Road Trip: Phoenix to Santa Fe
1.
Phoenix is built on flat, uninhabitable land. The barrens are without constraint, no edges to anything. Space is inexhaustible. Boulevards run straight as an arrow for miles without curves or turns. These thoroughfares crisscross the valley, passing through suburbs and housing tracts set back far from the roads, through the city center with its petite glass towers gathering sun like ovens, crossing interminable vacant lots without shade and so dry that not even cactus can grow in these places, and, then, ending like a desert river simply running out of water in the white scar of an arid wash, some knolls like inflamed boils poking out of the gravel a thousand yards away, a lead-colored mountain standing like an Egyptian mortuary on the horizon. Everything sits isolated by large expanses of empty terrain: fast food joints squat like tarantulas at the center of two acre lots with winding drive-through lanes and the banks, in fact, are really more drive-through than bank, little kiosks with rows of tanks from which customers can refuel their cash on-hand, flimsy commercial structures line outsized, empty parking lots and hundreds of acres of anonymous warehouses swelter in landscaped desert. What exists here could just as well not exist – even the big mansions in the foothills of the mountains look like frail refrigerated vessels, glistening and black but without foundations, scarcely a toehold on the stony slopes. A storm, perhaps, a Haboob as dust storms here are called, could sweep it all away in a manner of minutes.
Half-asleep, I navigate the parking lot at the resort; it’s about six in the morning, still ninety minutes from tee times on the green course cupped between the mountains: through the gate and, on the way, to Santa Fe, New Mexico, nine hours distant. In Phoenix, all roads run out of town, flat and straight and obliging with lanes coming and going and medians, an entire assembly of concrete and curb that is wider than a football field and metered by traffic lights at half-mile intervals. At this time in the morning, the lights are all timed in my favor and in twenty minutes I am at the edges of town. I pass a place called Fur Babies Resort and Spa, a place where pets can “Stay, Play, Groom, & Relax.” (For some reason, this sign makes me sad and casts a shadow over my mood that lasts to the New Mexico border.) Gas stations look like Greek temples standing in bright white puddles of halogen lighting. There’s a rare slope at Fountain Hills, some dark shopping malls standing like fortresses along the highway and, then, a final stoplight before my highway pulls sharply to the north and east, traveling among a landscape of pits and slag heaps. In the pinkish-orange glow, I see strange pinnacles, turrets and minarets of pointed stone, castellated ramparts and stone periscopes poking up out of the roots of deep and shadowy mountains. Dawn is still just a suggestion and the ragged chaos of the ridges and hills through which I am passing is submerged in deep blue shadow.
I pass through Payson and Show Low, stop for gas and swing to the north by northeast over White Mountain Pass (7550 feet above sea level). Vistas go on forever – globular pinon pine like monuments to themselves isolated in a huge rolling grassland, tall treeless mountains with cold-looking, wet crowns of rock, seeps in the cliff sides, park land with trees scattered here and there among chipped rock outcrops, hovering overhead some grim eroded volcano cinder cones, then, up again into rumpled hills that are really the tops of mountains, snow bloating all the trees and the signs stuccoed with wet, sticky snow, highways slick with long corridors of ice where the trees and hillsides shade the road – it’s 29 degrees and there are some pickups in the ditch marked by Coconino Sheriff patrol cars parked with flashing lights near the slick stretches. The road curves and feels perilous and the infrequent side roads (Coconino Forest Roads) are gooey with slush, cut by tread marks full of grey meltwater. The two-lanes comes down out of the mountains into an empty valley, a vast treeless amphitheater with white-capped peaks brooding over the high chaparral.
At a lower elevation, I reach Springerville where my GPS goes berserk. The little town has about 2000 inhabitants and sits at the intersection of some dusty arroyos. The elevation is high enough for the terrain to be sparsely wooded with small pine trees splitting apart the stony ledges and hillsides. GOOGLE maps must think that the people living here are zombies or militant Mormon polygamists (who exist in these areas) or cannibals of some sort – a mile from town, which looks like an inoffensive scatter of buildings near a highway intersection and railroad yard, the map application diverts me onto a rough corrugated gravel road that wanders through ridges and hollows like quarries. The road curves and the route, passing along the edges of auto salvage places and cheerless trailer courts without any shade at all crosses a train track, then, requiring five turns at intersections between my washboard gravel lane and other rural roads, some of them merely cartways. It’s entirely inexplicable and arduous, one detour after another in a landscape dotted with shacks and fenced lots where cattle are somehow grazing without any grass at all. The map application is trying to protect me from something but I have no idea what peril here has forcefully knocked me off the main paved thoroughfare. At last, I’m on a battered stretch of asphalt with deep, flashflood-carved gullies on both sides, “Tumbling J” road as it is called, and, then, deposited at a crossroads on Highway 60 (the road on which I had earlier been driving) only three blocks from the brick downtown. By this time, I am completely disoriented and, when I reach the intersection with 60, it takes me a while to figure out which way to turn – in fact, I have to be guided to turn east by the same map application that dragged me through the outskirts of the town in such a baffling way. The bizarre route avoids the direct way through downtown, but at the cost of rambling through junk yards and trailer courts adjacent to the village. And why?
