Road Trip (3) – to Flagstaff
1.
6:54 - driving. 7:25 - Arizona border. Canyon walls on both sides of I-40, cliff-tops lined with pine. Frozen puddles.
Big Lithodendron Wash, then, Good Water followed by Little Lithodendron Wash. The canyon walls have diminished to chipped stone outcrops. The trees have retreated to the far horizons and the country is high chaparral, grasslands extending in all directions.
The world’s largest petrified tree is protected by an iron fence next to the parking lot of a souvenir shop that sells blankets and pottery. The busted thumb of the tree trunk is broad as a barrel and frayed at the top. Small white teepees are arrayed across a stony hillside.
2.
Homolovi State Park is about a mile northeast of the Winslow I-40 exit. A narrow two-lane road leads to the park boundaries where a half-dozen burros are grazing on the shoulder. The visitor center stands on a desert knoll with a flagstone patio overlooking miles and miles of high desert. The terrain consists of barren low hills veined with rock ridges. Some peculiar conical buttes mark the horizon to the north – these are the so-called “Hopi Buttes,” little tent-shaped protuberances atop a long bluish ridge.
I’m alone at the Visitor Center. A park ranger with a bushy Civil War-style beard is on the phone taking a reservation for a campsite, a laborious task involving lots of detail. Display cases house pottery shards, fragments of fiber twisted into twine and scraps of cloth, also a series of photographs about “experimental archaeology” – apparently, some instructors at the University of Northern Arizona spent an afternoon burning two mock-up pueblo structures to ascertain the tell-tale traces of intentional arson. In this part of the world, ruined places are often discovered to have been burnt, raising questions as to whether the fire was the result of war on the desert or some kind of intentional cleansing of structures abandoned by their inhabitants. A half-dozen large pictures show bright orange flames enveloping some masonry walls capped by timber vigas covered in thatch.
A trail leads to a Mormon cemetery for a place called Sunset City. In the arroyos, there is a water course for the Little Colorado River and the town was built on the low cliffs overlooking the intermittent stream. Although it’s hard to imagine in this dry country, the river flooded periodically and proved to be a resource with no value – the wash was dry most of the year and, so, the pioneers built rock walls to dam the stream when it was flowing; the idea was to impound water for their fields. But, when the ravine filled with water, flood ripped apart the dams and, for a good measure, tore down nearby houses. After twenty years fighting the environment, the Mormons moved on, leaving a scatter of graves in the stony soil overlooking the chiseled-out arroyo cut by the river.
The State Park was founded in 1986 to protect the ancestral pueblo (here called “ancestral Hopi”) ruins, seven large towns occupying hilltops overlooking the river-bed. Originally, the place was called “Homolovi Ruins State Park” (“Homolovi” is Hopi word for “many small hills.”) The politics of archaeological sites of this sort are complex. The Hopi reservation is comprised of a dozen or more hamlets on the First, Second, and Third mesas to the north. In this part of the Southwest, the walls and kivas of abandoned prehistoric villages are said to have been built by the “ancestral Hopi.” This is because living Hopi are adjacent to these places. By contrast, ruins in New Mexico are attributed to the “ancestral pueblo” people – of course, the modern Pueblo Indians, mostly Tewa-speaking, live near those sites. The old term for these villagers, “Anasazi” (a Navajo word that means the “enemies of our ancestors”), is no longer de riguer and considered politically incorrect. The modern Hopi call the builders of the crumbling village sites on the high desert “Hisatsonim” or “ancient ones.” There’s another wrinkle arising with regard to the ideology of Indian names in northern Arizona. The Hopi don’t regard these abandoned ruins as either “abandoned” or “ruins”. As far as the Hopi are concerned, any place occupied by their ancestors remains inhabited by spirits and the broken walls and crumbling stone turrets infested with ghosts aren’t “ruins,” but, somehow, still intact. Around 2011, the Hopi petitioned for the name of the park to be changed so as to eliminate the offensive word “ruins” – Homolovi Ruins State Park became simply Homolovi State Park. Similarly, the Visitor Center displays were re-written to avoid the notion that the towns had been “abandoned”. The people once living here, according to Hopi tradition, had simply moved elsewhere but didn’t “abandon” their proprietary control over the remnants of these villages. Accordingly, peculiar verbal circumlocutions exist at all archaeological sites in the area – ruined places abandoned for 700 years are neither “ruins” nor “abandoned”. In Hopi mythology, all once-inhabited villages are merely way-stations marking temporary settlements where the people paused on their way to the First, Second, and Third mesas where they now live.
