DAY EIGHT — FLAGSTAFF, ARIZONA
We slept like the dead. Which is good, because all the alarms went off at five o’clock sharp, the sun jammed its head through the window and yelled at us, and we stumbled painfully and bleary-eyed down to the car and prepared for another long day of adventure.
Just as sunsets in Arizona in the summer happen quick and they happen early, so too do sunrises. Here it was only mid-May and the sun was already into the sky by the time we set off at 5:30. There are a couple reasons for this. One is that this is actually the way things are supposed to happen — before Daylight Saving Time was popularized during the First World War, putting clocks ahead an hour in the summer, sunrise took place at ridiculously early hours everywhere in the summer. During the American Civil War of the 1860s, soldiers would often rise at three in the morning to get ready for a dawn battle at four. The second reason is that Arizona was a state that was on Pacific Time but is not in Pacific geography. Flagstaff is actually slightly to the east compared to my hometown of Calgary, but Calgary is well into the Mountain Time Zone. So while the sun was rising at six in the morning back home, here the clocks had gone insane and believed it was only five. But that’s the thing about clocks. When everyone abides by their crazy rules, all you can do is play along.
The nice thing about being on the road so early is that you have it nearly to yourself, and this clear Friday morning was no different. We were expecting the road south of Flagstaff to take us back into the open desert that lies to the east, but Arizona surprised us again. The interstate stayed through vaguely mountainous, mostly forested regions for some distance, as it cut through the Tonto National Forest, which is the fifth-largest national forest in the United States. It made for a pleasant drive that we were too sleepy to appreciate properly, but as we came out the other side and back onto a hillier version of the desert, we were treated to an altogether new and interesting sight.
Suddenly, cactuses. Thousands of them.
I had been seeing cactuses all along on my trip through the southwest, from the small plate-like versions near coastal Texas to bulb-like cactuses and little branching cactus-trees, but these, while nice, were not what I really wanted. What I wanted was that cactus you see on the Arizona license plates or in logos, emblems, and iconic images of the American southwest, the big cactus with the long arms, the real cactus.
What I didn’t know at the time was that even though this type of cactus is used in all sorts of images for the entire American southwest, from Texas, New Mexico, and even Utah, it doesn’t actually grow in any of those places. It is called the saguaro, and it only grows in the deserts of southwestern Arizona and extreme southeastern California, along with some parts of northwestern Mexico. As we emerged into the hilly desert they were suddenly all around us, littering the hillsides like trees, like giant sentinels with big spiny arms. I was delighted.
A saguaro can live as many as 150 years and grow up to 40 feet tall. Almost everything about the saguaro is designed to help the cactus reproduce itself. They are tall because that makes them more likely to be visited by bats, and they have night-blooming white flowers for the same reason. A saguaro’s nectar even has health benefits for bats, so all around this cactus has designed itself to be very bat-friendly, and the bats in turn will carry pollen from cactus to cactus as they make their nightly feeding rounds. Even the giant arms of a saguaro are there only so that more flowers and pollen can be produced at the end of each. It can take up to 75 years for a saguaro to grow its arms, and in the drier regions some never do.
The cactuses stayed with us most of the way south into Phoenix, which we entered around eight in the morning, just in time for the start of rush hour. As a city, Phoenix creeps up on you. The desert flattens out, and then the transition from desert to city is slow enough that at one point you look around and realize that you’re already partway into it and you just hadn’t noticed.
Phoenix as a city has 1.4 million people, but its metropolitan area sprawls across the desert and has some 4.2 million inhabitants. The Phoenix area was once inhabited by Native Americans, who dug a system of canals through the river valley and created a thriving agricultural area. By the time Europeans began to visit the region in the mid-1800s it had been abandoned and was once again a dry valley with a river that, like so many in the American southwest, nearly dries itself to nothing in the summer.
