wendover report no. 10

Walking the streets of Wendover on the Utah side, one might think that the town was recently hit by some form of natural disaster. Junked cars, boarded up houses and abandoned mobile homes are decaying away in abundance. Vacant lots and abandoned trailers are filled with trash, the shells of burnt out homes sit waiting to be bull-dozed, and “closed to occupancy by order of county health dept” signs nearly rival in number the amount of homes that actually look to be kept up and lived in. It is an economically depressed community, to say the least.

I have always been amazed at the ability of trash to attract more trash. It’s like if someone dumps an old refrigerator on the side of the road, someone else comes along and decides that that means it’s okay for them to dump their old dishwasher. If a house is abandoned and the yard is filled with debris, then somehow it becomes okay to start using that yard as a place to dump trash. When I was living in New York last summer I remember stumbling upon a rusty heap of an old Ford cargo van that had been dumped in the nieghborhood where I was staying. I assumed that it would be towed away, but a couple days later the van was still sitting there, but now it was full and over-flowing with boxes and boxes of brochures for the local water-taxi service (a business which just happened to be down the street). A couple days later I walked by again, this time to find that not only were the van and the thousands of brochures still there, but several empty paint cans and bags of trash. The van was now just a centerpiece of what was becoming an island of garbage. As I walked away I noticed a man wheel an old dish-washer up to the pile and add it to the collection, and I realized that the abandonment of this van had somehow granted permission to the entire neighborhood to dump their refuse there too. It was like if the new trash you were dumping came into contact with the van, or at least touched some trash that was touching the van, than somehow it was okay.

This tradition of accumulating trash left in or around abandoned things is strong in Wendover, and it is clear that the town is in tough economic times. This is in harsh contrast to the Nevada side of Wendover that’s just over the hill, a recent boomtown that is swelling with casino resorts and new suburban growth. The state line runs right through the middle of town, and within inches of this border start the glimmering monstrosities of corporate casino world. West Wendover (or the Nevada side of Wendover, depending who you ask) is awash with new development and large scale investment from giant corporate casinos, particularly the Peppermill, who are seizing the opportunity to cater to sinning Mormons from Salt Lake City who come to Wendover in droves to cross the border and partake in the lively activities Nevada has to offer. I don’t think there is a single independently owned business in West Wendover or a building over 30 years old, yet every weekend its parking lots are flooded with Utah license plates and its casinos are filled with over-confident college kids, grumpy truck drivers, and zombified retirees tethered to slot machines by coiled credit card lanyards that look like some sort of evil IV drip cord.

The state line is painted across the main street running through town, but beyond the immediate economic differences in Wendover, the border between Utah and Nevada is perhaps the most culturally dramatic state line in the US. On one side you have Utah, the chiseled down version of Brigham Young’s grand vision of the great Mormon empire Deseret and perhaps the most religiously conservative state in the country. The divide between church and state in Utah is fuzzy at best, and the state boosts the strictist liquor laws in the country. Much of Western Utah is a no-mans land, populated by some of the largest and dirtiest military, industrial, and toxic-waste sites in the nation. On the other side of the border you have Nevada, a state that allows high-stakes gambling, tolerates prostitution, and has the laxest liquor laws in the nation (there is even a State law that renders public intoxication legal, and explicitly prohibits any local or state law from making it a public offence). Wendover, as a town, is caught in the middle of this cultural divide, and the economic disparity is a result of the uneven rules and regulations imposed by those cultures. On one hand is a fantasyland of unsustainable freedom, and the other a bypassed wasteland of abused and neglected terrain.

The locals joke that if it wasn’t for the atom bomb, toxic waste, and casinos, (in that chronological order) the town of Wendover would never have existed. But it seems to me that the real reason for Wendover’s existence has more to do with all the things that it isn’t. It isn’t a natural environment that people would want to live in, making it ideal for bombing ranges and waste incinerators. And “sinful behaivor” isn’t tolerated in Utah, making the escape that Nevada provides all the more tempting and lucritive.