John D’Agata - About a mountain

I f you take the population of Las Vegas, Nevada, and you divide that by the number of days in the year, there should be 5,000 people in the city and its suburbs with a birthday on the same day that Las Vegas began.

On the hundredth anniversary of its founding, however, Las Vegas had only gathered twenty-nine of those people.

One of them arrived in a beaded blue headdress, her eyelashes sequined, her ruffled skirt torn.

Another stood smiling as he watched her while she preened.

There was a child in a knapsack. Its mother on the phone.

An Elvis showed up briefly. Turned out that he was lost.

A small family arrived carrying posters of their daughter: 19792005IT WOULD BE HER BIRTHDAY TOO!

All of us were there awaiting guidance from the city, assembled in a downtown fast food parking lot, seven thirty in the morning, the beginning of the summer.

This was May 15. And I had just turned thirty.

You of all people, wrote the city in a letter, know how special our city really is[because] Las Vegas is literally in your blood! Wont you help us celebrate your bond with Las Vegas by marching in this summers Centennial Parade?

When a city official arrived, we were told what we should do.

Smile!Be psyched!This party is for you!

My mom was there to wait with me, but they asked if she would march.

Whens your birthday, by the way?

Late July, said my mom.

Close enough, she was told.

We were positioned behind the mayor, and he behind six horses, and they behind the color guard from Nellis Air Force Base.

A young man with a shovel and a wheelbarrow marched beside us, stopping every now and then to scrape up the horses shit.

Im from Atlanta, said the guy who marched beside my mom and me. But me and my wife come out here once or twice a year to play. Guess thats why they asked me. I dont care, right? Ill march in their motherfucker.

We marched past Kostners Cash, and we marched past Super Cash, and we marched past Gamblers Pawn and Loan, and then an empty lot.

Past Drive-Up Wedding, Bail Bonds Now, 45% OFF ALL OUR LADIES STOLES AND FURS .

We marched into an area that locals call the Naked City, a neighborhood once inhabited by the citys many showgirls, and then by many vagrants, and now by seven signs for Adopt-A-Block Las Vegas.

SMILE! blinked a monitor as we neared some TV crews.

YOU ARE NOW ENTERING A LIVE TELEVISION PERFORMANCE AREA!

SMILE!

SMILE!

SMILE!

SMILE!

What do you want to say to America today? asked a woman in a pantsuit while gripping a microphone, beside her a man in tight blue jeans, an open shirt, a ponytail, a camera on his shoulder with its black cord twisting up the street into a van.

This is wild! yelled the man who marched beside my mom and me. Happy Birthday, Vegas, yo! I love you all, Atlanta!

We passed the bank of cameras and waved the posters we were given. Twirled some streamers, tossed confetti, shot compression-powered string. We stood and sang the birthday song to a grandstand in applause.

You guys rock! yelled a woman from the grandstand as we passed. And then we reached the end of the grandstand, and were done.

We turned around, joined the crowd, watched the others march.

The Sons of Norways Viking ship rocked sideways on its chassis.

The public librarys Book Drill Team passed out their branches hours.

Seven Chinese boys held aloft an orange dragon.

There were women marching silently behind a plastic banner: 1-800-BETS-OFFCALL IF YOU NEED HELP!

Men who drove old cars.

Girls with 4-H calves.

Old women wearing pageant crowns.

Congressmen, dairy carts, ballroom dancers, Meadows Chevy, the Organization of Ladies Kazoo Post-92 from Laughlinover two hundred different entries marching past us for three hours.

All of them being applauded, waved at, snapshot.

Broadcast on the news, on local public access, on video-phone recordings that were posted to the Web.

The parade was called by one newscast the happening of the century!

A local blogger wrote that something special happened here!

A radio host asked listeners if all that really happened?

And the mayor swore that this parade was going to be remembered as one of the greatest things to ever happen in Las Vegas.

And while I wasnt born there, and have since then moved away, during the summer I lived in Vegas I began to feel those claims, appealing in their hopefulness the way parades appeal, the way a list appeals to those with faith in withheld meanings: the dream that if we linger long enough with anything, the truth of its significance is bound to be revealed.

W hen I helped my mother move to Las Vegas that May, we lived for a couple weeks at the Budget Suites of America, a low-rise concrete pink motel with AIR COND and WEEKLY RATES and a Burger King next door.

We started to look for houses in developments called Provence, Tuscany, and Bridgeport Landing, wandering through their model homes on plastic carpet runners.

In the master bedroom suites there were books displayed on beds, their dust jackets removed, their spines always up, their titles too faint to clearly read at a glance.

In the mud rooms there were chalkboards with the reminder, Buy milk! Mason jars of pasta in the kitchens neatly spilled. Ceramic white bowls for family pets on the floor. Silk flowers in blue vases on the dining room tables sparkling with little specks of round plastic morning dew.

There were terra-cotta tiles.

There were screened-in lanais.

There were entertainment centers in every living room.

The model called the Amador had columns beside its door. The Palomar had room for four cars in its garage. And Versailles, gleaming white, came with an optional motorized gate.

In every house the smell of cookies wafted golden brown from a stainless-steel oven that hadnt been plugged in.

All you have to do, said one hostess in a house, is pick your model and your lot, and then leave the rest to us!

During one of those summer mornings upon first moving there, my mother and I stood in the sand of Las Vegas, listening to a broker around some wooden stakes and flags, some white-chalked land plots and orange-painted pipes, trying to see what he was seeing as he motioned with his hands, as he motioned with his wrists and wriggly fingers in full circles, motioned before his face, above his head, and to my mom, motioned toward the west, and then to me, and off the lot, then motioned past the stakes, the whipping flags, the lines in sand, beyond to where some pocks of little yucca plants were blooming, their tiny white flowers that never open all the way, their wobbly tall stalks of puffy million-seeded pods, their sword-long fronds that always indicate a desert, fanning out beyond the yellow of the lot in which we stood, fanning north above the shadow cast down by a mountain, fanning up and fanning over, fanning down and fanning out, then fanning off the private acreage that defines Summerlin, the walled and gated community my mother came to live in: orange houses, green parks, a white clocktower at its heart.