But one man, Jack Swilling, was visiting the valley in 1867 and noticed the outlines of the old Native American canal systems. He got to work and re-dug the canals, for the most part following the ancient routes, and in wet periods water once again filled the valley and made it a good place to live. Swilling founded a town there, and he wanted to call it Stonewall after the famous Confederate general Stonewall Jackson, who had died during the Civil War. The inhabitants didn’t care for the name, and instead called it Pumpkinville, on account of the large pumpkins that would grow there. It soon changed to Swilling’s Mill, and then Helling Mill, and then Mill City, and finally, in 1881, it became Phoenix. The name was chosen because, like the mythological phoenix, the city was seen as rising from the ashes of the ancient Native American society that had once lived there. I have to say, all of its names up until Phoenix were vastly inferior to Stonewall.
The city was the site of at least two major domestic military events during the Second World War. In the first, in 1942, during a time of greater racial segregation and division in America, white soldiers and black soldiers organized an illegal boxing match between their two sides. The match broke down into a general brawl, which turned into a riot, which grew even worse when the Army was brought in to stop the riot and black on-duty soldiers, fully armed, decided to join the side of the rioters instead of the side of the Army. The city was blockaded by the Army and instructions were given to stop the mutiny by any means necessary, and dozens of people were killed in the fighting before all army personnel were banned from the city and the civil government got things under control.
The second incident took place in 1944, when German prisoners of war being held in Phoenix decided to attempt a night escape. They knew of the river flowing through Phoenix, so they made a daring escape from the prisoner of war facility and high-tailed it to the river. What they didn’t know is that “river” is a very subjective term in the American southwest — it was little more than a narrow trickle at the time, and the escaped prisoners, unable to paddle to Mexico as they planned, were soon rounded up.
The GPS steered us safely through Phoenix on an increasingly crowded interstate, and on the southern side, though saguaros still stalked us here and there, the land became true flat desert and stubbornly remained so for several hours down through Tucson, where the interstate stopped going south and started going east. It was hot, and the landscape was not overly interesting, but there were still enough rocky outcrops and distant mountains to keep true monotony at bay.
As we drove along the interstate just past Tucson we noticed a most peculiar vehicle. There was a truck driving in the right-hand lane that was going only about 25 miles per hour in a 75 zone, so that everyone else on the road had to squeeze past him to the left. This truck was piled not just high, but ridiculously high, with everything the driver owned. The entire contents of an apartment — bed, couch, desk, table, chairs, boxes, everything — were stacked and tied together atop the truck, which sagged and puttered along under the enormous weight. The stack of belongings was a good twenty feet tall. It was impressive and terrifying, and we wondered how far he had to go. We pulled into a rest stop that he entered shortly behind us, so we were able to snag a photograph.
All I can say is, good thing it wasn’t a windy day.
As we headed east across southern Arizona, we began to see signs for something called, and I quote this directly, “The Thing?”. You have to pronounce the question mark as though you are asking a question every time you say it, you see. We didn’t just see one sign, or two or three or even a dozen. Over the course of at least 40 miles we saw more than 50 large billboards advertising “The Thing?” and telling us how we had to stop and see it because it was mysterious and awe-inspiring and one of the great wonders of the world. We wondered what sort of money the place must be making to afford that many billboards along the interstate.
We didn’t have time to stop, and frankly we didn’t feel that some roadside freak show style attraction would be worth what little time we didn’t have, no matter how vigorously sign after sign assured us that it was. But all the same we were curious, so William looked it up on his phone.
As it turns out, “The Thing?” only costs a dollar to see, so I have no idea how the guy affords so many billboards, though at least some of them seemed to be sponsored by a nearby Dairy Queen, which probably made more money than the attraction itself. “The Thing?” is located behind a gift shop in a series of metal sheds, which inspires confidence in its authenticity right off the bat. After looking through displays of old guns and tacky wood carvings and a car that supposedly belonged to Adolf Hitler, you will find that “The Thing?” is a vaguely mummified corpse that appears to be holding a vaguely mummified baby. Once upon a time it claimed that these were the mummified remains of Native Americans found in California, insinuating an ancient connection to Egypt, and later it was claimed that they were found in Arizona (when the exhibit moved there), and now it has no sign at all, and just lets you wonder.