3.
Two of the largest village sites can be accessed by winding roads that twist across the rolling hills. The villages appear as a mounds of stacked field stone, the remains of walls that, in some places, rise about chest-high. The flat shattered rocks form cell-like enclosures. There are several excavated kivas. Hopi kivas are square with high bench shelves along the walls enclosing a fire-pit and a bore-hole in the plastered floor to provide access for spirits to come and go. Most notably, the warren of low, broken walls are surrounded by acres of pottery sherds. I have been at many ruins and have never seen such an abundance of broken ceramic. People have rummaged around in the dirt and random stones to collect arrays of 12 or 15 pieces of sherds from one or another broken vessel, setting the jigsaw pieces atop flat boulders so that you can peruse them. The fans of broken ceramic resting on the rocks are surrounded by hundreds of other sherds, some of them bearing faint marks of paint, black slashes and hatches, or, in a some cases, textured – “corrugated” pottery as these things are technically called. Wandering among these fields of ceramic debris, I understand why the Hopi are not entirely convinced that the Hisatsonim have left these places. The traces of the old ones are shockingly vivid. Each broken piece of pottery signifies the work of someone’s hands and, everywhere you look, ceramic sherds are looking back at you. They fix you in their gaze like so many serpents or scorpions.
The breeze whispers to you as it blows across the barren land. Brooding pulpits of stone look down on the empty river bottom forty or fifty feet below. The crown-shaped buttes on the northeast horizon are slate-blue. Nothing is moving except the wind. To the west, the snow-capped summits of the San Francisco peaks above Flagstaff rear head and shoulder high in the sky, improbably white and lofty.
4.
I was 14 or 15 in 1970 when my family drove across this landscape on a camping trip. We were traveling toward Flagstaff. I think it was hot in the sun, then, but cool, even brisk and icy, in the shade. At that time, Homolovi State Park didn’t yet exist. I suppose the derelict walls were closer to the ground, then, not yet reconstructed but the vast field of broken pots must have been present all around the hilltop ruins.
We pulled off the highway about thirty miles from Flagstaff to visit the Meteor Crater, an attraction advertised by roadside signs for several hundred miles. In those days, a box-shaped metal barn stood at the brink of the crater, perched on the rubble-rim at the intersection of several gravel trails that led along the edge of the hole blasted into the desert. In the pole-barn, someone took your money and handed you a ticket to the attraction. There were some contorted meteorites, metal slag full of pits and hollow pock marks, gold nuggets, a couple geodes cracked open to reveal cavities full of toothy amethyst crystals, a rusty six-shooter and a case of arrowheads. It was a dusty, depressing road-side attraction, a collection of freakish oddities, the sort of place where Indian pots and tablet-shaped metates were shown cheek by jowl with rotting taxidermy (jackalopes and mermaids made by suturing half a monkey to a fish mount) and an “Aztec” mummy, either paper-mache or a cadaver looted out of some stony graveyard in another county. On the other side of the shed, trails led to the edge of the crater. I recall that the hole in the ground was vast, featureless, with sheer sides ravaged by landslides. It was cold and the wind howled out of the crater, spitting grit in your eyes. The scale of the catastrophe was vast and depressing, a wholly impersonal spectacle – this place was alien; it had nothing to do with you.
The meteor crater, still a privately owned tourist attraction, is more expensive today and more visitor friendly. At the freeway exit, a bedraggled private campground greets visitors – there’s a battered-looking geodesic dome, a couple of little green men made from plastic raising hands in greeting, a rank of dispirited trees, and some old trailers and RV rigs arranged around a potholed driveway. The five mile long road across the desert to the crater (which here looks like an unassuming low butte on the horizon) is marked with signs at mile intervals: 5 miles to Impact!, 4 Miles to Impact! and, so on. The speed limit sign says: Meteors 27,000 miles a minute; all other vehicles 50 mph.
