On the Road: Mesas and natural aquifers give way to spring training in suburbia

By Jacob R. Wheeler
Sun editor
Part two in a series of four travelogues (Read part one, “Leaving the Midwest’s gloomy grey for Southwestern red dirt” in June 19 issue of the Glen Arbor Sun)
“Though much is taken, much abides; and though / We are not now that strength which in old days / Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are, / One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” – Ulysses

My forehead swims when I sit up straight in the morning, and the pink blanket over me bares the musty smell of fever. I did not respect the elevation change Albuquerque, New Mexico throws at visitors from out-of-town – an omen, like the glance the roughneck at the bar gives he who walks into the wrong establishment, wearing the wrong attire. And I am paying the price, bed-ridden though my journey across America is not yet three weeks old. I have the lungs of a chain-smoking retiree, and my stomach turns at the mere hint of juevos rancheros in a greasy spoon diner on Route 66. Alas, the show must go on.
My host nurses me back to health with Thai takeout and creamy ice tea that could sooth even an irate postal worker’s palate, and we search the Spanish-style colonial square in the old town for straw hats and turquoise jewelry. If you don’t feel right, shop your way back to health, so say the billboards across this country. The afternoon of February 7, 2003 finds me taking a nap among the Petroglyphs – mountains of grey rocks outside of town marked by intricate drawings of sun gods and stick figures that were left there too long ago to call them “graffiti”. The gods settle my stomach, and the smell of the sweaty straw hat covering my face induces dreams of rolling in the hay as a small boy. When I awake I am healthy and rarin’ to go.
Thus, the stage is set the next day for a 10-mile hike up to the peak of the Sandia Mountains in an oncoming snowstorm, to an elevation of 12,000 feet where the air is so thin it could give you a paper cut. Saddled with enough water and Gatorade to stay alive, not just hydrated, we climb 4,000 feet on hitch-back trails through dirt, over slippery rock and even snow drifts until my brain gasps for oxygen and I stumble from left to right on the trail. “Focus, focus”, my guide tells me, for if I were to fall off the edge, this travelogue would be left for the crows to read. But I am in luck. The Petroglyph gods see our ascent complete and even have a gondola there waiting to take us back to Earth. The suspended cabin glides through the haze and casts an eery shadow on the red rock below like some Navajo ghost of the Southwest, and our lifeline shakes whenever a passenger coughs.
Now, with lungs as acclimated as those of a mountain goat, I am ready for a visit to the Acoma Pueblo, an Indian community set on a single giant mesa located about two hours west of Albuquerque. Acoma may be the longest continually inhabited community in America, and probably the friendliest, too. As I cruise the back roads of the Indian reservation south of I-40, everyone I meet throws up a hand in a wave as our paths cross for only half of a second. So I catch on, and slow down to greet the kids on their bicycles by the roadside, only to be greeted by dumbfound glances. Must be the Michigan license plate or the tacky plastic compass hanging from my windshield. At the parking lot from where the Acoma bus tour departs I am greeted by a convoy of vans selling turquoise necklaces and clay pots the color of a sunrise out of their open bay doors. Since turquoise reminds me of the soft sky I shop for a lady I know, then eat fried bread spread thick with honey atop the timeless mesa where roughly a dozen families have lived since long before the Franciscan friars climbed the hill and lugged their Catholicism up with them. The Acomans got along fairly well with their invaders, as evidenced by the traditional graveyard beside the majestic church where both Indians and white men are buried.
South, to Truth or Consequences, N. Mex.
