The tale of Don and Michael's trip to Phoenix and the thousand miles they covered in four days - being a tale of mild adventure, the power of landscape to prompt feelings of delicate awe, and the disconnects between human and natural habitats.
Saturday, June 3, 1995
The flight from Manchester, NH, to Chicago flew by without event -- that is to say, we glided without "chop," ate an inoffensive snack of pretzels and Coke, and solved the problems of the world by crowning Don emperor in charge of bringing common sense to the world. He taught me a good bit of travel self-defense: get to the ticket counter early and see if you can get your seat changed to the exit doors, which often only have two rather than three across and a bit more legroom and elbow room. I also found that row 27 by the rear exit door also has enough space for a small cot and a camp stove.
Airplane seats work best if 1) you have a sound and well-emptied bladder, 2) no claustrophobia, and 3) can do the trick of folding a newspaper in half without elbowing either the adjacent passenger or a flight attendant. In other words, compact and unfussy. In other words, cattle.
We got into O'Hare and made our way to the next gate (which in the course of our two-hour lay-over changed three times, luckily to gates directly next to the original designation). A little hungry (the snack had worn off by now), we found one of the numerous cookie-cut "food emporia" throughout the airport and settled in, Don with a bratwurst and I with my first (and most likely last) Polish sausage. Not that the sausage disappointed -- pungent and dense, it certainly exceeded the rubbery, moist cylinders parlayed from curb-side carts. But one is probably enough to make a useable culinary memory -- and my arteries thank me for my restraint.
As we waited and chatted and read, we noticed a large brigade of young boys and girls (eighth-graders, we learned later) who, to our dismay, seemed ready to board the same plane. They did, and we found ourselves sitting literally in the middle of the horde. They lived in Snowflake (a town two hours northeast of Phoenix) and were coming back from a class trip to Washington, D.C. In front of us sat three girls (I hesitate to say the stereotypical "wholesome" and "milk-fed," but they were exactly that, duplicates of the midwestern media-bred image of health and racial purity, with blond hair, unmascara'd light-colored eyes, and a perkiness that tethered them lightly to gravitas of the world). One of the girls (we never did learn her name) chatted us up, and occasionally her seatmates and a few other friends would pop in and out of the conversation. In a way, she was incredibly forward, and even a bit flirtatious -- she asked us our ages (she thought us 32 -- she couldn't believe we had passed 40, but then, at her age of 14, 32 is a distant horizon, and 40 is Andromeda), told us she liked Salt 'n' Pepa (black rap in Snowflake makes for an interesting twist on cross-culture) and lived across from the golf course, and showed us her stuffed pig named after her boyfriend. When Don asked her what they had seen on the trip to Washington, she remembered a few of the museums but not much else (they had spent a week there); when he asked her if she had met her senators, she paused, giving a quizzical look, and said, "What's a senator?" After we gulped and said "Whoa!" to the impulse to ridicule, Don patiently explained about senators. In her perky, dismissive way, she said, "Cool," and went back to listening to her tape. She seemed a very nice, ineffectual adolescent with a winning smile, blond roots, and a waterbug's facility for skimming along. The chaperons looked exhausted.
From the air, coming into Phoenix looks like flying into Miami or Los Angeles -- well before reaching the airport an "event horizon" of suburban lights begins to color the darkness, grids of lights punctuated by sodium-lit parking lots, neon'd take-outs, broad ribbons of highways slicing through the regularity, their own cold-white fluorescence outlining the arcs of exit ramps and interchanges. This vast electrified sprawl never ceases to amaze me for many reasons, not the least of which is, How can someone living on the periphery, or even in the epicenter, of such an acreage ever feel any connection to the entity called "Phoenix" or to the idea of being a "city-zen," one of a mess of disparate strangers bound by an etiquette that makes the strangers, in some dynamic yet hazy way, obligated to protect each other? It always seems to me that without density, without something like the North End's overlap of people, places, traffic, signs, voices, sounds, smells, and so on, it becomes impossible to become "urbanized" because so few opportunities arise for the casual encounter, the unexpected event, the street-level theatrics cued by the simple press of people. (Perhaps people spread themselves out like they do in Phoenix to make sure none of that unscripted reality breaks out, their fear or fastidiousness making them want their reality smooth rather than chunky, like the patina of stucco they layer over their concrete walls. Rather than build up, they build out, each seeking a plot that connects them to the services without having to palaver with anyone more than a block away or outside the office.)