Is it real? Probably not. We shrugged and drove past without stopping.
As morning turned to mid-afternoon we passed through mile after mile of empty, rocky, vaguely scrubby desert, with small mountains or rugged hills passing by to either side now and then. We drove past an ostrich ranch at one point, where hundreds of shaggy ostriches roamed in a surreal tableau. At last we approached New Mexico again.
Given how rocky and dry the desert around us was, we expected that this time we would not see the sharp and distinct division between interesting Arizona and boring New Mexico that had existed in the north. The border between the two was on the top of a hill, so that we could not see into New Mexico until we reached the top. We drove up one side surrounded by dirt and rocks, and we drove down the other side into what looked like the end of the world.
The difference was just as stark as it had been in the north, only now it was even worse. Rather than the flat, scrub-filled endlessness we had seen before in New Mexico, what we drove into now was almost awe-inspiring for just how terrible it was. From the top of the hill we could see down into the state, and as far as the horizon there was nothing but sand and dust, completely flat, coloured a bright yellowish-red.
The moment we entered the state we were hit with warning signs for dust storms, and indeed you could see them on the horizon — now and then an enormous cloud of dust would whirl itself up into a small funnel in the distance, or would simply blow in a large curtain across the landscape, sometimes crossing the highway. Everything looked completely dead, dry, turned to dust and blown away. We could only stare.
We drove through well over a hundred miles of this utterly empty and unforgiving landscape, past dust-blown little towns and lifeless fields. The dust storm warning signs continued without pause, and every now and then we entered a “Safety Corridor” where every vehicle was required to have its headlights on even during the day, just in case a cloud of dust came through. William and I reflected that the term “Safety Corridor” didn’t make us feel very safe, because it made us wonder what it was trying to keep us safe from.
Only the occasional well-irrigated fig orchard and the sight of great clouds of dead soil blowing across the highway — always ahead of us, never right into us — relieved the monotony of the next several hours of driving through that barren and dusty wilderness. At one point we stopped at a visitor information centre so I could pick up my traditional state highway map. The building was, as with most things here, surrounded by empty desert. As we got out of the car we stopped at the sight of a sign bearing the New Mexico state motto — “The Land of Enchantment”, it said.
We stared at the sign for a moment, trying to process the incongruity. I turned to William and asked, “Do you feel enchanted?”
“Yeah,” said William with monotone exhaustion. “I am enchanted as fuck.”
At long last we crossed the dead land and approached Las Cruces, the largest city in southern New Mexico, where an actual authentic mountain rose up on the far side of the city and the world returned to the familiar dry scrubland we’d seen on our previous trip through the state. Las Cruces — a name that literally means “the crosses”, though no one is certain why it was given the name — is a city of some 100,000 people, and we crossed it easily as the interstate curved south toward Texas. Many people in Las Cruces work either directly or indirectly with the White Sands military testing facilities nearby. Once again I have to note that when it comes to blowing things up in a place where you won’t disturb anything, New Mexico is the place.
We entered Texas right around five o’clock and drove into El Paso, a city of some 650,000 people, just in time for the Friday rush hour. El Paso sits on the intersection between New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico. From the interstate driving through the city one can see the line of greenery in the near distance that represents the Rio Grande and the Mexican-American border. I had never seen Mexico before, so even to see it across the river at a distance was a treat. Across that border is the city of Ciudad Jaurez, much larger than El Paso at 1.2 million.
El Paso is the short version of the city’s original name when it was founded by the Spanish in the early 1600s as little more than a convenient outpost on the north side of the Rio Grande. In those days the river acted as a natural defence against Apache raids, and so the north side was only sparsely and tentatively populated. The outpost was given the name El Paso del Norte, which means “The Passage of the North”. Though the region seems very much south to me, to the old Spanish colonists it was just the opposite, and was about as far north as most of them would ever go.
