Hello friends,
I’m writing to you from Las Vegas, where I am crashing on friends’ couches and camping before I head out to Davis, California for a few months. I’m the grateful recipient of a fellowship at UC Davis’s library to report on/research labor and climate change in the wine industry. I’m looking forward to a change of scenery — and making new friends! — but it’s bittersweet because Las Vegas has been feeling so nice lately. For those of you who’ve read my work since I started freelancing seven years ago, you’ll know that I packed up and moved every few months until 2021, when I got to Vegas and, shockingly (to me and everyone around me), stayed. I love the desert, and I love the friends I’ve made here, and this is the first place that’s felt like a settled home in a very long time. A lot of my friends are also moving, or have already moved, so this summer has felt like an extended goodbye. First to leave was Clement Gelly, a writer and photographer and one of my closest friends. During his last weeks here, he drove with me through the Mojave at midnight so I could see my grandmother in the hospital. Another one of my closest friends and neighbors, the freelance photographer Bridget Bennett, is moving to Reno this week, and we’ve spent the past month drifting between each other’s houses, packing and trying on clothes and trading books.
Forgive me for being sentimental. I know I’m leaving too, but this is the first time I’ve lived somewhere when other people are leaving me first. I’m usually the leaver, picking up and going every few months to get ahead of the heartbreak that comes with saying goodbye. This wasn’t intentional — mostly, I moved whenever I felt restless — but departing after just a few months meant I didn’t have time to form terribly deep friendships, and, therefore, could avoid all the hardest parts of leaving. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve loved every place I’ve lived, and the people I’ve met in those places. I have wonderful friends in all those places. But leaving Las Vegas is different simply because of how much time I’ve spent here. I suppose this all started a year and a half ago, when my partner at the time, the subject of this essay about my first apartment in Las Vegas, left the city for his hometown. Our relationship slowly died, and then the others started leaving, too.
All that said, I intend to return to Vegas after my stint in Davis, and I’m excited for life to take on a different tone here. That must be what it’s like to have a longer-term relationship with place. Neighborhoods change. People come and go. Friendships shift.
For now, I’m in Vegas until the end of the month, writing and hiking and trying to stay cool. It’s been hot here, the hottest summer ever, as we say every summer now. We had one 120-degree Fahrenheit day, the hottest recorded temperature in the city, and I was living in the hottest part of the city. It’s difficult to articulate what that kind of heat feels like. I felt like my head was going to burst. I don’t get angry easily, but that day I felt inexplicable rage towards everyone I encountered, and I couldn’t get outside to walk or run or hike like I normally do to calm myself down. Now, we’re supposedly in the middle of monsoon season. But it’s hardly rained.
The photos I’ve included here are mostly from a hike I took in the spring, for a forthcoming desert story. Already they feel like artifacts from another time. In February, Death Valley received a deluge of rain, expanding the ephemeral Lake Manly in Badwater Basin to the point where it was deep enough to kayak, which I did, with the conservation biologist Patrick Donnelly for this Talk of the Town story in the New Yorker. It was magical. All the water made the Death Valley blooms in March and April spectacular. After Lake Manly, I drove out to Bishop and hiked, camped, swam in hot springs, and stared at the silhouette of Mount Whitney, which I’m hoping to be in good enough shape to hike next summer!
Other travels this year: I drove halfway across the country to see the eclipse in Dallas, and, during a chance encounter at a quiet neighborhood park, met a group of molecular biologists who shared my stress and shock and joy at seeing the moon cover the sun and invited me to a party at their home afterwards. (You can follow my eclipse journey on these archived Instagram stories here.) In May, I traveled to Kauai for a journalism program with the National Tropical Botanical Garden (where I swam at some wild beaches and learned about adventure botanists who rappel down cliffs to collect specimens.) More recently, I drove out to the Amargosa Valley with a few friends to watch the Perseids meteor shower one night last week. We set up a circle of camp chairs off the side of the road and looked up for two hours straight, our conversation interrupted by gasps and exclamations. A few days ago, I hiked up to Griffith Peak in my Lake Manly-destroyed tennis shoes (the salt got to them) and sat for a while at the summit, looking down into La Madre Mountain Wilderness and finally answering a few of my own questions about how the Spring Mountains and Red Rock Canyon all fit together. This is all to say, I feel so lucky to live the way I do, to have the kind of freedom to see all these places in the middle of what normal desk people consider a “work week.”
Here is my other recent published work: an essay about secrets, for Hazlitt; an essay about becoming trained as a death doula last summer, for n+1; an essay about a rural desert YouTuber, for Alta Journal; and an essay about City, the massive piece of land art in the Great Basin, for Desert Companion. A few weeks ago, I went on KXSF’s Supper Sessions with the Vinguard’s Pamela Busch for a conversation about wine and power and my book — which you can order directly from me, since I have a few copies left! Stay tuned for a conversation with KNPR’s Mike Prevatt about our visit to City… I think it should air Friday. And if you live in the Bay and want to be friends, please reach out! I’m hoping to spend a lot of time hiking in the Sierras, go see the Lost Coast, do some harvests, and find some rocks to climb (I am not very good but am trying!).
That’s it. Bye Vegas </3. See you in 2025.
Meg
Meg, these photos are so cool! Best of luck at UC Davis. My send off to you is this: whenever I have writer's block, I read and read and read until I'm on the go again.