The parking lot on northeast side of the crater’s rim is large, shoppingcenter-sized on two levels, although it’s most empty on the morning of my visit. Ominous classical music plays on hidden speakers and the visitor center is the length of football field, also stacked up in two levels on the edge of the pit. It’s expensive to visit the best-preserved meteor crater in the world: 28 dollars for an adult (reduced to 23 dollars for veterans, first responders, and the elderly). Inside, the complex there are toilets fragrant with heavy floral scent, a courtyard with exhibits, several small but tastefully appointed museums, a cafeteria, gift shop and theater. The displays are intelligently curated with informative labels that are National Park quality. In the theater, you can sit in a recliner chair for a ten minute “4D” video presentation: the chair tilts and rocks and vibrates to illustrate the images on screen. It’s a modestly effective stunt although the video accompanying the chair’s gyrations isn’t very good – something about a mission to destroy an asteroid aimed at earth: the mission’s captain is a mannequin-handsome, inert young man with a floppy-eared cartoon rabbit named Jackie for his co-pilot.
I took a tour guided by a chubby Navajo kid wearing a baseball cap and carrying a backpack full of mineral samples and bottles of water. The young man said that the tour was “committed” – this meant that when you left the Visitor Center in his company you were obliged to walk by his side a quarter mile along the rim of the crater; the doors through which you had exited the building were locked behind you. The kid had a couple of interesting stories. Visitors used to be allowed to hike down into the vast hole blasted out of the high desert. Once, when a tour was underway at the bottom of the crater, local vandals somehow dragged a Volkswagen bus up to the rim and, then, pushed it over the brink so that it plunged into the hole, dragging some rock-slides behind. “So this is when tours leading to the bottom of the crater ended,” the tour guide said, as if this explanation were sufficient and told you everything you needed to know. The crater, the young man said, creates violent updrafts with gale winds billowing up over the edges of the pit. Once, these winds caught a small plane flying over the crater, ripped off its wings and caused the aircraft to plummet into the bottom of the pit. Evacuating people and corpses out of the hole is difficult. Helicopters can’t be used to extract accident victims from the crater because of the violent and unpredictable winds. So it’s now forbidden to fly-over the meteor crater or use drones in this area. With good eyes, or a binoculars, you can just barely see a strip of plane fuselage resting in a wrinkled fold in the canyon walls.
The crater has had several names: Canyon Diablo, Barringer Crater, Coon Mountain or Coon Butte and others. Although the great scar on the desert has been investigated for many years, details as to the event that created the hole are still uncertain. For instance, it’s not clear as to the direction of the meteor’s approach before impact or its inclination to the surface. The peculiar absence of any meteorite fragments in the pit led geologists to originally believe that the hole was the caldera of an extinct volcano, not an unreasonable surmise since there are many volcanic features within a sixty mile radius of the crater. The meteor impact seems to have occurred 50,000 years before the present.
Viewed from its rim, the crater is an inaccessible spectacle, mostly round with high ramparts of shattered rock circumferential to a five-hundred foot deep cup. The feature is about a mile across. It’s impressive, but unsightly, like some kind of incomplete and gargantuan construction project. The top of the rim is windy and the crater’s steep sides exude a slovenly sort of malice – if you slip and fall here, you will most likely die. It seems improbable to even imagine that anyone ever successfully entered this deadly-looking pit, although apparently people have worked for years at its hollow bottom. At the bulls-eye center of the crater, there’s a torpedo-shaped tank, a rusting winch and a sheet of corrugated metal covering an excavation pit. A scatter of juniper trees decorates a ledge on the north side of the rim.
4.
George Moreau Barringer came from a distinguished family in Philadelphia – an uncle had been a Confederate general in the Civil War. Born in 1860, Barringer attended Princeton and graduated with a law degree. The practice of law bored him and, so, he spent considerable time in the West, exploring Arizona territory with cronies like Theodore Roosevelt and the novelist Owen Wister. (Wister wrote the iconic Western, The Virginian). Barringer speculated in land and acquired rights to several mines in Arizona’s Pearce and Cochise counties. These properties were lucrative and made Barringer into a very wealthy man.
