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April 23, 2004
Stuck in the middle of tourism
When I came up on the scene, the car was half in the road, half off. I yelled out, "Are you alright?" I asked again, "Do you need a hand?" After a pause of a few minutes, I heard a response in a heavy Italian accent: "We are photographing a coyote." While living on the northwest side of Pahrump Valley, I would often encounter foreigners stopping at the Horizon Market on Bell Vista Avenue and Leslie Street. It was the first store after leaving Death Valley. One time a French woman was stumbling to find change for the phone booth, I merely gave her my cell phone to call a friend in Las Vegas. We're in a unique spot here, between two major U.S. attractions for foreigners: Death Valley and Las Vegas. I sometimes would feel a little sympathy for the foreigners traveling in the U.S., knowing what it's like being in a strange country, speaking a foreign tongue. Some store clerks, who were probably just making minimum wage and had never been outside the country, weren't always the most courteous and hospitable. Once while attending the annual powwow at Petrack Park, I chatted with a driver hauling a bus load of Japanese tourists from Death Valley National Park to Las Vegas, parked in the Smith's Food and Drug parking lot. I suggested they view a piece of American heritage and visit the powwow; the drums could be heard from the bus. Oh no, the driver said, they had to get into Las Vegas. Different attempts have been made to cash in on the foreign tourist in Pahrump. A few of the local groups putting on cowboy gunfights have staged their reenactments along Bell Vista Avenue, in mock western storefront villages. An organized cowboy reenactment show would go over well with foreigners who eat up the Old West mystique. The activities could run the gamut from rodeos, to reenactments of cowboy shootouts, to an imitation dude ranch. One German tour guide from Las Vegas a couple of years ago was leading motorcycle tours around the West that included a stop at the Ash Meadows Cow Camp for a sedate barbecue. Members of the Desert Drifters Gunfighters enthusiastically obliged the Germans, holding numerous shootouts, so much so, that by the end of the evening the foreign visitors were starting to plug their ears. As it stands now, the only view most foreigners get of Pahrump is riding through on a tour bus and stopping off at Smith's for a potty break and a bottle of drinking water. It's as if a resident of Pahrump traveling in Europe or Japan, who tells a local where he or she is from, could be greeted by the remark, "Oh I know Pahrump, that's where we stopped to take a leak." Foreigners seem drawn to the national parks. While visiting Badwater last summer, in 126-degree heat, an Austrian man told me Death Valley was part of the circuit that included Yosemite National Park and the Grand Canyon. Of course, when they drive into Nevada on the Bob Ruud Highway they don't even have a Nevada Welcome Center staffed by the Nevada tourist bureau, as they do at other major entrances to the state, let alone even a sign that says Welcome to Nevada. Lonely Planet Publications and Moon Publications put out the two most popular guidebooks for the backpacker types touring foreign countries. I wasn't able to find a Lonely Planet guide that included Nevada, but I did read two editions of the Nevada Handbook, published by Moon Publications, to see what they had to tell those foreign visitors about Pahrump. Pahrump's name was translated from Paiute as "abundant water," "big springs," and "cow piss on a flat rock." An earlier edition wasn't too kind, stating when a driver slowed down to 65 mph it was still possible to read all the billboards advertising fireworks, real estate, construction firms, mobile homes, pest control, carpet service, fence installers, landscapers and new subdivisions. A new edition deleted the reference to our billboards and signs, but both editions mentioned Pahrump was an unincorporated town with haphazard development, a fast growing community where every other storefront was a real estate office. The guidebook did give some encouragement to someone to visit Pahrump, noting it was an "exotic" backdoor destination to Las Vegas with a winery and legal brothels, "worth a fast, gas-guzzling run through the desert." Maybe one of these days a tour bus will break down and the foreigners will get a chance to see some of what Pahrump has to offer. They might even get a chance to see a coyote, or a jackrabbit cross the road at night. (Write to Mark Waite at mwaite@pvtimes.com.) |
