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On the name “Kingman.”

24-Mar-12

For whatever reason, I find “Kingman” one of the most appealing names of all the Route 66 towns – if I were getting a Route 66 tchotchke, I think I would try to get one from Kingman.  I don’t know why.

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Through Kingman.

24-Mar-12
Pickups are mighty useful for antique shopping.

Pickups are mighty useful for antique shopping.

I’ve found that when I have the blues like I’ve had, there are three things I want to do: 1) work more, as a relief from thought 2) drive around looking at things 3) buy stuff.  One possible explanation for American culture is that most people are actually as depressed as I have been recently.  “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”  They thus spend their lives on work, cars, and crap.  This should be the motto of at least half the municipalities in America.  LABOR, MACHINAE, RES.  The imagery should be updated with the motto – no more suns rising on farms – men in suits driving cars past women nicely accoutred buying crap.  I’m sure you could have gotten Wasilla back in the day to approve a new town seal that looked like this.  Just put a Jesus in there somewhere.

These thoughts in Kingman, which seemed like a shell of a town, but it had a nice grid plan and a few decent buildings, and so a few Californians had colonized the place selling antiques.  I presume they only spoke to each other, but I didn’t ask, it seemed less interesting while I was there than it does now that I think about it.  Coastal colonists in the middle of nowhere might know a thing or two about loneliness.  Still having the blues though, conversation seemed unappealing compared with shopping, and so I picked up a column for $35.  It was an odd green color, but then again, so is my truck.  It might need a new finish but you can’t get someone to carve you a new column for $35, not of real wood anyway.

From the Kingman Prison.

From the Kingman Prison.

One of the curious buildings in town was an old jail, adjacent to the courthouse.  I took a photo of the odd sign on its side, “IT IS UNLAWFUL TO COMMUNICATE WITH PRISONERS WITHOUT PERMISSION FROM THE SHERIFF’S OFFICE.”  The building was in fine shape but did not appear to be used anymore.  Its modest dimensions – about the size of a three-bedroom house – obviously cannot satisfy the needs of the modern military-industrial complex.  Though Kingman appears to be the kind of place where no one lives, Mohave County just scrapped the old jail’s successor, a 47,000-square-foot facility which has held nearly 500 inmates at times, though supposedly it holds only about 200 comfortably.  The new jail, opened in 2010, boasts 266,000 square feet.  Possible uses for the old jail, according to the Kingman Daily Miner, include “a transfer station for private prison corporations.”

There was a stone house down the block from the jail which reminded me of home back East – the plants were well watered and trees were growing around it, and its proportions suggested the 19th century.  It made me miss home but it also made me realize that the road was rising out of the desert.

A bit of the East in Kingman.

A bit of the East in Kingman.

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Sign in Yucca.

24-Mar-12

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Yucca, Arizona.

24-Mar-12
The Joshua Tree

The Joshua Tree

Along I-40 I had to pull off to the side of the road to get a glimpse of a plant.  I was fairly sure it was Yucca brevifolia, a Joshua Tree.  It is a signature plant of the Mojave Desert, and is as far as I know naturally absent from the Sonoran Desert area around Tucson.  It was the first I had seen.

I was not the first person to notice how unusual the Joshua tree is in central Arizona.  The next town was called “Yucca.”

There is some natural reason for enthusiasm about this plant – its treelike stature is so unusual in this landscape – and its form is so unpredictable, being contorted and only rarely linear – and in the desert anything as large as a tree must always stand alone.  But I cannot deny that the place it has in my mind is largely because of the U2 album, and its sequel Rattle and Hum, which provided a host of sounds and images and thoughts to my teenage mind.  The music is by now so wedded in my mind to this landscape that I cannot pass through it without thinking certain musical thoughts.  In particular I hear “One Tree Hill,” “Heartland,” “All I Want Is You,” and “In God’s Country.”  I don’t have a CD or tape player in my car, but I know the music well and can replay it in my mind as I drive.  “One Tree Hill” also quickly brings my mind to “Unchained Melody” –

Lonely rivers flow
To the sea, to the sea
To the open arms of the sea
Lonely rivers sigh
Wait for me, wait for me
I’ll be coming home
Wait for me.