We flew in without incident, which is always good, got our car ("Full-Size Ford Taurus"), and made our way to the hotel, the Embassy Suites in Scottsdale. Driving through the dark in this attenuated city, down wide boulevards past one- and two-story buildings, coursing through the center of Phoenix, brightly-lit with its cathedrals to commerce and the make-believe of a thriving city center, then up Scottsdale Avenue, passing resorts, their compound walls lined lush with non-native water-hungry plants and lawns, through a shopping district ("Fifth Avenue") with stores sequestered in stucco'd, faux-Spanish mission architecture, all creams and fashion-designed earth tones (not the color of dirt but of dirt sanitized, refined, and made into a glaze), and then into the Suites, with its own corporate-designed palette of ornament and material: pottery floor tiles made in Taiwan, plastic cacti in bloom, thick sand paint on plywood columns replicating the texture of a cloister. Just limned against the horizon, lightly stippled by the lowering moon in its first quarter, Camelback Mountain, a rough dual sine wave of rock and spotty vegetation. We had arrived in Phoenix, city of transplants.
A trip to the bar for beer and tequila shots, chased by a snack of potato skins. Then sleep.
Sunday, June 4, 1995
I had planned to do my morning run but decided instead to ease up a bit and take a walk. So at about 6:30 AM I started out on my trek down Scottsdale to Camelback and around (crossing the Grand Canal that cuts through the two "urbanities," carrying water from the Salt and Verde Rivers -- an odd sight to see so much flowing water in the heart of the Sonoran desert). All the buildings I saw -- the "planned communities," the office parks (a Kwik Kopy with stained glass windows), the Fashion Square mall (with its stratigraphy of stores), the residential areas with their saguaros and prickly pairs and raked gravel "lawns" fronting a swath of stucco studded with log ends and capped with red tile -- lay easy on the eye, with their creams and whites and muted pinks shading into brown. All the edges had been well-kempt (by many of the dark-skinned men I saw raking, watering, sweeping away the night's debris), and the profiles they made never blocked out the horizon or jarred the pale blue sky. "Pretty," "nice" -- these words would apply.
But like many pretty things, more façade than skeleton, lacking what Don called "grittiness" and what I would call "thickness." At least in the area I walked, they lacked the kinds of flaws and gnarls that could date them or show the sacraments of human activity in their confines. Scoured, tidied up, diorama'd and landscaped, they could have been built yesterday or a decade ago; they had the curlicue neatness of architects' models, made fully manifest by the portable ecology of air-conditioning and shanghai'd water. One could only surmise the psychology of those who thought this a preferable way to live.
Today, Don had planned to spend the day in conference -- in fact, he had paid extra for this because the conference proper began officially on Monday. But after I outlined to him the trip I wanted to take while he sat in the climated belly of the Rio Verde conference room -- a 200-mile loop along the Apache Trail, past abandoned gold mines, through the Sonoran desert, to the Roosevelt Dam -- he decided to abandon his original plans and come with me. We went to the conference center early so that he could register and pick up any materials, then we loaded up with water, sunglasses, and Jolly Ranchers and headed south to catch Apache Boulevard east, which would take us out of the city to Apache Junction, the start of the loop.
Scottsdale and Phoenix in the daylight inspired even more dismay than the incoming ride last night. Nothing looked connected to anything else, as if the city planners had drafted the zoning regulations based on throwing dice. But at least they only annoyed. Apache Boulevard disgusted us, 25 miles (we clocked it) of strip mall, a conglomeration of auto shops, convenience stores, motels, fast food joints, auto graveyards. If one could describe Phoenix as a gold mine, Apache Boulevard became its tailings, its cast-offs, its leftover sludge. But we finally got past to AZ 88, the beginning of the loop, and off we went.
