tribe. ‘It began as a lumber town and had 14 mills working by the time the railroad arrived in 1867. But it soon had more saloons and became known for its lawlessness.’ It seems unlikely looking out at the little row of gentrified late nineteenth-century shops and the car parks full of suvs. ‘In fact, in the space of 11 years, between 1871 and 1882, the whole town burned down six times. Today, however, the town is a popular outdoors vacation stop and the Truckee River has some fine fishin’.’

The Amish, clearly happier with God’s bounty than the fires of hell, nod happily and one of the women – I’m still not sure which is which – leans over towards me and nodding towards Ben says, ‘He’s a real good fisherman.’ And Ben, who despite my earlier evocation of him as one of Snow White’s
pintsized
retinue has to be at least six-foot-three, blushes to the roots of his
thinning
hair. Ahhh, bashful. I was right after all.

But by now our docent has cut in again for ‘one last anecdote, folks, before we leave you’ (once safely over the Rockies they turn around again and head back to Sacramento to perform the same service for westbound travellers). ‘We are comin’ up to Verdi,’ (up until now I had been inducing Italian origins, but he pronounces it Verd-Eye), ‘and it was near here that almost as soon as the railroad went through, it saw its first armed robbery.’ But then we have crossed the state line into Nevada now and the state that made the mafia respectable has to be expected to have had a chequered history.

What is it about railway robberies that somehow accrues glamour? I suppose we had it in Britain with the grudging admiration for the thieves who carried out the Great Train Robbery in the 1960s and went on, mostly, to be rehabilitated. In the story of the American West they have acquired a legendary status all of their own. Montana had Butch Cassidy, the Sundance
Kid and the Hole in the Wall Gang but it was here in western Nevada that the precedent was set. Barely 18 months after the first transcontinental railroad had been completed a gang of ex-stagecoach robbers turned their attention to the new Iron Horse, helped by inside information from a mine agent at Virginia City, one of Nevada’s oldest mining towns and, as it happens, the site of the fictional Ponderosa Ranch in the classic TV series
Bonanza
. The agent, Jack Davis, was aware of a shipment of gold coins due from San Francisco to pay the miners and informed the gang who struck as the train was leaving Verdi for Reno just after midnight on 5 November 1870. Their ringleader was John Chapman, who just happened to be the local Sunday School superintendent. Three men boarded the train in Verdi, to be joined by five others already on board as passengers. Two of them tackled the ‘engineer’ urging him to fire the train on, while the others beat off an attack by an axe-wielding conductor, detached the rest of the train which was left behind while they, the locomotive and the ‘express car’ – which contained the strong room – sped on down the track. Six miles further on, they stopped, tied up the engineer and clerks, broke into the strong boxes and escaped with $41,600 in gold coins.

They were eventually tracked down in a manhunt across the two states, but a substantial proportion of their loot was never found, believed to have been stashed in caves in the desert. Even today there are still strange characters to be seen wandering around isolated desert valleys of western Nevada with metal detectors. But perhaps it’s no more foolish than the original gold prospecting. And certainly – as I’m about to find out – a lot more productive than hoping to find a pot of gold in Nevada’s casinos.

The casinos loom all around us now as we pull into Reno, self-proclaimed ‘biggest little town in the world’. The Amish, wisely, stay on the train.

I’M STANDING ON A BALCONY
looking up at the inside of a giant silver golf ball on which a simulacrum of the night sky revolves around the pinnacle of a 50-foot creaking, groaning construction of steel and plastic that I’ve only just realised is a theatrical mock-up of a functioning nineteenth-century silver mine.

Then lightning crashes in the artificial heaven, thunder peels out, a wave of green lasers flashes out into a completely phoney but disconcertingly realistic impression of infinity and amidst the gigadecibel cacophony there explodes a tune of cathartic intensity, a piece of music that is as essential to the soul of America as perhaps nothing save
The Archers
theme tune is to Britain. Sing along now: ‘Bump-diddy-ump-diddy-ump-diddy-ump,
BONANZA
!’

Instantly my inner eye conjures up a black-and-white picture of paternal Ben Cartwright, dim but lovable Hoss, dull old Adam and teenage heart-throb Little Joe, four abreast astride their steeds about to shout ‘Yee-hah!’ on the threshold of an ever-optimistic future. A few people descending to the lower floor of the Silver Legacy Resort Casino stare up at what appears to be a middle-aged bloke having a fit of hysterical laughter while at the same time consumed by a bout of uncontrollable nostalgia. You have to be grateful for magical moments like that. And hope that they don’t happen too often.

The ranch on which the classic 1960s series was based, long before Lorne Green evolved from humble rancher to command
Battlestar Galactica
, is just up the road, in Nevada terms, from Reno. From 1967 until 2004 there was a Ponderosa Ranch theme park on the site but it is now closed down.
Nonetheless
a bonanza is what every visitor to the ‘biggest little town in the world’ is hoping for. In its dizziest daydreams Reno would like to grow up to be Las Vegas, even though the best thing about the place is the fact that it isn’t. Even still it can be an assault to the senses.