It’s 11:45 when I cross the border into New Mexico, 141 miles on US 60 to Socorro. The country is completely empty and there’s no one on the road. Mesas and buttes crowd the highway, rocky heights like fortresses overhead and ridges slit by gorges, a spectacular landscape but intimidating in its solitude. The only radio station that I can access is Navajo. A female announcer seems to be reading the minutes of a tribal council meeting. The flow of native Dine words is interrupted by English terms: “percentage”, “Executive Management Committee,” “scholarship” and “undesignated funds”. The phrase “oral report” stands out like a big rock in a stream, impervious to the euphonious current of the “Navaja bizaard” – that is “Navajo language.” The news report as to “budget recommendations” (an expression also said in English) ends with a flurry of dates and addresses. Then, Elvis Presley is singing “Moody Blue” followed by Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors”. No traffic ahead of me, no one behind, nothing oncoming, not even any intersections, just two scuffed lanes dragged over the hills scarred by flash flooding, gorges guarded by pinon pine on the canyon rims. After about 40 miles, I reach Quemado. The name is familiar to me for some reason, but I can’t recall how I know about the place. The hamlet forces you to slow but half of the dozen commercial storefronts along the highway are boarded shut. There’s a gas station next to a tower of tires, some crumbling adobe walls, and a few weary-looking cottonwood trees drooping over shacks and abandoned cars.
After putting fuel in my car – the distances out here and the loneliness is a little daunting – I look up the town on my cell-phone. “Quemado” means “burnt”; apparently, the Spanish conquistadors humping their way across this rough country came upon a place that was inexplicable charred, probably a grass fire set by a lightning strike – hence, the name. Lightning is significant here for another reason. Quemado is where the Dia foundation operates an office to accommodate visitors to Walter De Maria’s “The Lightning Field” installation, built on a plateau about forty miles from town. The Dia office is in the corner of a two-story building with a white, blistered facade of ravaged stucco located a block to the west of the gas station. (There are several other old wooden buildings sharing common walls with the scabrous white plaster cube also housing some county services; these buildings have weathered to dark splinters.) De Maria, an earth artist and sculptor, supervised the erection of 400 stainless steel “lightning rods” on the plateau, arranged in a perfectly regular grid covering a tract of land one mile by one kilometer. The rods are of varying lengths because the terrain is not entirely flat – by design, the lance-like tops of the rods are all on a single plane located about 15 feet above the slightly rolling chaparral. This requires that the rods embedded in concrete be between 15 and 26 feet in height since elevations at the site vary by about eleven feet, gradients not visible to the eye; in photographs, the field seems to be a flat expanse of sun-seared grass and sagebrush. The most famous image of “The Lightning Field” graces the cover of Robert Hughes 1998 American Visions: the Epic History of Art in America – in that photograph, the golden spears of the rods are luminous against a dark, stormy sky and a jagged trident of lightning stabs down from blue-green cloud. (The lightning strike seems to jolt to ground against the far horizon and isn’t drawn to the grid of illumined spikes.)
De Maria’s installation isn’t easy to reach, “by design” it is said. Visitors can fly to Albuquerque and drive for two hours across wilderness basins to reach Quemado. There, a Dia staff member will drive you over rough roads to the place. A rustic log cabin is near the field and visitors stay overnight in that facility which reportedly sleeps six. The next day someone comes to pick you up and take you to your vehicle in Quemado. People who have experienced the art work say that the rods reflect light: sometimes, they are nearly invisible; at other hours and in different conditions of light, they are clearly present, lithe maidens, luminous columns in a great array that seem to support the sky. You can walk out into the huge grassland and stand among them. At sunset, the spikes are schematic rays of sun, beams that gradually deliquesce and melt into the purple sage. In the wind, the spear-tips ring and vibrate – they are built to resist gales of 110 miles an hour. What the field looks like in the snow or dead of winter, no one really knows. The roads across the chaparral are impassable between October and May.