For a long time the area remained an administrative base for Spain’s northern colonies, particularly New Mexico. In time the city passed into Mexican control, and after the Mexican-American war the section lying north of the river passed to Texas and took on the shortened name, El Paso. It’s currently one of the main cities for trade to and from Mexico.
It’s also apparently an inlet for drugs and illegal immigrants, for shortly east of El Paso we encountered an interesting highway situation. All vehicles were being directed off the interstate and into a large pullout area complete with dozens of security cameras and law enforcement officials. As we pulled up a man with a drug-sniffing dog walked around the vehicle, and then a very serious-looking officer came up to the window.
“You boys good American citizens?” he asked.
I could have answered, “Si, senior,” but since I didn’t feel like spending the next three days in a dark prison cell instead I simply admitted that I was Canadian. The officer almost completely dismissed me as soon as he heard this, knowing perhaps that all Canadians are harmless by nature, and turned his serious gaze on William. “You?”
“Yeah,” said William, clearly terrified that we were about to be tortured to death in a small room.
The man gave us his level Terminator eyes for a few more seconds, then said, “Have a nice day” and let us continue on.
A little research tells me that the police in El Paso are actually some of the best in America, in a certain light. El Paso, it turns out, was ranked in 2010 as the city with the lowest crime rate of any place with more than 500,000 people in the United States, which is not what you’d expect given that a lot of violence takes place right across the border in Ciudad Jaurez. However, El Paso is still a major drug trafficking corridor, and a good percentage of the illegal drugs entering America come straight through those same interstates we’d been driving. Police can never catch everything.
We crossed into the central time zone and lost our second hour of the day, which was getting longer with every mile, and to make matters worse I suddenly had a great and unexpected need for every single rest area we came to, each of which chewed up another ten or fifteen minutes of daylight. Perhaps the drug stop had been more intimidating than I’d known. Regardless, surely it was impossible that we wouldn’t make it before sunset. We had been up so early that the very concept of not making it to Fort Stockton by dark was ludicrous.
But there had been rush hour in Phoenix. There’d been rest areas and stops for gas. There’d been a stop to grab a map. There’d been a stop at a Dairy Queen for food partway across New Mexico when we needed relief from the heat and the monotonous landscape. There’d been rush hour again in El Paso. There’d been the drug checkpoint. There’d been two time zones in the wrong direction. There’d been all those little bathroom stops in western Texas. And so when the sun dipped to the horizon, hesitated, and plunged the desert into darkness, we were still on the interstate with an hour to go.
For a great distance it seemed that we were the only car foolish enough to have been caught out here, as they only other vehicles we saw were eighteen-wheelers plodding through the darkness, all of which we passed. At one point we were passing three in a row, and during that long stretch in the passing lane something suddenly rose up out of the night on the pavement directly in front of me, unmoving and appearing in the headlights too quickly to even hit the brake, and we crashed straight into it.
Whatever it was, this dark-grey object that in the half-second I saw it looked like a cross between a boulder and a spare tire, the car went over it with a jarring whump-bumping sound, and then it was gone behind us. The car didn’t lose control or appear to have been damaged. William and I stared wide-eyed and wondered what on earth had just happened, and as far as I went my heart was pounding because in that instant I had seen it in front of us I had been certain, completely certain, that it had been something solid enough to cause some serious harm.
We decided after a moment that the only thing it could have been was one of those long strips of blown-out tire rubber you sometimes see beside the road on interstates. Lying in a bundle on the pavement in the darkness, it had looked like something with some real menace to it, but had begrudgingly and bumpingly flattened out when we ran over it. No harm done, but we were exhausted and hungry and really wanted to get off this interstate now.
At last we reached Fort Stockton and located our hotel, but before stopping we decided that we should find some sort of disgusting fast food place and get something to bring back to the hotel room so we could eat quickly and then fall asleep, because it was going for ten o’clock now in central time, we had been on the road for fifteen hours, and we had to get up early again tomorrow.
What we hadn’t counted on was the fact—I’m sorry, but the undeniable fact—that Fort Stockton is the worst town in America.
