The Painted Desert

Tis been a while. I've come from everywhere to this little island in New York and in the interim I was going mad and I haven’t really said one word about all that here. I feel as though my mother might lose complete track of me should I not record the goings-on of my life on this website, to be stored in some far-away cavern of the Interweb forever and ever, ad infinitum. Thusly, I’ll get on with the tale telling. Hopefully this will end up being chronological. Order! Organization! Tidiness! We start with the wilds of the Arizonian desert. Hizzah!

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So after a decent, belly-full-of-Carl’s-Jr. sleep, I got out of the EconoLodge and back into the Ford Ranger and sped out of Albuquerque as fast as my four cylinders would allow. Interstate 40 is long and hearty, good gravel for most of the way, well-striped and fairly free of hazards (potholes, carrion, abandoned vehicles). All in all, a solid eight out of ten on the scale of Interstate Amazingness and Driveability. But it is also sad. Old Route 66 peters along right next to I-40, cracked and patchy, grass tufts popping out between withered asphalt, road signs dangling from rusty poles with rusty screws. At points, you can see old gas stations that must once have offered up iced glass bottles of Coke-a-Cola to travelers; motels with dead neon signs; dead-end signs where the road has given up its conquest of The Great American West altogether. Meanwhile, you speed along the hurky-jerky interstate at intense speeds, passing bigrigs on the left, the “endless broken white line,” missing out on the bluest sky, the mesas, the cattle, the fields, the smell of the earth. The Robert Franks, the Jack Kerouacs, the Rat Packs, the Hunter S.’s – they had it right. Convertibles, transistor radios, wind in the face, cowboys, Route 66. None of the Interstate bullshit. No Triple A. Traveling as an activity, as a pastime, not an inconvenience, a frustration. So there you are, going fast and getting somewhere, but knowing that you must be missing out on so much, seeing remnants of a better time out the passenger-side window. Maybe not even a better time. Just a better time to travel.



Just after crossing over into Arizona, I headed off the road to this Navajo trading center:



Invariably, these outposts are tourist traps that manage to play up and upon the naïve traveler’s grand Native American fantasy: red men and women still living off the land, sewing blankets and moccasins, poor guys, drunk on firewater and tied to revenue of the almighty roulette wheel. Mostly I think the goods were all imported from Mexico, including the two blankets I purchased for $5 each and the baby moccasins I picked up for Sydney. Regardless, it felt like a memory was being made. Like it will be a place I’ll stop again and again, however many times I happen to be traveling through Arizona on I-40. Places like that can belong to me secretly. Not really mine, but a place that no one else I know knows about, so sorta mine in a sense that’s pointless and who really cares anyway except that it makes traveling more interesting and more personal. Look for the plastic animal scene up in the rocks (buffalo, eagle, deer, bear, roar!) and turn off. Navajoland!

Rain clouds had spurted up here and there, but the sky was bright and blue and – thankfully – cool. The rains had brought mild temperatures. None of the Tucson 117 degree bullshit, and Arizona became more attractive and amiable in my eyes. And then the Painted Desert.

A young femme back home had mentioned that I just had to visit the old Painted Desert if I was planning on driving through Arizona. And, really, who am I to disagree with a young femme about anything? Besides, she’s arty and hip and as much as I despise this type of young human, I’m pretty much one of them and so that’s that. There’s a little exit off the interstate and, much like White Sands National Monument, after paying your park fee, you drive around a 25 mile loop and pull off where you see fit. My first stop was here, at Kachina Point, for obvious reasons:



If there is any chance of me getting out on my feet and out into "The Wilderness Area" on my own, I take it. The sign warned of rattlers and wild animals and reminded that there are no trails, no humans, no rangers, no nothing but me and nature for many hundreds of square miles. The trail head was simply that: a starting point for endlessness. I scurried down the dirt incline and past a small German family who realized the vastness was too much for them, ha!, heartless bastards, and my feet soon sunk into the clay of the mesas and soft white rock of the badlands floor. Endless is, I guess, the best word. I got about three or four hundred yards from the trail head and realized that I was, generally speaking, fucked. Basically, as I’m sure the Germans quickly found, the Arizona badlands and mesas and desert sound like this:

rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrsssrrrrrrrrrrrrr rrrr rrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Snakes galore. I wandered a bit here and there and saw snake hole after snake hole, heard rattler after rattler, and figured that even with a full day’s worth of water and a change of clothes, this was, for all intents and purposes, a bad idea. I imagined rattler teeth and venom and a slow, sunburnt death on the cracked floor of the Painted Desert and National Petrified Forest. As before at White Sands, nature was quick in defeating me, my suburban sensibilities, my desire to explore, and after a few pictures like this:



I headed back.

The park is huge and striking. Artifacts from ancient natives. Dried riverbeds and active washes. Thunder clouds. Rains. Petrified forests. Unseen cougars and lynxes and coyotes, but just knowing they are there is fun. And, again, endless:



There’s something magnetic about not knowing where the land goes. Something like Lewis and Clarke must have felt, been propelled by. Curiosity to know, to pin down, to become a regular, a local, to have nicknames for rock formations and giant petrified wood clumps. The overwhelming sense that there is far too much to see. The unknowability of this vast plane of land that’s right there in front of you, but that you know will never be of you, in your head. Always a mystery.

There was, of course, some disappointment. Too many people. Trailers and campers and pictures. Not enough foot-accessible trails. Repetition. A mesa is a mesa is a mesa. Stuff like that. But it was six hours of my life that, while perhaps not changing me forever, definitely intrigued me and defeated me and humbled me.

I’ll be back to conquer soon. I just need a companion who’ll suck out the poison before it sets in to paralyze.