Our guidebook had a mile-by-mile description of what to see and do on the loop, and at milepoint 3.5 we pulled into the Goldfield Gold Mine, a "reconstructed" mining town complete with a tour through a small section of mine. The people who had nailed this town together had included an historical museum, gift shop, restaurant, and a variety of shops, supposedly all housed in original (but retrofitted) buildings. I took the mine tour; Don, with his claustrophobia, decided that standing underground in a small place defined the term "bad decision" and opted for a self-guided walking tour of the town. The tour guide, a construction estimator who had an interest in mining, looked like the archetypal Western "guy": sun-grizzled, longish chest-warmer grey beard, sinewy, speaking in a slightly mocking drawl to all these pale tourists. But he was gracious and gave a good tour, showing us the machinery, the working conditions, how they set dynamite charges to get maximum bang, the rigors of stope mining with primitive air hammers and six candles for a 10-hour shift. He made an interesting point: at its height, this mine produced about 300 ounces of gold per ton of ore, or about $6000. Workers got paid, at most, $3 a day. He let the disparity stand without comment but clear intent: mining stood as the perfect symbol of capitalism, extracting riches from the earth, extracting profit from people's needs and vulnerabilities. Eventually the mine ran dry and became partly flooded; the town dried up until these guys decided to resuscitate it.
As we drove on through the Superstition Mountains (supposedly the home of Jacob Waltz's Lost Dutchman Mine), we could see off on the mountains' sides holes where gopher/men had dug for gold. Obsessions always leave their traces. Don had bought a tape by some Western storyteller purporting to give a guided tour along the loop, filled in with yarns and legends. What actually came out of the tape player (once we figured out that the whole rendition covered only one side of the tape, not both -- a bit of cheat, we thought) was a series of pitches for the concessions who had advertised in the accompanying booklet, with one or two stories told in a nasal twang with sentence endings like "By golly!" Definitely more than a bit of a cheat.
But it didn't matter. Driving through the mountains, through the Sonoran desert, on a switchback road as looped as a French braid, more than made up for the con. All around us the desert filled everything to the horizon's cusp, the saguaro sentineled up the sides and along the ridges, prickly pear and cholla infilling the spaces, grasses and shrubs, with their grey-green dusty lustre, embroidering the baked and sere ground. I would never have called the place "lush," with all the thick juiciness that that word implies. But this landscape nevertheless had its own drier version of the word, hard-scrabble and tenacious, with no concession to luxury or leeway for inattention. What lived there lived on the margin, frugal as any Puritan, balanced as finely as any Wallenda on a wire. I did not find it visually beautiful, the way I would the San Francisco mountains in Flagstaff; only by imagining what it took for the desert to stay as alive as it did could I generate a respect for it.
Perhaps this has to do with upbringing, being born in Denver, spending a good portion of my life in the cozy landscaping of New England, which would predispose me to value a palette of chlorophylls and blues and granite greys and not the dusky umbers and daunted greens of the desert. Landscape can only affect us based on what we already know of landscape, which in itself is not just visual memory but a whole catalogue of assumptions and sub-conscious aesthetic judgments about that memory. When we respond to a landscape, the response strikes us as emotional rather than rational only because it comes from so many decisions already made and filed that their provenance is tangled and murky. I don't know if I could love the desert, or that it would ever strike a deep chord with me. But I can certainly respect it, know it, add it to who I am.
After a long stint of swinging our way along the road, we pulled into Tortilla Flat (pop. 6) for lunch. It is a real town, having been a staging area for the crew going out to erect the Roosevelt Dam in 1911. (Since no good way existed to get materials to the dam site, engineers carved the road out of the mountains, taking several years to do so.) It had a restaurant which served a serviceable taco and enchilada, with good ice tea (unsweetened). Apparently, in 1987 part of the complex had burned down, and people donated money for its resurrection. This started a tradition of people leaving signed dollar bills (and other national currency) stapled to the walls; hundreds of bills now paper the restaurant area. (We, however, kept our bills in our pockets.)
After fueling our bellies, we continued on to the Dam, passing through different stagings of landscape, as if technicians somewhere unrolled one of those loops of scenery in old silent films to simulate the motion of the train, except that this loop had stitched into a little desert, a little rugged mountain terrain with canyons and caves, some wind-eroded spires and cylinders, with a return to desert. Past the Dam (which Don grumbled about, seeing disfigurement and rapacity in its presence, but which, while not disagreeing, I also saw a marvelous feat of engineering), we turned south toward Miami (named after Miami, Ohio), Claypool, and Superior, copper mining towns which, like other such mining towns, made their profit by scalping and troweling the surrounding hills and scoring deep pits for ore. We could see the past effects of this while driving through: hills with terraced sides and tabled tops, like some distorted step pyramid, faintly green with returning grass yet also troughed and corrugated where the vegetation hasn't had time to bind the soil. In some places the erosion ran so deep that the hills resembled the badlands in South Dakota, fissured and delta'd. The copper companies continue to run, smelters, earth movers, and sifters intact. (The scene also reminded me of Lead, South Dakota, with its 400' deep pit, at the bottom of which the giant dump trucks look Tonka in their smallness.)
