Quest of the Phoenix 2017 (8)

I woke up at 4:45 AM and couldn’t fall back asleep again, thanks to the combination of cacophonously singing birds and the gastric havoc wrought by yesterday’s gluttony. At least this would help me get an early start since I had a helluva drive today.

WHY do the single-serve coffee pots they have in hotel rooms have such short cords? They’re always up on some high surface where the cord doesn’t reach the nearest plug, and you end up having to bring them wayyy down by the outlet. I imagined John Wayne here, squatting to make coffee on the floor.

I was out the door by 7:00 AM. After going back through Casa Grande, my goal was to follow a chain of state highways Northeast until eventually hitting I-40 East at the town of Holbrook. Towards this end, I drove haphazardly east on 287 into the desert, being temporarily rerouted by yet more road construction (which this time managed, at long last, to completely shut down a road). I also got to sit there doing nothing for 15 minutes while a vast convoy of RVs emerged from some little ranch or something where an RV convention was going on, before finally the police said “Okay, that’s enough RVs for now” and allowed normal people who drive “cars” to proceed along the “road.”

In some or another quaint little town I also took a wrong turn and wasted another good 15 minutes driving out into BFE and back before regaining the route. Do people everywhere use the expression “BFE?” I hear it a lot in Michigan but never anywhere else, which is too bad (The “B” stands for “bum”; the “E” stands for “Egypt”).

Eventually, I got on 77 North (or 60 East? Both, really) and crossed the edge of the Tonto National Forest, which led me into some hills that were covered by forests… of cacti. That was cool.

Then the road got Colorado-esque again (though snowless) and suddenly I was in the SALT RIVER CANYON. I didn’t even know that it was there. I was just trying to blunder my way up 77/60/whatever and get back on the freeway, and oop, canyon. I can’t really complain though. I mean, just look at it in the pictures down there.

Nonetheless going was slow and I knew it was going to be a LONG day. I passed through several small mining towns, stopping at a Taco Bell in one for brunch, where I had the longest wait of all time behind some asshole in a pickup who, when he finally got his order, accepted something like five separate bags from the window before departing. I always, ALWAYS pull into fast food drive-throughs directly behind people like this, though this scoundrel was even worse than usual. He must have been buying 45 breakfast tacos for a retirement home or something.

As I continued to climb (back) into the mountains, the land finally became both flatter and greener, and soon sprouted an outright pine forest. Reminded me just slightly of Northern MI, though something was obviously different thanks to the higher elevation and lower humidity. I turned straight north at the town of Show Low, which had an interesting rustic-woodsy atmosphere while still seeming halfway prosperous (and which also featured an apartment building with the words “AMERICA WAKE UP HILARY [sic] IS A CRIMINAL” embossed on an entire side wall in huge letters; alas, I could not reach my camera in time. Oh, and this reminds me that I forgot to hunt down and photograph the anti-Trump billboard in Phoenix, which was a bit controversial there because Phoenix is actually the only large urban area in the U.S. that went red in the last election. Not that that actually has much to do with my interest in the place, though).

Beyond Show Low, the land became scrubby steppe-plateau again, like a flatter, pale-greenish version of northeast Colorado. Despite the lack of many obvious “features”, there was a subtle majesty to it. And again the plateau-feeling was back: The never-vanishing “I’m up on a high balcony or something” sense, at least slightly, even when there was nowhere to “fall off” within miles and miles. Perhaps it was a side-effect of having driven up onto said plateau from a lower elevation (and thus knowing I was “up”), and if I spent time there it would go away.

Finally, I reached Holbrook, a nice-enough-looking town which seemed to sport a bit of Route-66-themed tourism accouterments; once on I-40, I would essentially be driving on top of the ruins of the famous and now-mostly-extinct highway. Route 66 was a two-lane road that ran from Chicago all the way to Los Angeles. Small towns and small businesses profited by attaching themselves to it, and it became an iconic piece of Americana. However, it was largely replaced by the newer interstate freeways, and that combined with the U.S.’s increasing shift towards a corporate-chain-store economy had a deleterious effect on the many thriving little quirky places that had made a living catering to 66-travelers.