In 1902, Barringer was staying in Tucson, close to his Commonwealth silver mine. Uninterested in the musical soiree underway, Barringer went out on the porch to smoke a cigar. A man named Samuel Holsinger, also taking the air on the porch, told Barringer about a great crater located on the high desert 35 miles to the east of Flagstaff. Geological surveys conducted near the crater – then, thought to be the product of a volcanic explosion – showed large quantities of melted and fused sandstone around the pit. Thousands of tons of silica sand, apparently resulting from temperatures high enough to make glass, had been found in the crater. Furthermore, samples extracted from the 140 foot high rim of the crater showed anomalous chips and shards of nickel-iron slag. On the basis of these factors, Barringer concluded that the feature was likely an impact crater, resulting from an iron-nickel meteor slamming into the desert. Without traveling to see the crater, sight unseen, Barringer acquired the mineral patents to the crater and adjacent land. Then, he formed a mining company called Standard Iron. His plan was to excavate the shattered limestone and silica fill at the bottom of the crater to expose the enormous meteor that Barringer thought was buried beneath the concavity in the high chaparral. Barringer’s estimate was that the iron-nickel meteorite weighed 100 million tons and, therefore, was mineral resource well worth mining under the remote crater.
Barringer commissioned geological studies to encourage investment in Standard Iron, Inc. This work lasted until about 1908 with some preliminary shafts drilled into the layers of shattered sandstone under the center of the crater around 1906. Actual mining activities began in earnest around 1909. A black metal shed with a stark angular profile (in pictures, the works look like an early architectural design by Frank Gehry) was built to house the drilling rig. The roof of the building is pierced by a pipe chimney – it’s cold at this altitude in Winter – and another well was dug nearby to provide water for the project. Barringer’s crews drilled test shafts to a depth of three-hundred feet below the crater floor without encountering any evidence of buried meteorite. During this work, a drill bit became trapped in what the miners thought was the buried asteroid. Barringer ordered that a lateral adit be excavated into the crater’s south wall toward the location where the bit was buried. This project was exceptionally dangerous due to the disturbed and broken rock strata, unstable layers of sandstone floating in a matrix of blast-silica. The bit was retrieved but no large body of iron-nickel was discovered. The inverted stratigraphy visible at the south rim of the crater suggested to Barringer’s mining engineers that the main body of the meteorite had plowed itself to rest somewhere off-center, probably south of the crater. Slant drilling was, then, implemented in the hope of hitting the nickel-iron bonanza in the ground adjacent to the crater. But these efforts also failed.
Twenty years passed. Several million dollars were spent in exploratory shafts without finding any trace of underground iron-nickel deposits. Barringer’s investors were nervous and several of them withdrew from the enterprise. Barringer thought that the success of his endeavor was nigh. He hadn’t given up hope as to finding the elusive meteorite and, now, believed the nickel-iron bonanza was soon to be found. He raised another 200,000 dollars for a final venture, promising to dig down to the meteorite body on this last attempt. In the hope of inspiring additional investors, Barringer hired a geological consultant F. W. Moulton to assay the situation and provide a feasibility report as to exploiting the meteorite hidden under the crater. Moulton revised previous calculations as to the mass of the meteor and concluded that the nickel-iron body likely weighed only about 300,000 tons. Meanwhile, the drill crews had hit water about 380 feet under the floor of the crater. The water turned the sand into a slurry and the drill became ineffective – it was like drilling through watery quicksand; the bit couldn’t get any purchase or traction on the emulsion. Moulton’s report, disappointing to Barringer, was issued in 1928. A few weeks after reading the report, Barringer dropped dead of a massive heart attack. He was 69.
