My favorite thing about Las Vegas

There are giants in the sky.

Big tall, beautiful, (sometimes) scary giants in the sky.

They are as much a part of the desert valley landscape as the phallic light from the pyramid; or the green glow from the erstwhile-named movie studio turned resort; or the muscular mountain gods surrounding us, watching over us, occasionally chuckling to themselves, laughing as we gleefully slide down their sides.

When the pandemic happened, it wasn’t the half-staff lights on the Strip that got me. I had already seen that with the shooting a few years before. It wasn’t the eerie quiet and lack of movement on the town’s ubiquitous 6-8-lane highways, which we simply call “roads.” It wasn’t the relative emptiness of the usually bustling parks.

There were no planes in the sky. And my world was inexorably tilted.

Make no mistake – I saw the planes. Days after lockdown started, I was on the air at KUNV with a half-hour show examining, exploring, talking, laughing, crying at what was happening to the world. I live in southeast Clark County. I took the tunnel to UNLV every day. And every day, as my car climbed out of the darkness, I was met with the terror of the big tall giants sitting on the ground, crammed in as close as turtles. Hundreds of giants – blue with red and yellow swoops; white with red and blue tips; sunbursts. All sitting there. Sadly, it seemed to me. Cramped in with their brethren who they usually only wave to in passing.

I’m going to reveal something very nerdy about me. Which none of you will be surprised at. I know the two primary routes that planes take to land at Harry Reid Airport.

One of them goes over the Strip. Anybody who has ever been to Town Square has experienced a roar coming out of nowhere, and then a plane swooping over, so close you can see the wheels, and it makes you duck a little. Like you duck in your truck or SUV when you enter a garage with a low entry.

Human instinct. Duck. F**k the engineering. And common sense. There is a mechanical bird flying so close to me I feel like I did when I was 13, and jumped to touch the top of every doorway I entered in the quest to be able to get my hand over a basketball rim (which I utterly failed at). If I jump high enough, the teenager in me says, I might be able to catch hold of one of the wheels.

The other way planes land is over Eastern Avenue. And this is my favorite. This is what mesmerizes me, and makes it very difficult to drive east on Sunset Road at dusk. The first thing you notice is the four or five planes, lined up behind each other, evenly spaced at a shallow angle. Evenly. Spaced. I cannot emphasize this enough. The precision. The control.

But the best part is, when the closest plane is just within a football field of the ground, at the end of the line another plane just pops out of the sky. Like magic. One moment there is empty sky behind the last dot of a plane. And then – POP! – there’s another point of light at the end of the line.

My favorite thing about Las Vegas? Watching the planes pop out of the sky. And then become giants.

Last week, I was on one of those planes, for the third time in six weeks – a grueling schedule for a homebody, but a sometimes necessary one when the people you love live in other cities. When I’m on the plane, I cannot discern where it is in relation to it popping out of the sky as a tiny speck of light. I can only discern where it is when I see the grid below. And we almost always land over Eastern. If I’m sitting on the left side of the plane, I say hello to Sunset Park before we touch down.

During the pandemic, nobody needed to tell me that hotels were shut down, and our economy was suffering. I could see it, in the empty skies. And nobody needs to tell me now that we’re doing well. All the numbers and analysis from the Economic Forum cannot tell me what is apparent if you pull over on Sunset Road and look east. Stay for an hour. Stay for two. The giants will keep on landing. One after the other. Bringing people full of hope and excitement. 

And giving me a sense of immense calm. That I am home.