It had taken me a good five hours to get here. Now it would only be another eight on I-40 as I drove across northeastern Arizona, the entire state of New Mexico, and the first half of the Texas Panhandle to my lodgings in Amarillo. So far, rifling through my CDs, I had already listened to a classic rock mix, three black metal mixes, and a thrash mix. I might have to tackle some of my other podcasts a bit later.

Northeastern Arizona consisted of more rolling semi-arid plateau lands, much of them in the possession of the large Hopi, Navajo, and Zuni reservations, and accordingly rather impoverished. Sadly, on most statistical measures that quantify such things, the U.S.’s Native population often fares rather badly, with poverty, alcoholism, and crime being rampant. Back home Indian reservations are few and largely invisible (aside from the casinos, of course).

Shortly after crossing the New Mexico state line, I stopped at a visitors’ center/rest area to pee and have a look around. The facility was located in an area of low brown cliffs with traces of pueblo-ruins on their sides.

Not long after this, I decided I could use some lunch and exited at the city of Gallup, which is fairly small but still the only “city” between Flagstaff and Albuquerque, and which according to the blue sign on the freeway contained a Sonic (we have some of those in Michigan down by Detroit and stuff, but not up by Saginaw). I had to drive a bit to reach said restaurant and then found the city to be rather dusty and rough-edged, to an extent one doesn’t often see in America anymore. It almost looked like a frontier town from 120 years earlier. Later, checking the Intraweb, I discovered that Gallup has a high crime rate. Property crime there is worse than almost anywhere I’ve been, and the violent crime rate, at five times the national average, puts it in the top tier of Most Dangerous U.S. Cities — comparable to, for example, Saginaw, Michigan.

However, nothing happened as I pulled into Sonic, ordered a chicken sandwich of some sort and some mozzarella sticks, and then left immediately (due to time concerns, not the above crime-statistical blather, of which I was unaware at the time anyway). I ended up eating all this while driving because I am really smart. Fortunately the freeway was light on traffic so I could pretty much just set cruise control and engage in cursory guidance of the steering wheel with a couple fingers while I mostly focused on dipping the mozz-sticks in the marinara-cup which I set right next to the gear-shift, and then on eliminating the chicken sandwich, which occasionally required both hands. It is fortunate that "handling a bunch of crap while driving" is part of my job description.

Although there remained some nice scenery (including another ghost-of-the-horizon lone mountain), on the whole, New Mexico was pretty depressing. Poverty was everywhere, and the land was mostly a dull brown that gave off a sense not merely of austerity or ruggedness as had been the case in Utah and Arizona, but of actual desolation. Signs and billboards advertised local businesses which likely gained all of their meager income from I-40 traffic (and, previously, Route 66 traffic), yet the signs and billboards themselves were growing warped and faded, which contrasted with the bright image of family-vacationeering they aimed to project. I became more than a little melancholy and began to feel guilty for having mostly spent my money at corporate chains, not to mention my ridiculous room-service splurge at the luxurious hotel the night before. Intertwining thoughts of America’s brutal history (though we’re not much different from almost every other country, in this regard) and the fading of the American Dream played out in my head as I continued my zombified progression across the wasteland. I entered another of my occasional moods where I can understand why Siddartha Gautama spent 40 days or four years or whatever it was sitting under a tree and trying to resolve the suffering in the world.

In Grants, a small and also-desolate town another 40 miles or so from Gallup, I stopped for gas. I then began listening to RadioLab, six episodes of which I had burned to three CDs. The first one dealt with the mating habits of Deathwatch Beetles, so named because the five, quick, consecutive thumping sounds they make (as part of their mating call) used to be heard in quiet rooms where old people lay waiting for the impending funeral, and people thought that the sound was the Devil drumming his fingers impatiently as he waited to claim his next soul. Evidently, the beetles spend YEARS digging through their shitty little nests in the ground as pupae, then upon emerging as adults, they have mere days to find a mate (which is just as difficult for their species as for many others) before dying uselessly.

