Arizona or Bust
Arizona, for me, was a lot like the South End is for most Camanoites. I really didn’t have much more than stereotypes to go on. Desert everywhere, snowbirds on a migratory flight path, illegal immigrants behind every saguaro cactus, Republicans on steroids and Viagra, eternal sunshine of the mind, epidemic melanoma.
We headed into the back country, not much in the way of work or water or food. My brother and a buddy wanted a roadtrip so we took the rental rig and beat it like a bad burro off the mainroads. Put about 1500 miles on it, covered it with mud, probably ruined the suspension and gave it back to Budget as payback for the time they charged me for a new tire after I’d blown one down in Arkansas that had 32,000 miles on it. After about four days of hard travel through the backroads only coyotes and the border patrol use, my impression of the state shifted appreciably. We didn’t see one single sombrero peeking out from the arroyos. Folks were universally friendly. The sun was only out about half the trip and the dry washes ran red with flash floods that forced us back to pave roads the last day. We even got turned back by a snowstorm in the mountains, barely getting to the nearest town before our car ran out of gas miles from anywhere.
Arizona is like a lot of the west, varied and beautiful. Mountains, desert, buttes and mesas, dry gulches and reservoirs, geologic wonders and archeologic sites — it had enough to make every day surprisingly different. We passed through Tombstone and the OK Corral, took pictures of the steel border wall at the Mexican border, climbed into cliff dwellings, 4 wheeled through the Saguaro National Monument, touched a toe in New Mexico, gambled with the locals in a desert watering hole, had dinner with the man who gave Obama is first job as an attorney, forded flooded gulches and wandered once abandoned mining towns that are tourist traps now. And we still only saw a small part of Arizona.
We went through more than a few towns on their way to ghost status and we crossed hundreds of miles where the only sign of life was cacti and sagebrush. The west is still wild here even though Wyatt and Doc are long dead. It’s a Big Land, too big for this short trip, but I’ll be going back, not to escape the winter here on the South End, but to see a different South End, the one at the end of America.