Although I didn’t ask, the locals in Quemado, reputedly, don’t know anything about the site. Or, perhaps, they merely profess ignorance – although, in any event, I didn’t test this assertion. In the gas station, the clerk was native and the people seated at a small table among displays of hardware and ranching gear were all speaking Spanish. There are big blurry spots in the village where buildings have toppled over and not been replaced. Someone has painted a crude American flag on a plaster wall.
The road runs ramrod-straight across a vast level grassland. This is the Plains of San Agustin, a great basin formerly the bed of an endorheic lake. (“Endorheic” means a lake that is without an outlet such as the Great Salt Lake in Utah or bodies of water in mountain basins including Lake Texcoco in valley of Mexico.) The Pleistocene lake here vanished about 5000 years ago. The plain is sandy, clad in grease-grass and sage, and the ring of mountains confining the former lakebed (at about 7000 feet) are dark with pinon pine and ponderosa at higher altitudes. The plain is about 65 miles wide and roughly circular in dimension. The mountains wrapped a round the level chaparral are rich in archaeological sites. When the lake was still extant, prehistoric hunter-gatherers frequented the rock shelters eroded into the foothills comprising the former shore of the body of water. It’s desert now, an expanse of grey-brown grass veined with bare patches of gravel and ribs of pale sand.
There are a couple ghost towns along the highway, most notably Pie Town, home of the defunct “Pie-o-neer” café, shattered windmills propped up over tin tanks for cattle and Christ crucified on a raw wood cross on the edge of the ruins. Nothing’s really moving. A Family Dollar near the highway has failed; it’s a recent wreck among the older ruins. The mountains on the horizon enclosing the plains are not inconsequential – they are rocky reefs reared up in the sky, tilted prisms of snow on the heights at this time of the year, 10,000 feet or more above sea-level, big and sheer enough to block radio transmissions from drizzling into the basin. This explains the presence of the VLA telescope, about fifty miles west of Socorro. East-bound on 60, you can see the big white dishes of the radio telescope scattered across the desert a couple miles from the highway. The dishes look like pale toadstools incongruously sprouting in some enigmatic pattern from the desert floor. A big black hangar-shaped barn stands to the side of the array – this is where data collected by the radio-telescope dishes is assembled and studied. The observatory building is a raw, blunt axe-head embedded in the pale grey desert.
I stop at a roadside marker identifying the VLA complex. It’s very cold here, with a piercing wind spraying my eyes and face with grit. A couple from a van bearing Illinois license plates are peering out across the wasteland in the direction of the VLA dishes, protecting their eyes with the raised backs of their hands. The husband and wife are from the Quad Cities, East Moline or Rock Island, Illinois. They’re not sure what they are seeing and so I tell them the little that I know about the big radio telescope with its massive dishes mounted on platforms on a grid of tracks so that the instruments can be maneuvered back and forth under the enormous skies. They mention the EROS Data center near Sioux Falls, South Dakota. This place, which I have visited, is the opposite of the VLA. The VLA scans distant galaxies for evidence of neutrino stars, quasars, black holes. The EROS facility (Earth Resources, Observation, and Science Center) is a data archive for space satellite images showing the earth. The VLA looks outward; EROS is a funnel into which data about our planet is poured. The woman, shivering a little in the cold, tells me that the EROS center archives imagery that is so complete and precise that it has been used more than once to solve cold cases – that is, photographs in its possession show vehicles concealed on lake bottoms or tire treads that can be deciphered to identify cars involved in transporting murder victims. The day before the Illinois travelers were at the Grand Canyon where there were two inches of snow; six inches of snow, the woman says, decorated the red rock buttes at Sedona.
The next historic marker, east of the VLA, is at the edge of another hard-bitten ghost town, Magdalena six or seven viable structures among a field of abandoned shacks and commercial structures with wind-blasted, faded signs, ghost letters bleached into pale apparitions on the old wood. The scarred mountains jutting up over the town are the Magdalena Mountains, a wrinkled high ridge with pines growing in its seams and rubble slides drooping down from the craters of old mines. At one time, a railroad spur ran from Socorro 27 miles to the southeast to the cow-town of Magdalena. Cattle ranchers drove herds across the Plains of San Agustin from Springerville to Magdalena where the animals were loaded on livestock cars, hauled to Socorro, and, then, transported to various slaughter facilities in places like Denver and Omaha. The route across the San Agustin plains followed the route of Highway 60 and the trail was called “the Magdalena Driveway.” Gradually, sheep supplanted cattle. In 1919, at the height of the Driveway’s use, 150,000 sheep and 21,600 beef cattle were herded to the trail’s end at Magdalena. The Driveway was considered to be an important commercial asset and, during the Depression, CCC crews drilled wells every ten miles along the route and, even, set fence-lines to confine the livestock to the designated trail. The roadside marker tells me that the last cattle drive took place in 1971, precipitating the final demise of Magdalena. (The mines in the mountains were long since played-out and the big zinc smelter that once poured pillars of smoke into the sky above the town was dismantled.)