In the final years before his death, Barringer supported his mining efforts by selling tons of high-grade silica sand to Coca Cola Company. The sand was received in freight car loads in Atlanta, Georgia where it was melted again and converted into glass bottles for the beverage. (Silica mining was revived in the forties to the extent that a small school was built on-site for the children of the workers.) After Barringer’s death, mining for meteorite ore ceased. The head-works protecting the slant drilling rig collapsed and, finally, the corrugated steel walls and roof were hauled out of the mine on drag-lines built in the hope of extracting nickel-iron ore from the hole. Barringer’s heirs retained their ownership of the crater and, when Route 66, was completed between Gallup and Flagstaff (around 1926), travelers from the Midwest to California passed with a five miles of the site. By the mid-thirties, the property had been converted into a tourist attraction. 750,000 tourists visit the crater annually and, so, of course, the place is a kind of gold mine, although not the sort that George Barringer conceived.
5.
Barringer’s mining enterprise was founded to a large degree on a big chunk of slag discovered by Holsinger near Canyon Diablo eleven years before his the fateful conversation on the porch of the hotel at Tucson. You can see the so-called Holsinger fragment in the museum at the crater. The meteorite is about a meter long (.8 meters) and black with shiny polished surfaces within hollow places in the artifact. Some rust is visible in fist-sized indentations in the meteorite and the thing has a curious physiognomy, a topology of inside exchanging places with outside like a sculpture by Henry Moore. Graphite nodules once embedded in the rock dissolved on impact and so the object has cavities like empty eye sockets – these deep, dark pockmarks give the meteorite an organic appearance, as if it is an Argus-eyed beast crouching on its plinth. (Visitors are encouraged to touch the thing.) The provenance of the Holsinger fragment is unclear. The label suggests that the iron-nickel fragment was found near Two Guns, a disreputable collection of shack-taverns and whorehouses that grew up near the Canyon Diablo railroad trestle on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe line to Flagstaff two miles to the north. This big chunk of metal, of course, encouraged Barringer to believe that there was an immensely larger deposit of iron and nickel (the meteorite is 92% iron and 7.1% nickel) somewhere under the crater. Samuel Holsinger was a forest-service land agent and the man who first told Barringer about the crater, then, known as Coon Mountain, in 1902 at the hotel in Tucson. He was one of Barringer’s early investors and, in fact, worked as supervisor of the mining crews when work began at the crater. The meteorite fragment is named after him, although it’s not clear that he discovered the thing.
What happened to the bulk of the 300,000 ton meteorite that gouged the crater out of the desert plain? It’s now thought that most of the mass of the meteorite vaporized upon impact. The desert is said to be dense with small iron pebbles and round fragments like tiny ball bearings. If a magnet is dragged through the loose sand around the crater, innumerable tiny iron particles cling to the lodestone.
The crater is so vast that the vista from the rim doesn’t disclose that the cliffs around the pit and the hole’s floor are littered with mining artifacts, corroding cans and dusty bottles, winches, and gear boxes left by Barringer’s operations and the silica mining. A number of drill-shafts were bored from the crater rim or, even, the desert at the base of the 150-foot high ramparts of boulders and debris blasted out of the pit. In an enormous, featureless landscape, axles and drive-shafts and broken walls as big as SUVs shrink into insignificance and are illegible to the eye.
6.
Although I have been in Flagstaff half-a-dozen times, I have no mental image of what the town looks like. I’ve been on the commercial strip and have explored some of the high country under the San Francisco Peaks, but don’t recall ever seeing anything that I could identify as ‘downtown’. I’m sure there are old buildings at a crossroads somewhere on the plateau and, probably, some switching yards for the railroads that intersect here – but these are not places that I have seen. The Colorado plateau at Flagstaff gives the impression of being densely forested with tall, righteous-looking ponderosa pines among stands of pinyon and juniper trees; the slopes of some the ridges are clad in aspen. In fact, the climate is semi-arid and the woods are park-like without much in the way of underbrush – trees cover the landscape but the vegetation isn’t fused together into a green wall; you can walk without difficulty in these woods in the spaces that the dry climate enforces between trees. Normally, there is deep snow in the winter and patches of it will endure under the pine needles and in the shade of the ponderosas until early July. (In March of 2025, the plateau was suffering from drought – ordinarily about 60 inches of snow falls here; the total accumulation of snow for the winter of 2024 through 2025 was tallied at eight inches.) A steep dome-shaped peak, Elden Mountain, looms over Flagstaff, wherever it is hiding on the plateau – this summit is rimmed with trees and stands about a thousand feet over the Route 66 strip. Elden Mountain blocks view from the highway of the San Francisco Peaks which tower over the plateau, their crests another four-thousand feet higher.
