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| Exchange Club Casino, Beatty, Nevada, Steve Brown 2026 |
10:10 a.m.
I sit in Gema's Cafe in Beatty, Nevada. It's small, cute, with five tables and a stone fireplace. The decor is very reserved, and other than having a hearth, it feels more like an office breakroom than a diner. The atmosphere says This is about the food, not what's on the walls.
My bronchitis is acting up, and I'm coughing. Bad timing. I explain that I'm not contagious to the couple sitting at the table next to me. I can tell that the woman doesn't believe me. I wouldn't have come inside if I'd known my hacking was going to kick up right now. I was almost over my cough, but the smoke from the neighbors' fire blew right in my tent in the middle of the night. They never put it out. The butterfly effect. Everything ripples out. I think I should step outside to correct that when my cough suddenly subsides.
Beatty has that renegade spirit found in a lot of small Nevada towns. There's an awesome steam-punk casino across the street with iron and steel and gears and gadgets and metal fish attached to the iron facade. It's weird and wonderful. It's also closed down. Everything is boom or bust in Nevada, even the casinos. Nevada is a state of ghost towns and near ghost towns. Beatty won't fade away because it's a gateway to Death Valley National Park. However, because it's at an entrance not facing the most direct route from Vegas or LA, it also probably won't grow much, which is perfect. Too much of the west is being transformed into something it's not. I get why people want to live out here. No other part of the country compares. But it is precisely the lack of population that makes it special. And the growth is unsustainable. There simply is not the water. I once lived in an apartment with cockroaches who loved to inhabit the inside of the toilet bowl. Every time I flushed, I'd think, You stupid things! And then I'd think about all of the cities built in flood plains, or below or on top of mountains and hills with well-established histories of sliding, and I'd think, Okay, we're just as stupid.
Development in the desert west is different though. Once those aquifers left over from the last ice age are depleted there will be no moving back in after the whatever devastating drought finally causes collapse. We're living off borrowed water that cannot be replaced on a civilization timescale. And yet we use it as if it were a replenishable resource. It is, but not in a span that will do us any good. Once the ground water is gone, for all reasonable purposes, it's gone for good.
I love living out here, but every western city should be planning very limited growth. They do the exact opposite. We are stupider than roaches. Once the water is gone in the west, we can't move back in. The rate we're depleting our aquifers makes drying up inevitable, and yet we won't change. I am struggling with that myself. Human's just have a damn difficult time planning long range, which is ironic, because we spend very little time in the moment. We're always regretting the past or scheming of a more abundant future. But most of that mind-wandering isn't good because it's centered on escape not solutions. We avoid the now because it contains difficult choices that need to be made. We want what we want and freely take it without considering the consequences, and when the consequences do hit, we attempt to escape through our addictions. It is damn difficult to move oneself out of that way of living. We can't even regulate our personal diets, let alone change our approach to running civilizations.
Yet, I think the shortest route to long-term sustainability is actually learning to live fully in the moment. It's even more important than long-term planning. You can set goals all you want, but if you can't work with your current impulses, you will never reach your goals--individually or as a society. Moving from an escape-mindset to a now-mindset is what it takes. Here is our current reality. Here is the most likely outcome based on our current actions. Here are the current steps to take to produce a better future. Now, let's make the change, doing it moment by moment.
Being in the present is the antithesis to addiction. When you are fully present, you are fully at peace with whatever reality already exists. You don't need to escape anything. You sit, take in the light, the smells, and see beauty in whatever already is. If that moment is spent in a pristine meadow, it is apparent nothing needs to change. If that moment is spent next to a smoldering mountain of trash, it is just as apparent things do need to change. The difference is when you seek the wisdom of no escape, you will face that mountain of smoldering trash and get down to the work of cleaning it up rather than pretending it's not there because being in the moment is just as addictive as escaping the moment is once it is established as your way to be. Your brain is driven by consistency. If it is fed avoidance-thinking, avoidance is all it craves. However, if it is fed now thinking, all it craves is more and more now experiences. Dealing with whatever current reality one faces becomes more and more fun and one wishes less and less for escape. You stop worrying about how enormous the mountain of trash is and start finding joy in the process of cleaning it up because your contentment comes from actively being engaged in the present rather than fantasizing about some alternative reality.
Our biggest problem is not that we don't plan well enough. It's that we don't control our desire to escape reality. Now thinking teaches you to sit in a moment and deal with it as is. Once you stop trying to avoid things, actively finding solutions almost becomes automatic because what else is there to do with a moment when fully present than act in its best interest? At that point you become too aware of your interconnection with everyone and everything to keep avoiding your own accountability.
I live in a desert. What ill I do today that makes me more aligned with that reality? Out west, this needs to be our individual thinking, and it needs also to be our collective thinking. And we need to think it and do it now.
