Waiting for the Last Gasp – Adam Overland

Last Saturday, March 2, the winds were gusting to 70 mph as I drove into Las Vegas to see the Pinball Hall of Fame. Vegas is 35 miles from where I’m staying at Boulder Beach Campground, Lake Mead, which is just a few miles from Hoover Dam. Unfortunately, the pinball was underwhelming, the games in need of servicing, the ambiance non-existent. It was as though it were maintained by a collector who’d become too old or daft to know precisely what he has, nor has he the time or desire to fix his collection. The only thing they put money into appeared to be the incredible art deco sign out front and the additional huge pinball sign with three story letters plastered to the building itself, which in the age of Instagram was perhaps precisely the plan. There’s no need to deliver quality as long as it’s social media friendly. And so mostly it was a disappointment, but then I like to play pinball, not so much look at it, and I like my games pristine. 

Afterwards I considered walking around Vegas a bit, but the wind was no joke; almost no one was out and about, and that’s saying something in Vegas. Palm trees were shedding leaves and everything was a potential projectile. When the wind hit my truck sideways, I could feel it lift. Semis were noticeably absent from the interstate. At one point on the return trip, with the wind directly behind me, I took my foot off the gas to make an exit and wondered why I wasn’t slowing down.

So I returned back to the campground and toured the outside of Hoover Dam instead, where it is tucked neatly into the mountains and nicely shielded from the wind. At some point I hit the grocery store, and as I approached, a store employee was outside taking photos of the bright blue neon sign formerly reading “Albertson’s” but which now read “lbertson’s” since the wind had taken the A. The young woman noticed me looking and yelled through the wind, “Our fuckin’ A broke off!” I was impressed with her customer service immediately.

On Sunday I hiked the Gold Strike Hot Springs Trail, just a mile short of Hoover Dam, a 2.6 mile trek each way with a 900+ foot elevation gain. There are endless opportunities for hiking in the Lake Mead area, and early on in this trail, which begins in the shadow of the Pat Tillman & Mike O’Callaghan bridge, were the wreckage of several old vehicles that had apparently fallen 400 feet or so from the road above. Hopefully they were pushed off, and not driven. 

I got a late start on the supposedly 3-4 hour hike, and everyone returning appeared exhausted, which didn’t bode well for my doughboy body. In fact, the hike even had 7 or 8 mountain climbing ropes embedded in the rocks for assists on steep climbs—a first for me. Half of the hike wasn’t a trail at all so much as one large stone after another that you had to scramble over. A day later, my back is sore in places I didn’t know had muscles. Walking up boulders with the aid of rope pulling is an endeavor for the fit, and I’m solidly outside of that group. Even my hands—my tender computer hands—suffered minor calluses. 

The Tillman/O’Callaghan bridge adjacent to Hoover opened in 2010 to reroute through traffic around the Hoover Dam, bridging, as the dam does, Nevada and Arizona and leaving the dam proper for tourists only. And the dam gets enough visitors to justify it (7 million+ per year), this engineering marvel that basically allowed massive settlement in the west in water deprived lands. In fact, the damming of the Colorado allowed the U.S. to today get something like 25% of its water intensive fruits and nuts and 60% of its vegetables from areas served by the Colorado. Just to emphasize, we grow our water intensive fruits and vegetables… in a desert. And since I was last here in 1998, the water has fallen an incredible 150 feet (due to drought and overuse), leaving a massive “bathtub ring” on the walls of Lake Mead. 

The Gold Strike Hot Springs Trail itself winds through a canyon, with columns of basalt early on, later giving way to granite. After a relatively easy first mile and a half, the last mile to the hot springs involves scrambling over boulders, some so steep as to require the aforementioned ropes. After about 2.6 miles, you’re rewarded with hot springs bubbling up from the earth, forming several soaking pools as the water makes its way to the Colorado River on the lower side of the Hoover. Short of a swimsuit, I stripped down to my boxers and enjoyed a hot tub with 400 foot walls and the sounds of trickling water as the sun began to cast shadows through the canyon. But I had the same distance to travel back, and so my stay was enjoyable but short lived. 

After working today I ran perhaps a mile, half of it uphill. I was winded and came across a coyote who eyed me curiously from 150 feet away, sensing me on the brink of death, no doubt, and ready to cull the weakest link of the human herd. But I still had some fight in me and he had no back up, so I wheezed my way back toward the campground and with a newly full tank of water, took an excessively long, hot, outdoor camper shower (5 mins). 

The truth is, I think I’m losing weight but I don’t have a scale with me. When my gut reaches a certain size, the elastic band on my boxers tends to fold over on itself, and that’s how I know I’m too fat. At times, as my weight has fluctuated, my underwear elastic sort of rolls down on itself, as though hiding in shame from the shadow of my belly. But no longer is it rolling, just folding, and the goal is to get back to a weight where my boxers abide by their intended design. 

Which reminds me, I had last night a texting conversation with a friend, whereby I’d noticed my fly had been down for some time. This never used to happen to me, but now it’s at least a monthly occurrence, and I wondered whether it might be an early indicator of Alzheimer’s or associated dementias. There is big money in reliable testing for such a thing, and were a downed fly a medically reliable indicator, perhaps signaling some 30 years in advance my eventual brain deterioration (I’m 46), we could be onto something big. Real big. 

And so we agreed in principle to quickly patent and be first-to-market with the proprietary fly-down technology via our new business, the Fly-Down Alzheimer’s Early Indicator Intervention Corporation. Coming soon to your local medical care provider.