We drove for some distance down what seemed to be a likely street, but all we passed in the way of open businesses was a Kentucky Fried Chicken, so we shrugged and went back to it. There was no signage for it, but it was the only business around and I turned into what appeared to be the entrance.
It wasn’t. As soon as I pulled in, the car crashed down into a cleverly hidden pothole trap that neither of us could see in the darkness, and bounced jarringly out the other side and into what turned out to be an empty gravel lot surrounded by raised sidewalks. The KFC mocked us from the other side these raised sidewalks. Worried for my poor car, which had been attacked on the underside not once but twice tonight, I didn’t want to chance going back through that enormous pothole to get out, but there was no other exit. So we drove carefully over the raised sidewalk instead. Why it was raised I haven’t the faintest clue, but it gave my underside another scrape as we came down off the far side of it and into the KFC parking lot.
I gave my car as good an examination as I could in the dimly-lit parking lot, but I couldn’t spot any obvious problems, for which I was extremely thankful. Good thing my car is tougher than it looks. We went inside to order some terrible greasy chicken.
I quickly learned that American KFCs work differently than Canadian versions. I ordered a two piece chicken with fries, and they asked me what kind of chicken I wanted.
“Just chicken,” I assured them, a little perplexed. “Normal chicken.”
They insisted I had to choose exactly which types I wanted. Did I want white meat or dark? Did I want drumsticks, breasts, thighs, or some combination? Did I want original recipe or some other form of coating? I had no idea. I told them to give me white, original recipe, and whatever shapes they wanted. I didn’t care. William, a little more familiar with the system, ordered three pieces and specified what types.
After all of the rigmarole of getting the order sorted, it then became hilarious when it turned out that they didn’t actually have any of the choices we’d picked. In fact, all this particular KFC had at the moment was extra crispy thighs. They gave me three pieces instead of the two I’d ordered, and threw in a batch of cinnamon twists that we didn’t want, as an apology for not having any chicken choices at their chicken restaurant.
We didn’t care. We were tired and hungry and grumpy. We’d had a long day, we’d run over a tire, we’d bounced through a deadly pothole trap, and if we had to eat the dregs of a KFC that was only another straw on the camel. We went back to the hotel, where the man behind the counter gave me the key to the room without even asking to see any ID or the credit card I’d booked the room with.
We ate extra crispy chicken thighs at a table in the hotel room, decided that Fort Stockton was an awful place, and went straight to bed.
Warder to starry_nite
Chapterfish — Nate's Writing Blog
http://chapterfish.wordpress.com
Chapterfish — Nate's Writing Blog
http://chapterfish.wordpress.com
Eighteen Days in America, Part 8
- 30/06/2012 05:21:59 AM
662 Views
The previous decade or so, chicken places have become notorious for not having chicken.
- 30/06/2012 01:46:07 PM
318 Views
And they don't even have the best chicken.
- 30/06/2012 05:03:09 PM
290 Views
How can you like Mickey Ds chicken better than Popeyes? 
- 30/06/2012 06:05:17 PM
247 Views
- 30/06/2012 06:05:17 PM
247 Views
You answered your own question (and, , briefly, which is a bit cruel). *NM*
- 01/07/2012 02:41:05 PM
187 Views
, briefly, which is a bit cruel). *NM*
- 01/07/2012 02:41:05 PM
187 Views
I like Raising Cane's best of the fast food chicken places.
- 01/07/2012 02:46:06 AM
319 Views
Never heard of the place. Must be regional.
- 01/07/2012 02:44:45 PM
248 Views
Re: Never heard of the place. Must be regional.
- 01/07/2012 08:21:24 PM
429 Views
Ah. I understand what you mean, but I don't agree. *NM*
- 02/07/2012 03:49:20 PM
112 Views
I somehow missed your Grand Canyon installment (and was waiting for it, too.)
- 30/06/2012 03:54:31 PM
519 Views
"Suddenly, cactuses. Thousands of them."
- 30/06/2012 09:26:39 PM
286 Views
Would also have fit in well in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. *NM*
- 01/07/2012 02:46:52 AM
127 Views