Arriving by train – as most visitors don’t – immediately reveals Reno’s greatest statement of belief in its future: it has all but buried the tracks. Having grown up literally around the railway, Reno discovered that by the late
twentieth
century having traffic halted repeatedly during the day for mile-long-plus freight trains to trundle by, was a serious nuisance. As a result, the city – backed by the private finance invested in the casinos and a generous grant from federal government – spent some $284 million on cutting an open trench through the centre of town, allowing road traffic to pass uninterrupted.

Happily the station – a minor detail given that only two passenger-carrying Amtrak trains (one in each direction) call per day – substantially survived, with the addition of a lift down one floor to the new platform level.
Entertainingly
they left the ‘restrooms’ at street level, calling for much anxious
lift-button-pressing
by passengers apparently equally terrified of having to walk up one flight of stairs to the convenience or missing the once-a-day train (an admittedly serious inconvenience).

From the station it’s a modest trot to the Silver Legacy where I had booked a room. You could stay somewhere other than in a casino in Reno, but it would be odd, and it wouldn’t be easy. The Silver Legacy was identifiable, I’m told by the station attendant, by a silver golf ball the size of a small planet perched on its roof. It was only later that I found out why. Being identifiable from the outside, however, is quite another thing to being readily accessible on the inside,
particularly
to that little known and less regarded life form: the pedestrian.

It takes me three attempts to work out that all the obvious entrances from the street lead straight into the main, slot-machine throbbing casino floor and that to get into the hotel which towered above it, with the reception and lobby on the first (in American: second) floor, you’re expected to drive straight to the underground parking. Or failing that, be chauffeured through a cavernous concrete-pillared approach about as pedestrian-friendly as the docking slot on a Death Star. Despite it being less than a five-minute walk most people coming here from the railroad station catch a cab.

Having finally negotiated the entrance procedure, I find myself
suddenly
enshrouded in a thin but deceptive veneer of luxury. Casino hotels are designed to look five star, even though they charge only two-to-three-star prices. If you look closely at the fixtures and fittings you’ll find it’s only rarely you hit the jackpot, but the reckoning is that if you’re feeling flush and
comfortable
enough they’ll soon get their money off you.

When I’ve checked in and been handed my fistful of vouchers for the ‘casino resort attractions’, I make my way to the 18th floor to find a view that is 
five star and more: endless limpid azure skies with just the wispiest of clouds floating over distant barren hills, and in the foreground this small but
outrageous
concrete and neon oasis of Mammon. Looking at Reno today, it is hard to imagine that the city it might have aspired to rival is not Las Vegas but Salt Lake City. This was originally a Mormon settlement, but sold its soul for 20 pieces of silver, although probably more like 20 million pieces nowadays. Annually. At whatever the going rate for silver is.

The discovery of silver in the second half of the nineteenth century finished off Reno’s ambitions to becoming a strict Mormon community as the settlers were swamped by an influx of those who’d missed out on the gold rush. Silver was easier to find and easier to mine. It might not be worth as much but you could still end up rich if you got your hands on enough of it. And with the
prospectors
, as usual, came the saloons, whores and, most importantly for Reno – and all of Nevada – the card tables.

Gambling was legalised in 1931, just in time to take over as the local
community’s
main source of income. With the sun still high in the sky, however, my first plan is to find out what else there is to Reno apart from gambling, by the simple if unorthodox plan of taking a stroll through town in the crisp dry desert air. Unfortunately this turns out to be a lot harder than I had imagined. I don’t mean finding what else there was to the city, I mean simply finding fresh air or sunshine again. After 40 minutes wandering through a maze of slot machines and fast-food outlets, I’m despairing of ever seeing the light of day again. When they say ‘resort casino’ they mean it: the operators’ clear
intention
is to prevent you as far as possible from ever venturing outside. Once your income stream – however small – has trickled into the casino’s great well, there’s no way it is easily going to trickle out again.

When they say ‘complex’ they mean downright confusing. Turn the wrong way at lobby level and you find yourself staring at a sushi bar or a
Caribbean-themed
rum pub. Or a designer shirt shop. Or a handbag emporium. Move a few feet in the other direction and there is a pizza joint next to a ‘surf-and-turf’ restaurant offering modestly priced steak with lobster tail. Then there are the signs beckoning to the night club, to the ballroom, to the circus acts, to the microbrewery (I was tempted), to the Aura martini lounge which advertises ‘sophisticated sexy waitresses’ (and for which a two-for-one voucher had been pressed into your hand with your room key – I assumed it related to the
martinis
, that is, not the waitresses). And so on, and so on, seemingly
ad infinitum
.

What the American ‘resort casino’ concept really is – and I am sure there are devotees out there who will point out that Reno is a pale shadow of Vegas, 
but it was enough to blow my novice mind – is Disneyland with an ‘over-21s only’ label. Not that under-21s are excluded. They’re offered ice-cream
parlours
, cuddly-toy shops, circus rides, games arcades which all seem just perfect for families with 10–14 year olds. It’s scarcely enough though – what is? – to improve the mood of the clutches of older teenage boys in huge baggy jeans lurking sullenly on their side of the ‘over-21s only’ demarcation line. This is nothing more than a yellow line on the floor, but it is a barrier between virtual worlds. For ‘their own protection’, not just teenagers, but young adults up to the age of 21, including young men who may have fought for their country in Iraq or Afghanistan, are forced to stand on the wrong side of the line and watch those who are older and therefore supposed to know better pour alcohol down their throats and dollars into slot machines.