The plateau seems featureless, a table-land entirely covered in pine forests, now and then, broken by broken heaps of black, ice-fractured basalt. The apparent homogeneity of the plateau is an illusion. In fact, the ponderosa forests conceal weird castellated turrets of lava flow and deep, dark chasms, invisible until they are immediately (and treacherously) underfoot, gouged down into the plateau. The bedrock of the plateau is porous with buried cisterns and fissures in the fans of volcanic rock that form the pedestal for the San Francisco Peaks. As a result, surface water sucked through the pine-needle forest floors seeps down into lava caves and bottomless cracks in the plateau – water doesn’t remain on the surface, nor does it flow, except as flash floods, in canyons. For this reason, the area around the snowy peaks was called Sin Agua (“without water”) – the Indians who lived in this area, according, are called the Sinagua people. Of course, we don’t know what they called themselves when they lived here in large pueblos in the forests or as cliff dwellers in the canyons.
When I traveled here with my family in 1970, we went to a place called Walnut Canyon. I recall ruins under shadowy overhangs, cold breezes sweeping across the pine-lined canyon rim, and darkness in broad daylight, an effect of memory that I can’t quite explain: something like grey shadows, broken masonry, slicks of ice across an asphalt trail, the whole terrain somehow lightless although a wan sun shone in the sky.
As it happens, Walnut Canyon is five miles from the commercial strip of old Route 66 where I am staying in east Flagstaff and, so, I drive to the National Monument, an easy enough place to reach through the woods: it’s three-miles of strip malls and gas stations and fast food places on 66, then, past a big Ralston Purina elevator, standing between railroad sidings, the white tower painted in the colors of the dog food logo, and, then, two miles on a winding road through the unspoiled pine forest to the Visitor Center.
7.
At the parking lot near the Walnut Canyon Visitor Center, some tourists are walking dogs. A girl in a sweat-suit jogs by. Voices seem to emerge from the ground, wafting up from below, and there is a sing-song chant also rising out of the earth. Tall ponderosa pines shade the vehicles in the lot. At the end of a short pathway, some buildings jut over the canyon rim. There are people in the gorge and it is their voices calling out and laughing and, it seems, monotonously chanting that I hear echoing upward in the stillness.
The trail into the canyon exits the Visitor Center across a platform overlooking the gorge. It’s a nasty, intimidating gash in the flat, pine-wooded table-land, a deep funnel-shaped slit that narrows at its bottom to a fissure so tight and gloomy that you can’t ever see its bottom. Walls of dense shadow fall into the gorge where horizontal veins of sandstone run ribbons along the canyon wall. At its rim, a man with a good arm could pass a football across the canyon, singing now with voices below. The cut in the rock seems to have two parts, an upper gorge where there is enough purchase on crumbling sandstone for small, embattled trees to cling to the rocks and, then, the lower depths of the gorge where the cliffs are steeper dropping down to jagged ledges that lock together. The trail drops down into this steeply tilted landscape over about 240 steps, steel treads mounted in the rocks. At the overlook, you can see across the gorge to shadowy overhangs where rocks have been stacked to build blind-looking stone cells in the cliffs. Once your eyes are accustomed to the gradations of light and shadow and the distinctions between stacked stone and the rock strata, it’s apparent that there are dozens of structures inset in the sheer cliffs.
At the outset of the so-called “Island Trail” (it loops around the mid-section of promontory point splitting the canyon into two deep grooves), a sign reads: “It is not necessary for you to descend. It is mandatory to climb back up.” This legend, intended as a warning as to the steps dangling off the side of the canyon, is a variant on the Coast Guard’s unofficial motto: “You have to go out, but you don’t have to come back”, an informal motto dating back to the days when the Guard was known as the U.S. Official Life-saving Service. Voices sound below and the chanting in the depths continues.
