January 4, 2006 - Sojourn into the Past-Day 2

January 4, 2006 - Sojourn into the Past-Day 2

Saturday December 24th—Christmas Eve, IM and I wake early before 7:00 AM at our room at the Hampton Inn in Blythe, California, get cleaned up, check out of the hotel, and get back on Interstate 10 heading east. It was a chilly this Saturday morning, I’d guess in the 50s Fahrenheit, but there was little or no wind. A cloudless sunrise greeted us as we left California and entered Arizona. Shortly after we passed the truck scale inspection station and the grade pretending to be a mountain before descending gracefully into long expanse of low desert—elevation a few hundred feet above sea level, we could see a long stretch of nearly straight two-lane highway ahead of us interrupted only by clumps of traffic slowing around one or more 18-wheelers.

Before we entered the stretch of I-10 with few rest stops or gas stations, we pass the desert town of Quartzsite. The town is a paradise of snowbirds in their RVs of every shape and size. In early January the town becomes ground zero for rock hounds from all over North America and beyond. The life lesson that years traveling the roads of this country has taught us is that humans are restlessly wandering creatures. We are no different than the wildebeest of Africa, the migrating birds that call no geography a year-around home, whales circumnavigating the earth’s oceans… We all share a restlessness that drives us to different places for every possible reason. Some like the winter denizens of Quartzsite come to swap rocks, crystals, and gems from January 6 to 15—the largest show of its kind the promoters claim. This trip was meant to satisfy our own human restlessness and we leave Quartzsite behind and head for Phoenix.

The traffic is heavier along this stretch of road—now traveled by those journeying from California to relatives in the Grand Canyon State—than we remembered it in years past. Arizona as well as New Mexico has always reminded me of West Texas. The states share much in common, the climate, the influence their huge common neighbor to the south, Mexico, exerts upon all three, their conservative politics—liberal Santa Fe and Sedona, notwithstanding. As a kid growing up, I wanted away from that influence, which is why IM and I live in Northern California. Don’t get me wrong, I admire the values denizens of these states share: a reverence for hard work; a self-determined don’t tread on me attitude; a hard nosed pragmatic view of the world—you have to be downright practical in the desert; a strong sense of community—my family still has an extended network of friends and neighbors that look after one another unselfishly; among others. The southwest—including a great deal of California—is reclaimed from nature through extensive public works projects that enable large numbers of human inhabitance to live where the natural ecosystem would not allow. I’ve always felt as though I was trespassing somewhere large numbers of humans weren’t meant to be: an alien in an alien landscape. (Humans trespassing in places where large numbers of humans aren’t meant to be is becoming more true nearly everywhere in the world.)

The skyline of Phoenix greets us around 10:00 AM. We decided to pull off the Interstate somewhere in Goodyear—that suburb of Phoenix named after the giant tire company with a blimp that set up a shop here at the turn of the last century to grow Egyptian cotton to make the cords used in their rubber tires. It’s now a suburban sprawl complete with giant strip malls at every freeway exit sporting Walmarts, Targets, Lowes, and Home Depots superstores, all surrounded by fast food restaurants. We pull into one such center off the freeway and find an I-Hop where we thought we might get breakfast. As soon as we parked and got out of the car, we noticed five other cars disgorging passengers all heading toward the I-Hop to join a queue of waiting diners spilling out the door. IM and I turn around, get back into the Chevy Trailblazer and merge back onto I-10 heading east. The suburban outskirts of Phoenix could have been anywhere along any Interstate in the southwest—congested shopping centers with consumers competing for parking spaces, restaurant seating, checkout registers, gas pumps, and space on the Interstate, which was congested but moving at the limit as we passed through the heart of Phoenix. From the freeway you can see two clusters of high rises making the skyline appear as if two rival camps were vying for the right to be “downtown.”

We pass Interstate 17, which was hurrying north toward Flagstaff and the less populated more wooded region of the state. Shortly after we pass I-17, I-10 dips south for a short distance passing the western extreme of the twin runways of Sky Harbor Airport—great name for an airport—before it takes a southeasterly direction at the southern edge of Sky Harbor to begin it trek toward Tucson. The eastern part of Phoenix is hemmed in by the sprawling suburban growth—spurred by relocating California high-tech companies—of Tempe, Mesa, and Chandler. In Chandler on the East Ray Road off-ramp from I-10, we stop at a Circle K gas station to fill up and grab some water for the road—we had given up on breakfast as the wait would have delayed us far too long in our journey. Back on the Interstate, we pass through Casa Grande with its large outlet mall off I-10—appropriately called The Outlets at Casa Grande—and assimilate eastbound traffic off Interstate 8, the 564-mile road—the Border Friendship Route—that empties onto I-10 after connecting San Diego with south central Arizona. We reach Tucson just after noon, the two-lanes of I-10 broadening into sections of three, four lanes and up to six lanes as we cut through the center of Arizona’s second largest city—this one a close cousin to El Paso. The drive beyond is through the eastern part of Arizona where I-10 passes through mountain terrain that is spectacular, but by now we’re intent on making El Paso by mid-afternoon. We reach Deming, New Mexico just before 2:00 PM and I pull off at the East Motel Drive Exit, gas up at a Chevron Station and get back on the Freeway, heading for Las Cruces, the last place in New Mexico before entering Texas and El Paso a mere 40 miles beyond.

We make Las Cruces at about 2:45 then follow the southerly path I-10 takes as it leaves New Mexico and heads toward the western tip of Texas, where it follows the western border of the state with Mexico through El Paso and beyond. This stretch of I-10 resembles the suburban sprawl we encountered around Tucson and Phoenix, though it was less obvious in the smaller cities of we passed through in New Mexico, Lordsburg, Deming, and Las Cruces, the largest. We pass through the center of El Paso at about 3:30 and exit at Texas Highway 54, heading north to my folks’ place a couple miles away. After we park the Trailblazer and hug my folks, we bring in our luggage and settle down for our first meal of the day, a bowl of Costco clam chowder and a garden salad wash down with a glass of Kendall Jackson Merlot salvaged from one of my brother’s 18-wheeler crashes—no one hurt just a lot of cases of wine spilled along the side of I-10 in Arizona someplace, one bottle from which I was tasting for dinner. We were home and it felt much the same as it did on the numerous Christmases in the past.