Another Family Dollar store has failed at Magdalena. The road runs along a ridge toward Socorro, the high sierra of the Magdalena mountains looming over the highway. Forest roads penetrate the mountains, entering along green canyons. Snow crowns the heights and there are enigmatic road signs – something called “the Box” is eight miles away at the end of a forest road and another sign points to the Alamo Navajo reservation, a so-called non-contiguous part of the Navajo nation. It’s not clear to me why this place is cut-off from the rest of the tribal lands to the northwest. This reservation is 100 square miles with about 2000 inhabitants, desperately poor, it seems, and living on shadeless lots in government houses strewn across the tumble-weed and thorn desert.
Socorro sits in the green swath of the Rio Grande valley at the base of bare, windswept bluffs. It’s a long, twisting downgrade to Socorro and the town is tilted, built on the slope that drops to the river bottoms. This place also seems hopelessly poor. The houses are variations on semi-ruined trailers, backyard ramadas shading heaps of car parts and feral-looking dogs on chains. The main drag is California street, treeless and a hundred yards wide. California is lined with motels that look like they could be sets for a Sam Shepherd play. Not only have motels failed here, and been left to rot, but also restaurants (mostly taquerias and hamburger joints), drug stores, and, even, a car-wash. People have lived in Socorro for a thousand years or more. The so-called last conquistador, Juan de Onate, led an expedition from Mexico into this area in 1598. South of the present town, there is a ghastly stretch desert called the Jornado del Muerto (“the route of the dead man”), 140 miles of desert basin without any water, a place so barren it was used for testing nuclear weapons – the Trinity site is located in the Jornado. Onate’s column of explorers and mounted cavalry were exhausted by their transit of the desert and half dead from thirst when they encountered a large and prosperous pueblo among cultivated fields along the river. The Indians were hospitable and supplied corn to the Spanish conquistadors, “succor” or aid, as it were – hence, the name given to the place: Soccoro. (A few months later, Onate expected similar succor from the more war-like Acoma Indians to the northwest. These people resisted and ambushed a reconnaissance column led by Onate’s reckless and arrogant nephew. Onate retaliated by massacring as many as a thousand of the Acoma villagers and, further, ordered that the right foot of every man older than 25 be hacked off.) Spanish missionaries visited the area in 1626 and built a Mission there, not surprisingly dedicated to Our Lady of Perpetual Aid (or succor). In the Pueblo revolt of 1680, refugees from the sacked and burnt missions to the north sheltered among the friendly Indians at Socorro. But the rebellion spread to the South and by 1692, nothing was left of the Mission and town but ruins. Spanish gold and silver mines were hidden in the Magdalena mountains and Europeans returned to the area to exploit those workings around 1815 when the town was rebuilt atop the broken walls and crumbling adobe bricks of the old settlement.
I stop for gas near the Interstate to Albuquerque and Santa Fe. A human skeleton wearing frayed women’s clothes crosses the road; the wind is blowing hard, pushing grit pellets ahead of it. The skeletal figure clutches her bonnet tight to her skull with long, yellow bony fingers. It’s doom in the figure of a ravaged bar maid or ranch wife, staggering through the gusts of annihilating wind.
It’s a fast hour at freeway speed north on I-25 to Albuquerque. The freeway parallels the Rio Grande and runs in the trough between the city with its glass towers and the somber ridge of the Sandia Mountains. North of Albuquerque on the freeway, I traverse classic New Mexico landscapes. Exits are named after ancient pueblos and the Jemez Mountains to the west are green with snowy caps, spilling lush alpine meadows out of the cleavage of their bosoms and, to the east, there are badlands and turquoise mines at old Madrid and weird hoodoos along the road the colors of chalk that little girls use to draw hopscotch courts on pavement. I exit the freeway a few miles from Sante Fe on Cerrillos Road. The big peaks hanging over Santa Fe are pyramids dense with pine rising up to brilliant, glittering snowfields.