The path down traverses many steps and there are steep switchbacks in some places. The canyon feels clammy and dangerous. It’s hard to imagine the Indians that lived here scrambling up and down these sheer, fractured walls. On the last ladder-like flight of steps to the relatively level trail around the “Island”, an angry Indian kid is sitting at the top of the stairs, bellowing the same words over and over into the gorge. “This is my land. This isn’t your land,” the kid shouts. “You’re nothing but fucking bitches. Call the fucking cops. Go ahead, call the fucking cops to take me away. It’s not your land. It’s my land.” Encountering this guy on the steepest part of the descent is a little alarming. As I approach from above and behind, I speak to the Indian: “So how’s it going today?” Obviously, it’s not going too well, I suppose, the kid would say, but he pauses in his chant, looks over his shoulder and mutters something like: “I wasn’t talking to you. It’s okay. My bad.” I go around him and continue down the last dozen steps to where the trail looping around the pyramid-shaped “island” clasps together like a belt. At that junction, an old man wearing a National Park hooded sweatshirt is chatting with several elderly tourists who wear hiking boots with expensive back packs and Nordic ski poles. These people pretend not to hear the Indian above them who has reverted to his monotonous and indignant chant.
The loop trail leads along a narrow shelf of rock very close to the stone walls wedged into the overhang cracks. There are more steps up and down. Half of the trail is drenched in profound shadow and the canyon below is grim and dark. The other half of the trail is on the sunny side of the cliff where it is bright and warm and the stacked stones glow with an amber light. Some trail-side markers emphasize that these dwellings were not “abandoned” but that the people simply left them on their way to a better life, departing from the canyon around 1250 after living here for 150 years. The so-called Sinagua people built these granaries and small houses in the wall of the cliff; they are said to be the ancestors of the modern Hopi who, apparently (so it is alleged) trace some of their clans to this canyon and the structures remaining here.
The trail and the steps are just the just the most recent iteration of various pathways carved into the gorge to provide access to the ruins. People in Flagstaff began coming here in the last quarter of the 19th century. Their picnic expeditions involved extensive looting. At the Visitor Center, old photographs show men in cowboy hats and stern, formidable women wearing white long-sleeved blouses and sun bonnets gathered on the ledges next to the stacked stone walls. People filled up picnic baskets with fragments of woven baskets, broken ceramics, arrowheads and tools of various sorts, and rags of decaying cloth. After a quarter century of this looting, the artifacts around the cliff-dwellings were all gone and, so, visitors began yanking down walls and hauling the yellow stacked stones out of the gorge. This alarmed some of the local people, of course, themselves assiduous looters as well, and, so, the place was declared a National Monument in 1915.
I talk with the old volunteer near the place where the “Island” trail loops back under the daunting flights of steps leading to the rim. He tells me that the canyon wasn’t a bad place to live. The people didn’t have to clamber down to the bottom of the canyon, invisible from this vantage, for water. Walnut Creek is intermittent in any event. Seeps drizzle down the canyon walls and some of them are feathery with algae and its was this source of water, available all year long, that supported the people. A hawk soars high above the canyon rim and the angry Indian is now departed so that the canyon depths are mostly silent. Shadows darken the gorge. Soon the sun will be low and the canyon will be cold and dark and empty except for the spirits that the Hopi imagine haunting the dank gloom behind the stone walls jammed into the cliffs.
8.
When I check into the Americana Motor-Inn on old Route 66, a handsome young man is lecturing a girl on the history of the highway that runs next to the motel. My impression is that the fashionable man is the owner the place and that the girl has applied for a job behind the reception desk – their colloquy seems like some kind of interview. Some Indian curios are tastefully displayed against the wall and there are white tubular-looking bikes incongruously parked among the couches and easy chairs in the lounge. The bikes, I assume, are for rent, so that tourists can take a spin around the streets of Flagstaff. The man has a fuzzy face, half-shaven it seems – he looks like a tennis instructor or a golf pro or, for that matter, a surfer or ski bum. He defines the word “Americana” for the young woman. The motel has been renovated so that it will be ready for the 2026 centenary celebration of the establishment of what Steinbeck called “the Mother Road.” Signs for Route 66 were first placed on November 11, 1926. Interstate highways made the route superfluous by 1985 and most of the signs were then removed. The hip young man says that affection for the highway wasn’t just “nostalgia”, but something more – that was where the notion of “Americana” arose.
