SAGEBRUSH APE

Thursday, July 24, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Sagebrush Ape: Beauty operator

By Heidi Walters

One day, in the newsroom, the mail brought me an envelope stamped in big red letters: ATTENTION BEAUTY EDITOR. Obviously it was meant for a daily paper with an army of writers and a fashion section.

I threw away the contents but kept the envelope. I found the notion beguiling: beauty editor. That's what I want to be. If there is an overriding goal to be had in this life, mine would be to observe and pass on the beauty of the world. Grand, you says. Pretentious. But I say it's crucial. It's more important than passing on the bad news. It's the only thing that helps us bear the bad news.

The first thing I would do, though, is change the title from beauty editor to beauty operator. It sounds more active. It's a title I've always loved, ever since hearing my grandma say, "This new beauty operator I've been going to, I'm not too happy with how she does my hair."

What's troubling is that people don't agree on "beauty." This leads to battles over what to build, what to destroy. This leads to dead-stops in comprehension among friends. So what is it? That is what the beauty operator would go and find out.

There'd be random discoveries--like the Saturday I go to the Marinello School of Beauty, where students do discount haircuts, discount highlights, discount lowlights, discount nails and discount "dermalogicals." Discount humor, too. One of the maroon-suited instructors bounces around the room teasing and encouraging the students. They tease back. He winks at customers. His hands are rifted with raw cracks that must be chemical-induced--ugly, beautiful testimony to his devotion to craft. I tell the student who folds strands of my hair into little bleach-painted packages that the shrunken dummy heads that other students are combing, curling and teasing are macabre. She says I should see it when they stick 'em on broomsticks and hold them under the hair dryers.

There'd be more deliberately sought observations, such as how, for some people, beauty is a physical need to wander up the mountains or out into that heatwave-rumpled conveyor belt of distance in the lower elevations where, no matter how long you walk, the mountains still shimmer out of grasp. Without that kind of beauty, they become restless, quick-tempered, cynical and depressed.

For me it's always been this way. When I was little I kept appointments with specific trees (to swing from the branches and talk to the magpies, of course). I made regular forays along the creek beside my house, walking in the water, avoiding the fish-egg-slippery rocks--downstream to the cranky rancher's fence where weeds and debris piled up, or upstream to pick blackberries and then sit on the wood bridge and stare into the swirling place near the bank where steely water met dark green leaves. One summer I went every day to a spot near the creek where two milkweed plants grew side by side--on one crawled shiny, metallic blue beetles, and on the other flat, dull-red beetles with black markings. I was mesmerized. But I didn't come up with any cool theories about it. I found the scene magical, that is all, and every day that I went there was the same: beautiful, inconclusive.

There'd be nostalgic finds, remnants of life well-lived. Like this rusted shovel, once my green-thumbed grandpa's, that leans now against my studio wall, with its nibbly, corroded tip, its age-cracked wooden handle. Or the tall, death-tanned bloom of an agave plant standing next to it, its spent, dry stock bristling with pistachio-sized, opened seed pods that dropped little waterfalls of tiny, hard, black, slippery seeds when I first grasped it out near a beautiful dirt road that leads to a view of the Las Vegas Valley.

There'd be conflicting conclusions: The persistent electric buzz of the cicadas just outside my closed sliding glass door is beautiful. Open the door and it is hell--the line is that fine. And the other night when it rained and the lightning woke me up, I opened the door and the buzz was gone but in came the steamy scent of wet creosote.

Inevitably, there'd be dissent. Take my favorite drive--a hypnotic journey through basin-and-range extremes on Nevada Highway 266 between U.S. 95 in Nevada and U.S. 395 in the Owens Valley in California. Sometimes I'll pass fewer than five cars in more than two hours and have the whole beautiful "emptiness" to myself. To me it's fullness. And it smells good, especially when you hit the big sagebrush country.

But my editor, who made that trip last weekend, returned heat-spent to the office and declared it the worst stretch of highway he's ever traveled. "A whole lotta nothin'," he said. Why, look at the map--even the pioneers trod a wide path around it. They found Death Valley more inviting. All that's there is Gold Point--meagre mining outpost turned ghost town. And the Cottontail Ranch--meagre sex outpost. A small ranch community further west. Nothing else but a nauseating sea of low, shrubby stuff that doesn't even warrant the name "plant." That's what he says about that drive.

Well, that's why I'm the beauty operator, not him.