After checking into the motel, I go to the Jambo Café for supper. This is an African restaurant, a place where I always eat when in Santa Fe. (Years ago, my wife attended conferences in Santa Fe and I traveled with her. One of the secretaries at the law office with kin in Santa Fe recommended the Jambo Café and we discovered that the place was not only very good, but memorable.) The café is located in a nondescript shopping mall off Cerrillos Road. Adjacent to the restaurant, there’s an interior design shop that sells wicker chairs, masks, and other African furnishings. The cafe’s sign depicts the continent of Africa emblazoned with banner-like swaths of red, white, and green. Early in the evening, the place is busy, but not crowded. The customers are sleek, mostly young and well-dressed, creative types who use LA diction and huddle together to discuss independent films. As expected, my meal is very good and perfectly prepared.
Near me, an elderly lady, sensibly dressed against the cold that rises out of the high desert after the sun sets, waits for her dining companion. Several times, the waiter approaches her and asks if she would like to order. On the third pass, she asks for a cup of decaffeinated coffee. The old woman looks about anxiously. Outside, purple shadows are gathering. Finally, she takes out her cell-phone and, because her hearing is a bit precarious, puts the device on speaker. A woman answers. She sounds confused. “It’s a senior moment,” the woman on the speaker-phone says, “I completely forgot.” For some reason, the lady who has been stood-up apologizes. “I’m on my way,” the voice on the phone says. The old lady with the cup of decaf slouches in the corner booth where she has been seated. A ledge under the cafe’s big picture window runs along the side of the booth; it is decorated with elephants carved from blocks of wood and dark, grimacing masks. A big table is being set up in the next room, twelve places, it seems. Then, a crowd of people enter, a department from a university celebrating someone’s birthday, perhaps, or a group of writers from the West Coast on a retreat to picturesque Santa Fe. I hear soft voices, people competing to impress one another with their knowledge of sub-Saharan cuisine, faint words that could be construed as bickering except that the speech is so polite and gracious and accommodating.
Things can go wrong even in paradise. A few days earlier, the famous actor, Gene Hackman, was found dead in his big mansion up on the mountain slope above the town. His wife was dead as well. They don’t know the cause of death, although no foul play is suspected. (Later, we learn that Hackman’s much younger wife, a concert pianist, died from sudden onset Hantavirus, a pathogen carried by deer mice. After she collapsed, Hackman who was demented wandered around the big house for several days, perhaps, wondering where she was, although this isn’t clear. Then, he died, presumably of dehydration. At this altitude, you have to drink a lot of water to avoid the brain fog and dizziness that accompanies dehydration. Hackman’s estate was found to be swarming with infected deer mice – rare in this county, they are much more commonly found on the Navajo lands to the north and west. There is disease festering elsewhere – six days earlier I drove through west Texas into New Mexico, passing through the epicenter of a measles contagion sweeping through the Mennonite communities on the staked plains – most of these Mennonites were born in colonies in northern Mexico and have not been vaccinated against the disease.)
The old woman is still waiting for her date, slightly irritated and forlorn, as I saunter out of the café to my car. Back at the Fairfield Suites, I try to read (Bolano’s The Savage Detectives), but the walls of the motel are paper thin and I can’t avoid hearing President Trump’s “State of the Union” harangue, broadcast on TV sets in, at least, two adjacent rooms. This is an address that I don’t want to hear, not even as scattered phrases intruding through the flimsy gossamer walls. But the rant compels my attention; I can’t block it out. Trump has taken up lodging once more in my brain, behind the fleshy porches of my ears. He seems to be arguing that Social Security has paid benefits to three million people who are between 120 and 130 years old; hundreds of thousands who are between 130 to 150 years old have also received social security and, indeed, the President says that there is one gent, apparently 330 years old, also on the government trough. It’s like Hitler orating in the next room or, outside, in the gloomy corridor, distressing and intrusive.
I fall asleep, not a gentle declension into slumber, but, more like passing out, and then at 4:26 am, voices batter through the walls again, a newscast replaying Trump’s harangue. My sleep has been arduous, a trek through a landscape full of blind box canyons, sheer drop offs, echoes sounding off rock faces, mirror-rocks reflecting back to me nonsense phrases, weird intrusive thoughts of disheveled, rotting garbage, dumpsters, broken bottles in an alleyway. I am oppressed by the thought of Bertolt Brecht’s poem about a Japanese mask of a demon made from gold lacquer: “Sympathetically, I observe / the swollen veins in the forehead, indicating / what a strain it is to be evil (wie anstrengend es ist, Boese zu sein).”
I’m awake in the cold room, a newscast somewhere nearby playing highlights from Trump’s speech. I can’t sleep and so I read poetry and look at the pictures in a book illustrating different styles of Hopi pottery.
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