Don wanted to have all the mine owners shot as eco-criminals; I couldn't disagree. As he said, Is there any hope for a species that can so spectacularly foul its nest? Not far from our minds and position lay the giant drain called Phoenix, full of negligence and denial.
On the way in we stopped off at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum (Thompson made his living digging copper; apparently, the Arboretum constituted some sort of mea culpa to the land). We didn't actually go into the Arboretum; instead, they had a wonderful display of local flora outside in the parking lot, so we got a chance to see the barrel cactus, the old man cactus (covered with fine white threads), agave plants of all shapes and sizes, trees with green bark. To avoid suffering the visual assault of Apache Boulevard again, we struck Route 60 west into Scottsdale back to the hotel.
In the evening we met Don's wife's nephew, David, who lives in Phoenix and studies for the ministry (right now, working on his Hebrew). We had a tasty dinner at the Princess Resort (tenderloin wrapped in banana leaves with a raisin sauce; Don, roast suckling pig with bitter orange sauce and various spices, cut from a full pig at the table). There we met Tequila Sheila (we never found out if either name actually belonged to her), who had the job of pushing tequila shots on patrons. (In fact, Don brought up the point that he saw no difference between her and any other drug pusher.) Of course we dashed down a shot while she belted out "Arriba! Arriba!" as if she were doing the voiceover for Speedy Gonzales. Weird, but the tequila warmed quite nicely.
At the hotel we had our regular nightcap (a beer and a shot of tequila), then got ready for the trip tomorrow to Sedona and Flagstaff. It would be good to get out of Phoenix.
Monday, June 5, 1995
Today's quest: Sedona, of which Max Ernst once said, "There are two places I would like to live: Paris and Sedona." Reportedly a town of artists and galleries, haven for backbeats and visionaries (four energy vortices allegedly exist in Sedona, allowing those sensitive enough to rearrange their energy patterns and find inspiration -- tours leave at 11, 1, and 3), we looked forward to finding a place of affinity and right-mindedness. Everyone we had spoken with told us, with slightly hushed voices, of Sedona's beauty, of its unique magnetism and aura.
To get to Route 60 northwest out of Phoenix to Wickenburg, the first leg to Sedona, we had to drive back along Camelback through the "heart" of Phoenix to get to the other side of the city, a heart garish, sugary, and infernally clean, and then through a 10-mile gantlet of strip malls. But once outside the city, the desert opened up again, and despite a small course correction (I had us going toward Los Angeles for a while), we made it through the Wickenburg Mountains to Wickenburg, which touts itself as a real Western town, which I suppose it is, with a pedigree of mining, stage coach stop, and farming. We went to the Desert Caballeros Western Museum, which told us more than we would ever want to know about this little burg, mining, and the agricultural habits of the local (and now disappeared) Indians. They had a gallery of paintings and Remington bronzes -- theme: cowpoke -- and a pseudo-Main Street downstairs that would give museum-goers a "flavor" of the old town. One interesting observation that Don made in the dry goods store: Looking at the products on the shelf -- cereal, sewing goods, canned vegetables, cloth for clothes, candy, and so on -- it would not be difficult to live off these goods since so many of them differ very little from what we find today in our own stores. Less variety, to be sure, but not necessarily fewer choices. So the great "choice" we think we have as consumers really means a choice among "un-necessities" that ad execs have convinced us should be "necessities." Thoreau made the same point in Walden: all we really need are the grossest groceries; everything else is froth.
The town itself covered a few blocks; most of the owners closed their stores on Monday for summer, which means we couldn't get into the bookstore (Readers of the Purple Sage) or several other interesting shops. Don did get an espresso (several shops offered this service) and a NYC piece of cheesecake, but somehow that didn't quite fit the ambiance of the place. We didn't stay too much longer-- what was the point?
