The Big Nowhere

THE NEXT DAY WE STARTED BACK DOWN THE EAST side of Nellis, with stops at TonSopah Air Base and an abandoned therapeutic bathhouse in Warm Springs, where, against Coolidge's stern admonitions, several in our party took the waters in various stages of undress. After a buffet lunch and shopping (I got two fine bottles of Pahrump Valley burgundy, "the extraterrestrials' favorite") at the world-famous Little A 'Le' Inn in Rachel, and a visit to the rival Area 51 Research Center, we arrived at the unspoken grail of the journey: the Area 51 Perimeter at Groom Lake Road. While not emphasized in CLUI's exhibit or tour literature, the area's volatile history of territorial squabbles and double agency among the military, the UFO true believers and the Interceptors freedom-of-information/military-hardware geeks nuanced every phase of the expedition.

Coolidge himself had first stumbled upon the disputed terrain in 1993, when he was detained by unmarked men in camouflage while trying to access Groom Lake Mine, identified on his map as being well outside the restricted area. When the misunderstanding had been cleared up, Coolidge found his way to the Little A 'Le' Inn, where he fell into conversation with Glenn "not the singer" Campbell, the most high-profile of the Interceptors. Intrigued, Coolidge began visiting the location, closely following the battle over the expansion of Area 51 to include "Freedom Ridge," from which inquiring minds might view the "nonexistent" Groom Lake facility, and in these encounters the seeds were sown for much of what became CLUI.

Rich in content that is itself laced with associative possibilities, the Center's guided tours impose a durational aesthetic structure onto real physical experience at times reminiscent of a medieval pilgrimage, at others like a 48-hour Net-surfing binge. The Nellis Range Complex Tour and the accompanying "The Nellis Range Complex: Landscape of Conjecture" exhibition, in articulating a negative conceptual space with a dense filigree of peripheral data, possess the intricacy and elegance of Islamic calligraphy, reconciling the political contradictions and aesthetic tautologies of cartography and drawing, seeing boundaries as from above, as lines, with an open and nonjudgmental attention to detail. The Department of Defense was, of course, successful in its acquisition of Freedom Ridge, so the CLUI tourists stopped at the warning sign and waved at camouflaged gentlemen in a white Ranger, who responded over a megaphone with "I hope you didn't pay too much for this tour!" As our busload of pilgrims rolled toward Vegas, dozing to Werner Herzog's gut-wrenching Gulf War documentary Lessons of Darkness(just one real-landscape translation of the virtual landscape created at Nellis), I thought of an appropriate snappy comeback, by way of Wendell Phillips: "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few." We should be grateful that CLUI is out there, patrolling our borders and keeping the landscape at least open to the possibility of democracy.