How to Describe the Darkness?
3 Oct
On the Road at Night in Rural Nevada
By Jannifer Huston | Share on Facebook
Alamo, Nev. — How to describe the darkness? If Las Vegas is a city of light, rural Nevada is a creature of the opposite nature. When night falls, a blackness, thick as velvet, engulfs the world. When the last light goes, drivers turn their cars’ headlights to the brightest setting, rolling cautiously down the highways crisscrossing Southern Nevada’s deserts.
The journey from Alamo, NV to Las Vegas is 100 miles long. In the evening, the stars that hang above the scraggly mountains alongside U.S. 93 shine furiously. It is beautiful. But a stranger to these roads should make the trip in daylight, if possible. As the sun goes down, night drops on the rural world like a heavy curtain, hiding everything. The darkness that sweeps over this landscape of sand and shrub swallows every road sign. Travelers pass major intersections without ever knowing. The absence of light is so complete that not even shadows survive.
On the two-lane roads that connect Alamo to Las Vegas, Mesquite to Caliente, Ely to Pioche, approaching vehicles look like airplanes drifting in a black sky. But a driver can proceed for many miles without encountering another person, and the sense of isolation that reigns over this dark world is profound. Mobile phones die. Radio stations cut out. And man, so accustomed to light and noise, finds himself fearful in this quiet, Southern Nevada night. (more…)