The second episode on the disc dealt with the nihilist philosophy espoused by Eugene Thacker, author of In the Dust of This Planet, about how existence is meaningless and horrible and so forth, and about how the title of his book had been cynically exploited for cash by marketers who put it on designer t-shirts. All around me as I listened to this the land continued to look like one of those brown and snowless Michigan-winter days, only minus the possibility of spring ever arriving. I was in a VERY GOOD MOOD right about now, as you might imagine.

At some point (I can’t remember if it was before or after I started listening to RadioLab), I passed through Albuquerque. As usual, traffic got much worse and I had to actually concentrate on jockeying with massive semis and meth-laden cars for sufficient road-space in which to not die. Nonetheless, the brief impression I got of the city was positive. Approaching it from the west, you can see it rising near the base of the mountains, and even on the freeways system they seem to have made an effort to give everything a sort of red-brown Southwestern aesthetic — almost as if, unlike half of Phoenix, the residents of Albuquerque were not trying to hide the fact that they live in the desert. I’ve heard it’s a fairly crime-ridden city (according to actual “facts”, that is, not just because of Breaking Bad), but I nevertheless wouldn’t mind returning when I had time to look around.

Traffic stayed fairly nasty during a brief foray into some reddish mountains, and then I was back out in the boonies. Here the land grew flatter and a bit grassy, and thus more boring even if slightly less inhospitable than the western part of the state. I was starting to get tired, and the day was winding down into late afternoon, almost early evening. I listened to another episode of RadioLab that dealt with some guy’s bizarre World War II anecdote about how, during a forest fire in Finland caused by shelling during the winter, some escaping horses ran into a crystal-clear lake which insta-froze as soon as they touched it and entombed them all in ice. Most of the episode was devoted to examining if this was possible (conclusion: Probably not, although it is possible to freeze water in a similar fashion due to the way ice crystals need some sort of debris in order to form properly, hence pure water does not freeze at the “correct” temperature). After this, I shut it off for awhile because I had to keep the volume insanely high in order to discern the speakers’ voices over the noise of my car barreling down the freeway at 75 to 80 mph.

I stopped for coffee in Tucumcari, which used to be a popular Route 66 stopping point and which was actually rather nice and prosperous-looking. The McDonald’s was super-modern, with an electronic ordering screen off to the side of the main counter (I actually “went inside” this time since I needed to empty my bladder as well as refill it), though most people were just ordering in person the old-fashioned way, regardless.

Dusk descended as I neared the Texas panhandle, giving the sky a hazy purplish-blue look that was menacingly eerie in conjunction with the empty brown fields below. Crossing the state line, it grew fully dark, and a sign informed me that I was back in Central Time Zone (Arizona does not observe Daylight Savings Time, so I lost one hour crossing into NM, and another crossing into TX. Driving back east, I was now going forward in time rather than back). In a decision of utter brilliance on my part, I turned RadioLab back on and began listening to one of their Halloween episodes, about a guy who was fairly sure that the farmhouse he had inherited was being haunted by his dead parents. I switched it off somewhere in the middle since I fucking hate ghosts (good thing I don’t believe in them and have never encountered one and want to make sure it stays that way). I was nearing exhaustion and having difficulty focusing on the road, which was just sort of a vague strip with little white and yellow lines on it leading into a blackish void, with a cloud-covered full moon above and a bunch of those metal agricultural tower thingies flashing red lights above the horizon, all of them perfectly synchronized. It was pretty weird and I began talking to myself loudly to help concentrate and not doze off or something.

But, as I then came to Amarillo, traffic did not get bad (it was now around 10 at night) and I found my exit, street, and hotel without incident. I’d been a bit concerned since the hotel in question had the phrased “medical center” appended to its name and I was hoping it wasn’t like, attached to a hospital and meant for patients’ families for something like that. In fact, it was a normal hotel that just happened to be near a “medical center”, I guess. Minus the GOLF RESORT the prior night, it was probably the nicest place I stayed in during the trip, with a generally riffraff-free clientele-vibe and all of the usual amenities you hope for at a mid-priced facility. I only moved the bare minimum of my luggage into the room (partially since it was on the second floor), and I passed out at 11:30, which was pretty damn late. Although I had been cheated out of an hour at each of the two state lines I’d crossed, thus making it seem like I’d been on the road for 15 hours, when in fact it was a mere 13.