They can also watch them smoke. Whereas not so long ago American
anti-smoking
laws seemed draconian to Europeans, now that we have caught up, the US situation seems more chaotic than anything else, not least because each state has its own variation. The Nevada Clean Air act, for example, forbids smoking in enclosed public spaces – other than those which cater mainly for adults and specifically permit it. Such as casinos and bars which don’t opt to ban it. The practical upshot of this is that on one side of the yellow line painted on the floor – in the over-21 gaming and drinking area, smoking is allowed, but no more than a foot or two away, on the other side of the line, it is banned. Even though the whole lot is under one roof and if anyone has told the smoke not to cross the yellow line, it seems blissfully unaware of it. The weirdly
perverse
effect of this is that it feels, within the topsy-turvy logic of this confined ecosystem, as if you can smoke ‘indoors’ but not ‘outdoors’.

When I say the whole thing is under ‘one roof’ of course, that too, is a
deception
. I’ve been gradually discovering this for half an hour now, in my search for an escape. There is what
Doctor Who
fans would immediately call a
TARDIS
effect here – and that as we all know stands for ‘Time And Relative Distance In Space’ – the inside appears hugely bigger than the outside. The secret is that it actually is. Because the hotel lobby level is on the upper floor you easily forget that the shape of the building at street level is irrelevant. Ground-floor Reno is in a different dimension to the world one storey up. On the higher plane, as it were, the Silver Legacy is linked to two other equally humongous casino resorts by walkways that don’t look or feel like walkways because they’re avenues filled with shops or bars. I didn’t know it, while I had been wandering in a vague and self-deluding search for the exit from the Silver Legacy, I had in fact been exploring a substantial area of Eldorado and Circus Circus as well. 

 You not only lose track of space but of time too. Which is of course what the designers intended. There are no windows, no indication of daylight. This is a world in which time is measured by the revolution of digitally generated wheels on electronic slot machines and the dealing of hands at virtual poker tables. It’s only after 40 minutes of hopeless wandering that I find myself back in the Silver Legacy hotel lobby which is when it finally dawns on me that to find my way out of this seemingly subterranean labyrinth back into the
sunshine
, I have to go down, what seems like further underground, but is actually the way out.

Downstairs the world is pretty much the same, an artificially lit
environment
of smoke and drink and gaming. Girls in slinky thigh-slit skirts deliver drinks to the slot-machine players who are as oblivious to them as they are to the news-ticker style slogans running above the rotating wheels they stare at: ‘Welcome to Silver Legacy Resort and Casino, United we stand, God Bless America, We support our troops.’ These are of course the same troops, who if they were still under 21 – as many of them are – would not be allowed to have a beer or play the slots, no matter how heroic their exploits on the field of battle.

There is a crowd around one roulette wheel, a rare intrusion of
old-fashioned
physical gaming in this electronic-dominated world, through there are also poker, blackjack and craps tables, all of which are relatively quiet. And then I remember why. It is still the middle of the afternoon. And the reason I know is that there is a subtle difference down here: in a far corner I can see a light that is neither neon nor fluorescent, a light that reminds me of the time of day and the fact that somewhere out there the sun is shining. I push it and fall out of the singularity into what I dimly remember as reality.

It’s pretty quiet out here. The odd pickup truck cruises by, down Virginia Avenue and through the Reno arch, the city’s landmark emblazoned with its neon ‘little big town’ slogan in the neon-trashing bright desert sunlight.
Following
the faded photocopy map acquired from the Legacy’s bemused
bellhops
who were obviously not familiar with the concept of ‘outside’, let alone ‘on foot’, I head towards the edge of the town centre to see if the beautiful babbling clear waters of the Truckee River have, like Amtrak, been sunk in a concrete canal.

It hasn’t. Just a few hundred yards from the Silver Legacy, the strip is
suddenly
brought to an abrupt halt by a bridge across a river that is every bit as brightly bubbling and indomitably fresh and clear as it was a hundred miles or so back in the mountains. There is another Reno ‘beyond-the-Truckee’, a green civic space with grey granite municipal buildings – post office, town hall
– while the riverfront itself is a peaceful oasis of rippling water, calm and coffee shops.

But in Reno terms this is suburbia. The real town is the strip, so I head back along it, unsurprised to note that Reno is competing with Vegas in another of Nevada’s state specialities: quickie weddings and divorces. I’m just not sure they’ve quite got the hang of it yet. Is the Antique Angel wedding chapel sure they’re sending out quite the right message, unless of course it specialises in second marriages. The sign on the door read ‘closed’, but the window dressing advertises: ‘Hispanic ceremonies available.’ And matching white ‘bride’ and ‘groom’ sun visors. But then maybe Reno has something of a blind spot when it comes to naming its facilities. Mountain View may seem a romantic
customer-attracting
name for most businesses, but a mortuary?