Three months before in drizzly Copenhagen a Dane named Jesper had told me to seek out a little trailer-trash town near the Mexican border that was named after a popular 50’s television show, and soak in its hot springs. Could this be the Viking plunderer’s blind quest for the pool of eternal life? No, there really is a town called Truth or Consequences, and I choose truth; an aquifer bubbling up out of the clay and spilling into giant oak tubs beside the Rio Grande where I sit and welcome the morning. The consequences are the two lonely nights I spend shivering in the youth hostel’s trailer with a broken space heater as my only companion. But a stoic old hippy named Bart entertains me after my bout with the frigid night as crumbles of granola tumble down his beard. Every rural youth hostel in America seems to have an old man whose life responsibility it is to pass one traveler’s tale on to the next one, thereby aiding the spread of knowledge.
From Truth or Consequences I take a day trip to the White Sands dunes in the heart of the government’s missile testing ground. The National Park’s museum here swears that the billions of cake white sediments receding slowly across the desert are a natural phenomenon. They contrast with New Mexico’s typical terrain so much that one can recognize them from outer space. But let the imagination run loose, and remember that the U.S. government exploded mankind’s first nuclear weapon here, at the Trinity test sight just before obliterating Hiroshima. I break the law and steal from the Park, depositing two handfuls of the white powder into a coffee cup, nearly expecting my hand to fall off at first contact. When I get home I will compare this to the grains found in the Sleeping Bear Dunes. That evening I spoil Jeremiah, the proprietor of the youth hostel, with good Sierra Nevada Pale Ail, and listen to him lament how difficult it his to maintain true friendships when the people he meets always move on the next day. The life of the wanderer, or he who caters to them, is filled with wonders, new sights and sounds, but it is lonely too. I hope to look back on this journey more fondly some day when I have my own roof over my head.
West, to Silver City, N. Mex.
My little Honda probably looks forward to crossing the mountainous Gila National Forest on New Mexico’s western border as much a camel does to crossing the Sahara Desert. “Push me to my limit, master, with no regard for my well being, you thankless slave driver.” Highway 152 through the Mimbres Mountains presents hours of switch-back turns, up into snowy peaks, down into lush green, and then up again, as I constantly switch between second and third gear as my right foot moves promiscuously back and forth between the gas pedal and the brake. The car yawns and lets out a little whimper occasionally, but I refuse to take pity. She is my beast of burden, and we must cross this treacherous path.
At San Lorenzo I follow highway 35, and then 15, to the Gila Cliff Dwellings, where a tour guide leads me up into the caves where an ancient native civilization built homes completely within the rocks and established an architectural sophistication that we claim didn’t exist until the white man got here. Somehow the rock peoples just disappeared, and were in enough of a hurry to leave behind traces of their daily lives: cooking utensils, carvings, ladders. I am reminded of another great civilization — modern before its time — that mysteriously vanished: that of Knossos on the Grecian island of Crete. Could archaeology be a futile science. Are the peoples of old taunting us, leaving behind just enough artifacts to plant the seeds of doubt in our egos that we may not be living in the first civilized age?
That night I stay in an EconoLodge in Silver City, and immediately regret paying $60 for a gigantic room that is too clean and lonely when I could just as well have forked over $15 for another night of social entertainment at the youth hostel. I don’t need a double bed or a television set; these amenities make me feel far from home.
Northwest, to Phoenix, Ariz.
The moment I cross the state line into Arizona on February 12 the heavens open up and begin spitting rain. The cacti that appear at random east of Tucson multiply and take on a greener plumage the farther north I go, as if I am spreading the seeds of life in this barren region. Or maybe it’s just the rain. I am way ahead of schedule today and will reach Phoenix by noon if I don’t kill some time. So I pull of I-10 into the only market I can find – a strip mall – and load up on gifts for my hosts: bread, cheese, fresh flowers, and two bottles of Italian wine that complement each other: a red Chianti and a white Pinot Grigio. I had hoped the locals might acknowledge me as the one who brought the rains today, but there is no distinguishing between locals and tourists in this setting: we are all just faceless strangers wandering up and down the aisles of a gigantic air-conditioned Walmart. This mall is its own universe, and one where the weather never changes.