“We run like a river runs to the sea.”

U2 was following a pattern already established by rock musicians from the British Isles (if they will forgive the term), who generally produced their best music when they attempted to artistically assimilate as much as they could of America.  To me it is endlessly fascinating.  The excellent Wikipedia article on the Joshua Tree album – my goodness, Wikipedia just keeps getting better in time – describes what seems to me to be a completely advisable artistic process:

Inspired by American tour experiences, literature, and politics, U2 chose America as a theme for the record…. Several events during the sessions helped shape the conscious tone of the album, including the band’s participation in A Conspiracy of Hope tour, the death of roadie Greg Carroll, and lead vocalist Bono‘s travels to Central America…. Throughout the sessions, U2 sought a “cinematic” quality for the record that would evoke a sense of location, in particular, the open spaces of America. They represented this in the sleeve photography depicting them in American desert landscapes….

Thematically, the album juxtaposes antipathy towards the United States against the band’s deep fascination with the country, its open spaces, freedoms, and ideals. Anger is directed particularly at the perceived greed of the Ronald Reagan administration and its foreign policy in Central America.[45] Bono said, “I started to see two Americas, the mythic America and the real America”,[46] hence the album’s working title, The Two Americas.[1]

Another working title was Desert Songs. These are fabulous working titles and express immediately why the album is still so fascinating.  “In the long run men hit only what they aim at.  Therefore – they had better aim at something high.”  Even though many of the tracks do not excite me, and much of the production I feel could be improved, the greatness of the theme gives worth to the whole endeavor.

Settling on the title The Joshua Tree was inspired:

The album sleeve was designed by Steve Averill,[30] based on the band’s idea to depict the record’s “imagery, and cinematic location” in the desert. The initial concept for the sleeve was to represent where the desert met civilisation,[1] and accordingly, one of the provisional titles for the album was The Desert Songs.[57] They asked their photographer Anton Corbijn to search for locations in the United States that would capture this.[21] From 14–16 December 1986, the band travelled with Corbijn and Averill on a bus around the Mojave Desert in California for a three-day photo shoot. The group stayed in small hotels and shot in the desert landscape, beginning at the ghost town of Bodie before moving to locations such as Zabriskie Point and other sites in Death Valley.[19] For the shoot, Corbijn rented a panoramic camera to capture more of the desert landscapes, but having no prior experience with the camera, he was unfamiliar with how to focus it. This led to him focusing on the background and leaving the band slightly out of focus. Corbijn said, “Fortunately there was a lot of light.”[18]

… On the evening after the first day’s shooting, Corbijn told the band about Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia), hardy and twisted plants in the deserts of the American Southwest, and he suggested their use on the sleeve.[1] Bono was pleased to discover the religious significance of the plant’s etymology;[57] early settlers, according to Mormon legend, named the plant after the Old Testament prophet Joshua, as the tree’s stretching branches reminded them of Joshua raising his hands in prayer. The following day, Bono declared that the album should be titled The Joshua Tree.[57] That day, while driving on Route 190, they spotted a lone-standing tree in the desert, unusual since the plant is usually found in groups.[1] Corbijn had been hoping to find a single tree, as he thought it would result in better photographs than if he shot the band amongst a group of trees.[57] They stopped the bus and photographed with the lone plant for about 20 minutes, something The Edge called “fairly spontaneous”.[45] Despite shooting in the desert, the group dealt with cold weather. Bono explained, “it was freezing and we had to take our coats off so it would at least look like a desert. That’s one of the reasons we look so grim.”[59]

Cafe in Yucca, AZ.

Cafe in Yucca, AZ.

Joshua in prayer is an image of precisely the idea embodied in The Two Americas – the contrast between desire and attainment of the Promised Land – and Joshua as a historical figure functions just as well, because the actual taking of the Promised Land – the rape of Canaan – contains in itself all the horror that makes attainment failure.

I-40 roars right through the heart of Yucca.  The businesses which catered to travelers along the old Main Street – which was Route 66 – are now all closed.  I spend a half hour walking around town, where I see no one but snap a few photos while the semis whoosh by.

