After a week of traveling, it’s good to be home. Although its tempting to dive right into holiday preparations, baking, and tackling the suddenly-more-noticeable accumulation of magazines and junk mail, I want to spend some time reflecting on the excess extravagance of Las Vegas. 
I want to think about that in the context of what preceded it, about the perhaps equally excessive asceticism imposed by the desert on those who lived there in the centuries before it became Sin City.
In the state and federal parks we visited, there was invariably the story of Native Americans. Voices of the Nuwuvi, the People, were featured in our last road trip, to the Pahranagat Valley. The area is on the Pacific flyway. Kind of like Maumee Bay, but in the middle of the desert. We saw several dozen tundra swans and a bald eagle. 
The Nuwuvi believe they were put on the earth to keep it in balance, a balance which mostly ended sometime in the 19th century when cattle-rustlers brought their stolen herds to this remote area where warm springs create a mile-wide band of fertility surrounded by nothing but high desert and mountain ranges (and, today, an aspirational development featuring an unlikely golf course and mostly-imaginary community). 
Technology, epitomized by the Hoover Dam, was certainly one key to how the goats and tortoises gave way to the glitz of the Strip. But it wouldn’t have happened without the ruthless ambition and ingenuity of humans, some of whose stories we read about at the Mob Museum. The story of the last 150 years of Las Vegas seems like the story of western civilization in an exaggerated microcosm. Nature is tamed and destroyed, culture is created and corrupted. I would not want to live anywhere near the Las Vegas strip. But I would also not want to live as the Nuwuvi lived.
So I want to think about it all while enjoying my life of (relative) moderation.