There’s a taco stand built into the former breezeway between the motel’s office and the rooms. It’s a classic motor hotel design, a couple of horizontal wings with doors opening onto a sidewalk along the parking lot. The blocks of rooms form a right angle, enclosing the turquoise lagoon of the small swimming pool. The rooms’ numbered doors are painted bright red and there are picture windows inset in the brick walls between doors: here a lamp on a table glowing behind the glass or the opaque ruffle of white curtains or people having sex in a room full of green gloom like the bottom of an aquarium or lodgers murdering one another while the TV flickers fitfully. In my room, there’s a disco ball in the corner above the desk and the globe is spinning in a spray of spotlights, casting off sparkles and a flock of bright red and silver highlights that sweep across the wall. It’s not immediately obvious to me how to shut off the festivities enlivening the room and the mirrors on the wall shimmer with specks and glints of light shed by the disco ball. The bathroom is large with a big shower encased in a block of plexi-glass. There are twin queen beds. On the left, a sign posted on the wall above the bed says “HEAVEN” and labels a photograph of a forest of pine on a tilted hillside; the bed on the right, is named EARTH and the picture at the back-board shows the Milky Way spilled across deep space.
9.
Around 5:15, I consult my phone and find that there is a well-reviewed barbecue place, Satchmo’s, a third of a mile away. I walk along the Mother Road and, then, turn on an intersecting street. Some government offices in glass boxes with tinted windows line the street, then, there’s a mildewed-looking Thrift Shop, an insurance office next to a chiropractor, and other small businesses, half of them defunct. Banks stand at the intersection with drive-through kiosks in their parking lots. It’s an odd array of enterprises, the rows of businesses set well back from the busy avenue with freestanding buildings occupied by cafes and hardware shops. My feet are sore and my thighs hurt from clambering around in the canyons and, so, I tire of looking for Satchmo’s. It’s not obvious to me where the restaurant is located and the map on my phone is misleading – it flattens everything into a row of stores and cafes when, in fact, many of the enterprises stand at skew angles to the road, islands in asphalt that is ambiguously either parking lot or street or some combination of the two functions.
I see a Vietnamese place, the Pho café, along the sidewalk under an arcade jutting from the flat roof of the row of businesses. Neon shows a cup of tea from which steam emanates. The inside of the restaurant is mostly empty except for a couple of Hispanic girls in a booth. It’s fragrant and there are some travel posters of Vietnam framed on the walls as well as a plaster Buddha next to the cash register flanked by a couple of colorful red lacquer elephants.
The waiter seems to double as chef and he looks like a swarthy pirate. Most of his face is masked by a bandana, but I see that he has luxuriant bushy eyebrows. The guy speaks with an exaggerated New Jersey accent, a little hard to decipher because his lips are covered by the bandana. He tells me “Brudder, yer food will out momentarily...” Every time he attends to my table, he gruffly calls me “Brudder.”
Mountain darkness has fallen. It’s purple and blue between the specks of light along the avenue. I see Elden Mountain looming over the town, but the shape of peak seems pressed close to me – there’s no perspective, no regression to push the mountain back away from my eyes, nothing with which to measure scale in the gloom. It’s an optical illusion but the mountain looks like a heap of construction debris, like a pile of gravel dropped by dump-truck or a mound of dirt flung up from a pit where footings for a building are being poured. The peak seems close enough for me to touch, a heap of darkness in the empty lot between buildings.
The girl in the taco shop at the motel is sitting behind a counter on a folding chair. She has a book open on the table in front of her and seems to be half asleep. I feel vaguely disloyal for not eating at the motel but hiking across the dismal parking lots to the Vietnamese café, a restaurant that wasn’t even my destination. I’m happy that the girl’s eyes are downcast and that she doesn’t look up at me as I walk past the little orange-lit cell where she is reading or sleeping or dreaming – which I can’t tell.