Onward north to Sedona! We both looked forward to visiting what sounded like a funky, beat (as in bohemian), if New Age-tainted community, expecting bits of whimsy and serendipity to rain down upon us. But first to Prescott (Prescutt, pardner), though we didn't stop there -- nothing in the guidebook shouted "Stop and see me!", so we heeded the silence and pressed on. (Every town has its museum, its Victorian mansion restored, its government seat, maybe an Indian ruin or two -- after a while it does become a case of having seen one western-themed museum, you pretty much have seen them all.)
Now began our climb through the mountains, up steep and akimbo'd switchbacks, rising 4000 feet from saguaro to piñon to pine, from 90° heat to 70° cool, from lip-cracking aridity to zephyrous hydration. And views for days. (We joked about how ho-hum even great beauty could get under a steady diet of it.) Topping the range, though, scattered all ho-hum-ness to the winds: a flat valley, then the red cliffs of Sedona, with snow-mantled Mt. Humphrey's buckling to the sky. We both caught our breaths on the exhale at the same time, the kind of vista that imposes silence so that it can be properly absorbed.
Then, on the downhill we came into Jerome, an old defunct mining town clinging on with some tourism and disaffected hipsters buying up Victorians and restoring them. We downed a beer in the Spirit Room (where the locals refused to speak to us, with one man snapping out a little venom) and walked around. Jerome would not be a bad place to live, supposing that one either had a lot of money and didn't need steady employment or could freelance everything with a modem, fax, and phone. The architecture bemused us, old hotels in shabby gentility with repatriated tin ceilings, and stores along the streets filled with knick-knacks and (again) espresso.
Onward down the mountain - Sedona ahead. Coming into Sedona on Route 89, we started looking for signs of the Sedona we'd heard and read about. And looked. And looked. Instead, strip malls, upscale and scrubbed but "strip" nonetheless, lined both sides of Route 89. Vainly we looked for a central place, a "downtown," something pedestrian (in the ambulatory sense) and uniquely vintaged, as we had been led to believe. Nothing -- only a cross-roads that led to the famous church built into the side of one of the red hills (an excrescence, a barnacle, but which afforded a nice view of the surrounding area -- Don refused to go near the place, citing not only his dislike of Catholicism but also of the fools who thought that a church at this site would better improve the spirit than the simple red rocks themselves). We did find a somewhat decent bookstore, with a lot of travel books in it, but shoehorned in between the salons, eateries, and other turista shops that dangle in the drivers' peripheral visions. (They remind me of the fish that uses a bit of its own body to simulate a wriggly thing that lures other fish near him, where it swallows them quickly and without relish.)
One of the most obnoxious sights: Mystic Hills, an "environmentally planned community," with houses starting at $250,000. Don believes that the New Agers who came out here a decade ago are actually running real estate schemes under the cover of their spirituality, the New Age equivalent of land-grabbing religious shysters like Oral Roberts and Robert Schuller. If not them, then certainly someone else -- why use a name like "Mystic Hills" except to give people a cover under which they can delude themselves that their presence, unlike the people over there or over there, isn't really doing any damage because they're living in an "environmentally planned community"? Most developments -- Fox Lane, Pheasant Run, Whispering Pines -- are named after what their creators destroy to build them. Mystic Hills is no different.
So with heavy heart we left Sedona -- and before long found redemption on the Schnebly Hill Road, an 11.5 mile gravel road through the mountains whose beauty made the mildew of Sedona dry up and blow away. (The guidebooks didn't concur about the creation of the road: one called Schnebly, a trader, Theodore, the other Carl, though both agreed that he named the town after his wife, Sedona. And we couldn't find out if he built the road himself or simply had it named after him. But small matter.) I have seen little in my life that matches this sight; Don could only find the Vermillion Hills on the North Rim of the Canyon as a cognate. At this height, even Sedona looked quaint; distance can lend enchantment, even if undeserved. Rich red rock formations, ground out by wind and water into flutes and spires and the steep crash of cliffs, hung over the road. At the top, just before the road intersected with I-17 into Flagstaff, a pull-off (a "scenic vista" in Park Service parlance) gave us a final broad vision; the wind blew so strong that it made the pines sing, made the rocks thrum.