The Phoenix that I experience is one of several million lost souls who have forgotten their identities, or never knew them in the first place. They awake each morning to line up on this city’s countless expressways and accept the name, job title and cultural status they are assigned. Each one is given a three-room apartment in a cookie-cutter subdivision with a large gate barring admittance to anyone without an access card. The lawns inside the complex by the tennis courts and pool are mowed so low that they remind my feet of a carpet. Inside the apartment, one could turn off the air-conditioning and open a window, but the ever-present “whoosh” of automobiles going by on the expressway and the smell of chlorine wafting up from the turquoise pool often make one reconsider. Greater Phoenix is a series of grids, with nearly all roads meeting each other at right angles. Getting lost here is nearly impossible, though dropping off rented movies at the wrong Blockbuster (you’ll find one on almost every other block) is a distinct possibility.
This imagery may not seem so bad to those who have grown up in a suburban maze and enjoy the continuity of these communities, but the visitor who seeks out something unique at every destination, be it even one mile down the road from the last, is left wanting. I, for instance, relish Lake Michigan’s turbulent, icy waters exactly because they jar me from my sense of comfort, and I grew up mowing the lawn only when the grass had grown too high to find the errant baseball during a game of catch. I will not enjoy Phoenix, Arizona, and I realize this the moment I arrive. My host is not a native of this setting, and she seems out of place here. The moments when I remember her sitting on the ground drawing on a canvas with crayons or writing poems in the sand with a stick have been replaced by anxiety after an hour stuck in traffic jams. Phoenix seems to have sapped the creativity out of her, and that which was born on the free beaches of Lake Michigan at the height of summer is slowly dying here in confined suburbia. We go for a hike on Squaw Peak — this city’s version of a mountain trail – and the real challenge is not the climb, itself, but dodging ugly show poodles on leashes around every turn and finding traction on a trail that’s been worn into a superhighway. Alas, from the apex of Squaw Peak one gazes down at a million blue swimming pools. The British painter Hockney who lives in Los Angeles and glorifies this American sub-culture would certainly approve of this trail.
The only part of Phoenix I really enjoy is Guadalupe, the dirt-poor Mexican ghetto, set just south of Tempe where I’m staying and just across I-10 from a rich country club. So it goes in many American cities, the expressway separates two cultures as well as any Iron Curtain would. I have to lock my car and watch my back when strolling through Guadalupe’s dilapidated shantytown, as I’m sure all the banditos recognize the naivety resonating from my gringo skin. But at the local barbershop I meet Tommy, the only genuine Phoenix local during my three-week stay here. We engage in guy talk, debating the prowess of the local sports teams, sharing advice on how to deal with woman issues. That he is a Latino from the ghetto, and that I am a middle-class white boy from the other side of the continent, matters not. We are both humans addressing our own problems every single day, and that we will conquer some and fail others is a certainty on which we both agree.
Luckily, my stay in Phoenix coincides with the beginning of baseball’s spring training: the truest sign that eternal summer is on its way. Since I am from the Midwest, and since I am humble enough to bet my pennies on a perennial loser, the Chicago Cubs are my team. So I drive to Mesa for the Cubs’ first day of full-squad spring training in their complex next to HoHoKam Park. Their star Sammy Sosa’s has reported to work on time for the first time, ever. Sammy is his usual charismatic self, and feeds at least two sound bites to the small crowd at hand for every homerun he crushes during batting practice. The woman standing next to me, separated from the players by a mere fence, professes out loud that she wants to marry Sammy. He stops his game of catch with Moises Alou and walks over to write down his phone number. “Chica, call me collect,” he shouts. Sammy isn’t quite as interested in me, but when I ask him what he plans on doing this coming October, he pauses for a moment and says very matter-of-factly, “the playoffs man”. But I want to get a second opinion, so I ask Alou, the typical slow starter, after the game of catch if things feel like February or May. “February”, he says in a hoarse voice. Alas, another Cubs season of woe.
To be continued in the next issue of the Glen Arbor Sun