Chapter 23: Next stop, Phoenix
Once we crossed into Arizona, I picked up in the book I had purchased in Philadelphia, a piece of what I thought at the time was airport fiction but centered around the state in which I now traveled. This was clearly a reprint because the picture of Anthony Quinn was on the cover from a movie made based on the book, he dressed as a plains indian.
My friend Hank, back East, would have been offended by the novel's title, The Drunken Indian, claiming it was politically incorrect. I did not automatically believe every Indian was a saint nor as Mark Twain seemed to think, every indian was a drunk. The only Indian I'd seen in my life were those on television and those on the side of the road now selling trinkets to the tourists. I wasn't even sure I wanted to meet one, not so much fearing the loss of my scalp, as the sense of alien-ness such a meeting might make me feel.
Like many people I would talk to later, I felt an incredible sense of inferiority now that I had reached the place so many movie westerns had boasted about over the years, the wide sky and the stark landscape giving me the idea that human kind might not be the end all of the universe.
The few times we paused for a rest, and I stood out in the arid air, I felt lost, as if I was a mere dot on a map of the world, unworthy of notice. The feeling grew so intense at times, I buried my nose in that book in order to read about what I was traveling through rather than witness it for myself.
The book was actually centered somewhat south of where we were, around a reservation just north of Phoenix, but since the bus was scheduled to plunge south after Flagstaff, I figured I'd read as much as I could on the way there as to get a sense of the place by the time, I reached it.
The book proved to be no airport novel, but a moving satire on the culture of the west, and as I read and as we traveled, my opinion of the place grew lower. I would later find this same low opinion of Arizona when I read the life story of Woody Gutherie, and still later, when the state refused to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s memory.
Still later, I would change my opinion again, as I came to better understand “The West,” and the hardships people endured to settle here, where people white or red, struggled against and environment that didn’t want them here, and how each culture developed its own strategies for survival, often clashing with each other in the process, ultimately, those with more guns claiming victory, not over the land – nobody ever won against that – but over each other.
Hippies back east railed about how the White Man stole the Red Man’s land, when, in fact, it was no man’s land to start with.
We had come to the heart of conservativism as if the harsh sun had baked people's flesh so well that no sense of human need could enter the hearts or blood stream of people who lived here. It was pick yourself up by your bootstrap or starve philosophy that I would later find so offensive and yet at the same time so appealing, a raw, powerful and dangerous as the landscape itself.
As the signs marking the approach of Flagstaff fluttered by the wide windows, I suddenly felt a chill, and after a careful search of the bus around me, I found the bus driver staring at me in his rearview mirror.
Like many of the local white people I had seen since entering Arizona, the driver had that sunbaked look, skin so tanned and taunt I might have played his face with drum sticks. He seemed to squint, and yet in the midst of that squint sat two grey eyes as hard as marbles, their uncompromising stare seeming to read something from my expression I did not know I broadcast.
I’ve been told a fugitive's face gives him away, his guilty life story revealed in nervous ticks or some refusal to look at someone squarely.
As the driver studied me, I became convinced he knew exactly who I was and what I had done and waited until we reached Flagstaff to call the police.
Perhaps he didn’t know but concluded from my short hair and my military appearance that I might be a deserter, looking for some way out of the country.
This was Barry Goldwater county, perhaps the most patriotic of places, where such a deserter would have seemed far worse than a Judas.
I wasn’t sure which I feared more, being taken for the thief I was or condemned as a traitor I was not. The former would end me up in a jail cell, the second would find me bleeding somewhere in a ditch along the side of the road.
Outside, the landscape grew more crowded as other buildings appeared signs packaged goods and cocktails with taverns advertised with martini glass signs. Many of the businesses had names like the Turquoise Tepee, Western Auto, Canyon Cafe, the Pow Wow Trading Post Motel. All the businesses from motels to restaurants sold an assortment of items aimed at drawing in tourists, selling film, jewelry, petrified wood, indian arts and crafts. One indian trading post boasted of "a friendly Navajo," while from time to time I saw signs along the road side that simply had a black rabbit painted onto a white backdrop, advertising some store whose name locals apparently knew from the illustration.
And in the distance, the sacred mountains of the Navajo and Hopi, the San Francisco Peaks glittered in the sun light, white topped, blue bottomed, both inviting and alienating at the same time.
I also saw more and more signs for things connecting themselves to the Grand Canyon or Hoover Dam, though both I knew from one of the other passengers with a guide book lay north and west of Flagstaff and the bus, would be turning south after a short rest stop.
Around me, the rest of the bus seemed in awe of the landscape, stunned by the skyscrapers of stone that dotted the north like top-heavy giants, red-colored buttes left over from some prehistoric age. We briefly passed through an area called the Petrified Forest where numerous other stores offered to sell samples. The loving couple in one of the seats behind me and on the other side of the bus had renewed their vows, cooing again as they had when they first boarded the bus in the East. Mr. and Mrs. Warton oohed and aahed, this scenery, the meat and potatoes of their life on the road, he snapping pictures through the glass, although the photographs would hardly reflect the hugeness of the landscape. Even the professor seemed impressed, his puffing pipe producing more and more fumes as if to express his excited mood, though his stern expression never altered.
Finally, we pulled into Flagstaff.
A man named Edward Whipple is credited with founding the place when opened a saloon here in the 1870s, and the town that developed around the saloon was then called Antelope, something that was immediately changed once the railroad built a depot here.
Most of the original buildings were constructed by the railroad, though with the growing population of more than 30,000 many more buildings had been constructed since. The town was the seat of a county that boasted of five indian reservations, the Grand Canyon and numerous other historical sites. Tourists flocked here, using the town as a jumping off point. The town was also home to the local Indian Government which over saw policing activities through the wide indian lands nearby. As we drove into the heart of the city, I saw official signs directing drivers to the Northern Arizona University, the Lowell Observatory and the Norther Arizona Museum.
Once at the bus station, the hostess and driver changed, and I felt an immense relief when I found no police waiting for me as I stepped down onto the gravel lot and made my way into the station for coffee, a toilet and a local newspaper.
Even though we still had to visit Phoenix, I knew that sometime after night fall, this bus would roll into Los Angeles, and that this next leg was the last leg, with this driver and this hostess would be the last we would see on this trip.
I was already anxious to get it over with.
Comments
Post a Comment