The final part of the road took us through thick Ponderosa pine forest (several times we started humming the "Bonanza" theme) to I-17; a quick left turn, and we headed north to Flagstaff, with the snowy peaks of the San Francisco Mountains guiding us like some lithic radar. By now we didn't expect a whole lot while entering an Arizona city, and Flagstaff did its best to keep it that way: a long swath of strip mall architecture along Milton Road up to and past our hotel. (Part of that is historic: a segment of Route 66 runs through Flagstaff, with its attendant motels, stores, and so on.) However, the campus of Northern Arizona University mitigated the commercial gash a little, with its pleasing collection of old and new architecture and well-landscaped grounds.
We checked into the Embassy Suites and set out for dinner, a Mexican restaurant called El Charro (with a formica atmosphere and Doritos for nachos but cheap and plenty with the food). As we did every night, we brought our guide books and maps to plan out the next day's route, which would take us through the Navajo and Hopi reservations. As we spoke, a young man named Tim Montoya joined us; he'd overheard us talking about going to the reservation. He called himself a Hopi/Laguna and said he lived at Mishongovi, on Second Mesa. He proceeded to invite us to meet him and his brother tomorrow, and they would show us around. He talked a little about himself: he and his brother had come into Flagstaff to buy plywood for some renovations on their house (a round-trip of close to 200 miles - just a jaunt); he had once been an exchange student at a school in White River Junction, VT; he considered himself an artist and wanted to do nothing else but make his art. (We bought two pieces from him, pendants with two medallions inscribed with Hopi symbols, anchored by a oblong piece of wood painted as an eagle feather on one side and an ear of corn on the other -- childish in its technique but interesting, perhaps because we were talking with the artist -- I doubt we would have bought them if we had seen them on display somewhere.) We thanked him for his help and promised to try to meet him the next day.
Both he and his brother were friendly and unreserved with us, hospitable and generous. They both had the broad flat features we had seen in pictures of the Hopi, skin the color of bronze chocolate, hair ebon and fine. Their English held the lilt I'd noticed when Indians speak it, with the "o" elongated and softly voiced and the emphasis on syllables just slightly off what our ears expected.
Don decided to stay at the hotel while I went to the Lowell Observatory (appropriately sited on Mars Hill Road) for one of their evening slide shows and observations through the 24" Clark telescope. They had put together interesting exhibits in their museum section about astronomy and star-gazing/finding (after all, Pluto had been discovered there), and they had chosen the moon that night for exploration. The first observatory had been built in 1894, and though primitive by today's standards, its wood frame and brass gearings gave it a solidity and familiarity that more modern telescopes couldn't have: it looked as if indeed it could have been constructed by a zealous amateur astronomer.
The moon through the frame of the two-foot lens hung so crisp in front of me that I believed I could have cupped the moon in my hand and felt the rough millennia of its craters and seas. Only a brief glimpse (people behind me waiting to see) but enough -- the kind of vision that could turn a child's mind easily to a lifetime in the stars. And after the disappointment of Sedona, the day ended with a true celestial order, not the sham vortices of mystic hucksters.
Tuesday, June 6, 1995
After a morning run under the glow of Mt. Humphrey, east on Route 66, then north to Sunset Crater, the cool aftermath of a volcanic eruption some 750 years ago that scared off all the Indians in the area and spread a laminate of ash and dust over 800 square miles. I took the mile loop through the park while Don waited and read, imagining what the black folds and jags and spews had looked like when molten and plastic, imagining what the inhabitants must have thought about this sudden betrayal by the land, this sudden menace in what had been their life support.
We then proceeded along the park road to the Wupatki ruins, a community inhabited by an estimated 200 people a 1000 years ago. These ruins, built out of the red rock, formed one link in a chain of villages all along this area, which in themselves lay along trade routes that radiated south to Mexico and west to the coast. When the Park Service first took over the ruins a generation ago, they had tried to "reconstruct" them to both detail the daily life of its inhabitants as well as repair any damages caused by nature. Apparently, however, over the years people have questioned the wisdom of this since they did not have very accurate ideas of what the village would have looked like, relying more on intuition and educated guesses than hard documentary evidence. So they have decided not to do any more reconstruction and to let the ruins settle on their own. (One man spoke about how the construction resembled ruins of a completely different people unconnected with the site because the Service had used Navajo craftsmen who in turn had used their own notions and culture in the absence of anything more firm or directed. Such are the pitfalls.)
Don and I had a good time trying to reconstruct in our own minds what had passed for life there -- the daily work, the play (it had a ball court), the stories, the pace. Probably a hard life, and short (40 years on average), but not necessarily brutish or nasty. I would not want it (and how could I have any life but the one in the century where I live?), but it must have had its rewards.
From there we headed north to Tuba City and the Indian reservations. But somewhere outside Cameron (about half way, where we stopped for an unmemorable lunch and where Don bought Helen a tarantula encased in plastic -- her request), my right eye and nostril started to run, severely. At first I thought the eye irritation had come from inadvertently rubbing sun block in it (we lathered up every day because even in the car the sun bit through), but the moist nostril gave the lie to that. (And only on the right side -- the left worked just fine.) We concluded it had to be an allergic reaction to something, either something in the dust or the vegetation. (It made sense -- I had never been to the Southwest before, so who knew what histamine enemies lurked there?)
Along the road to Tuba City, Navajo craftspeople set up stands to sell jewelry, and we had decided a while ago to stop and see what they had. So, teary-eye and all, we stopped at almost every one, looking for pieces that somehow held a difference, an edge of vision. Much of the stuff had obviously been made to conform to what they thought the tourists wanted -- silver and turquoise confections that showed little individual spark. But we came across a man who called himself an artist and who made pieces that no one else had ever, or would ever, make again. Don bought a beautiful pendant of silver and stones that used Navajo symbols to tell a story about his nation and about the simple energies of life. (The following day, the man, with his family, was heading out to Fort Lauderdale for a show -- driving.) He spoke clearly and directly about how he turned his visions into solid things -- we had a lot of respect for this man at a rickety table on one of the poorest pieces of real estate in the United States while the wind sluiced dust through the air.
On to Tuba City for Visine, Comtrex, and Kleenex (all of which we actually found). It gave some relief, and I felt better in the car with the AC on, which seemed to filter out whatever attacked me. Tuba City, as the guidebook said, has nothing to do with tubas (Tuba was a Navajo chief) and is not much of a city. We saw the old Indian boarding school (parts of which are still used for administrative offices for the school district), the KFC, the dilapidated housing -- everything looking on the decline, on the downside. I had the same feelings driving through Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota -- here lay a land, a time, a geography so different from Phoenix that they could both be considered, not just different cities, but separate solar systems.
From Tuba we struck east across the Navajo reservation, still intending, mostly, to meet up with Tim Montoya on Second Mesa. The Navajo land completely surrounds the Hopi reservation, and even for these people who live so closely to each other, their orbits spin so defiantly apart that they, too, seem to exist in separate nebulae light years apart. (Of course, this comes from their histories -- the Navajo coming from Minnesota, borrowing cultural advantages from others as they moved south, the Hopi coming from either the south or the west or both with a strong, and exclusive, religious system, the differences sharpened even more in this century through land disputes and legal battles with each other.) On the Navajo land, people do not live in clusters, in villages. Instead, you will see, as if dropped randomly across the landscape, a building or two (one of them usually a trailer, though a hogan sometimes sits there as well), vehicles (not all of which run), and a long dusty ribbon of road that eventually meets up with another road somewhere. No phone lines, no electrical lines. The Navajo apparently like to live in solitude, apart from one other for most of their daily lives, coming together when necessary to transact business. The scale of this separateness defies easy imagining but once seen, never forgotten because so stark and so deliberate.
Higher up on the mesas live the Hopi, in villages. The first "town" we came to was Hotevilla, which, according to the guidebook, contains some Hopi who have resisted living in the old way. Not until we came to Old Oraibi, the oldest continually inhabited space in the United States, did the Hopi land strike us. They had built their houses (perhaps a dozen or so, at least what we could see) hardly different from their Anasazi ancestors, out of a buff-colored brick that blends so neatly into the dun landscape that the houses appear to sprout from the dirt. An occasional TV antenna and solar panels on the roofs, but blinker these out and timelessness takes on a visceral solidity. We stopped in a crafts store there (which, nod to modern times, took credit cards, and had a span no bigger than a living room) and had a wonderful conversation with the owner. Outside, the wind whipped along the mesa, and again time slid away -- the imagination could easily slip outside hours and minutes and follow the wind along the edges and cliffs as it erased the modern world and brought the Anasazi, the "Ancient Ones," within grasp.
Chronology dissolved even more strongly in the villages of First Mesa, especially in Walpi, which sits on a spit of cliff reached by a road no wider than 15 feet, the width of the mesa itself, a brood of buildings that, again, seem to grow right out of the stone that foundations them. One can only imagine the minds that worked the fields at the mesa's bottom during the day then stared at the stars, unlustered by any "light pollution," in a sky as unbounded as the land that shaped and buoyed them.
From Walpi we went to Keams Canyon, then dropped south to Holbrook, where we stayed for the evening. (Curiously, the farther we got away from the reservation, the more my eye and nose dried up. By Holbrook, they had pretty much gotten back to normal.) For dinner we ate at the Butterfield Stage Company, where Don had the most succulent filet he'd ever eaten and Texas Jim, a low-rent version of Willie Nelson, serenaded us with his guitar and drum machine.
Going through the reservations raised some interesting, and still unanswered, questions. Clearly this land was poor, as were the people -- but were they? How does one measure "poor" here? How do they measure it? Conversely, how do they measure abundance? What price do they pay for their choices? These are difficult questions to answer because they involve examining colonialist and imperialist systems of thought so deeply bred in the bone as to feel instinctive.
Wednesday, June 7, 1995
A bit of a bust today. We started out with a trip to the Petrified Forest, which had its interesting points, then rode through boring prairie-like country toward Show Low, along Route 60 to Heber (where we ate burgers and club sandwiches at Doc's Rim Café), then tried to find the turn-off for the Mogollon Rim drive, a supposedly beautiful trip along the Mogollon Rim, part of the White Mountains, offering broad vistas and unparalleled beauty. (Don made the joke that he was a little sick and tired of inspiriting landscapes.) However, we missed the turn-off and ended up coming into Payson. (What we could see of the vistas from the highway, however, did not inspire us because they looked exactly like Vermont, which to us was old hat land-gazing.)
At Payson we turned north to go to the Tonto Natural Bridge State Park to seek the world's largest natural rock bridge, 400' wide with a 150' span. However, we got there to find out that they'd closed the road for construction (it would have been nice to have a sign 11 miles earlier in Payson to point this out). So, turned south again, heading back to Phoenix on Route 87, where we got caught in traffic because of construction, making our way slowly through the desert again, saguaro cacti as thick as brambles. Outside Scottsdale, at the Fort McDowell Indian Reservation, we stopped off at the casino, a salmon colored concrete building filled with slot machines and poker tables, then pressed on along Shea Boulevard, a necklace of expensive developments soaking up water and space behind 6-foot walls, starting (at the low end) at $115,000 and all called "master planned communities," i.e., the feudal manors.
From my notes: "It was depressing to see all these -- but I need to think more deeply about why it was that way. After all, people are living where they want, following an imperative inlaid into our sense of being American: travel means opportunity for reconstitution of the character. Except that these people aren't coming to Arizona to find and refine themselves -- instead, they come to embalm themselves, to make sure that who they are will suffer the least number of slings and arrows in an environment evened out (by AC) and utterly insulated by regularity. It is a theme-park mentality, a theme-park ecology -- at least for those who have the money to buy the surreal anodynes."
We got back to the hotel uncorrupted, refreshed ourselves, had a good dinner at the hotel, watched the Rockets beat the Magic over tequila, and got a good sleep for tomorrow's departure.
Thursday, June 8, 1995
From my notes: "Airport, flight, airport, flight -- not much else. Did meet a man who actually lives in Bisbee -- 47, divorced (2 years), having worked as some corporate drone for 15 years decided to take a risk. A town of 'romantic decay,' he called it. He plans to drive around the Southwest for the summer, then think about what to do for money in October. His 'occupation' now is 'lover of women and seeker of truth.' A vocation with a tested pedigree. I wished him luck.
"Travel expands the self, soothes the disciplines of the schedule, makes ease available. How best to incorporate the sense of expansion into the everyday wardrobe. How to live life as if we really were on a journey, that we really believe that."
Home, sleep, slide back to the routine -- except that the neural pathways have been slightly altered now: they hold new landscapes, and thus become new brain-scapes. Next year: fly into Las Vegas, explore the North Rim and the Arizona Strip, drive up to Cortez and through that area, fly out of Denver. Already reading the guide books.
(March 1996)