The sign is there, the motel is gone.

The sign is there, the motel is gone.

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Road Music.

24-Mar-12

Hard not to think of the quiet parts of this song staring out into the desert as the sun begins to slant into the horizon.

See the sun rise over her skin
Don’t change it.
See the sun rise over her skin
Dawn changes everything.

Mississippi and the cotton wool heat
Sixty-six – a highway speaks
Of deserts dry
Of cool green valleys
Gold and silver veins
All the shining cities.

See the sunrise over her skin
She feels like water in my hand.
Freeway like a river
Cuts through this land
Into the side of love
Like a burning spear
And the poison rain
Brings a flood of fear
Through the ghost-ranch hills
Death Valley waters
In the towers of steel
Belief goes on and on
In this heartland
In this heartland.

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Route 66, Yucca, Arizona.

24-Mar-12

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Onto Route 66.

24-Mar-12

When at El Capitan in Yosemite, the largest cliff face in the world, my geology professor stated that granite was the rock best suited for forming large cliff faces.  When I asked him how we knew that, he said, “Because if there were a better one, there’d be a larger cliff face somewhere else made of that other kind of rock, but there isn’t.”  For an abstract thinker like myself, this was a surprising answer and as you see I have remembered it to this day.  Based on this reasoning, I will say that the middle Colorado River is one of the most forbidding places for bridge construction in the world.  I say this because if it were not, the Americans, perhaps the greatest road- and bridge-building culture of all, would have built more roads and bridges over and along it.  As it is, the middle Colorado is crossed by two bridges – both near each other – in some 600 miles.  The problem, of course, is the Grand Canyon.

Since roads do not cross the Grand Canyon the only approaches are dead ends coming from the major highways.  I had to leave the river to meet up with it later.  So I took Route 66 east, away from the river, and headed for the Grand Canyon.

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The Summum Absurditatis.

24-Mar-12

Just in case you were looking at London Bridge in Lake Havasu City and thought to yourself, “All very well, but where the deuce is the St. Magnus the Martyr Parish Boundary Mark?  That should surely be on the bridge, shouldn’t it?”  Well, here it is.

St. Magnus was apparently an Orkney warlord who, being kidnapped once by “the usurping King of Norway” – also, astonishingly, named Magnus – refused to turn pirate.  Later he was assassinated by another Orkney warlord named Hakon.  Magnus must have had friends in the church, for he was given the title of “martyr” for his pains.

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Best Pizza in Northern Arizona.

24-Mar-12

The thing that’s frightening about the sign is that it might be true.  My general conclusion is that it’s not even worth trying the stuff to find out.  Unlike Southern Arizona, which does have some good pizzerias.

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The River.

23-Mar-12
I'm so impressed no one arrested me for looking at the dam.

I was so impressed I didn't get arrested for looking at the dam.

I woke up the next morning and headed north along the river.  I saw the Parker Dam, visually uninspiring though an important piece of American infrastructure: the dam was built by the notorious William Mulholland to supply water for Los Angeles.  I had recently read Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert and found myself generally unsympathetic; the book, written in 1986, could use a fresh look.  Reisner portrays the municipal water supply men as a bunch of Yosemite Sams hellbent on hydrologic conquest as a kind of unfortunate byproduct of penis possession.  That there might really be a value to having a city like Los Angeles, as opposed to the little adobe village it was in the 1870s, does not seem to enter into his thought process.

This is to me a strange myopia.  I see no reason for the malls of Los Angeles to have lawns when places like Tucson have legitimately made xeriscaping an art form – see the opuntia down below for an example of weird and spectacular desert blooms – but that is not to say that men like Mulholland were idlers and tyrants, or that dambuilding was the West’s tulipmania.  We need to correct the last century’s excesses: too much water is wasted on unused lawns, silly pools, and ill-advised gardening; the ecology of streams should be restored as much as possible, for example the restoration of Californian salmon; we rely far too much on irrigation farming in the desert and we should shift much of our farm production back to well-watered areas (the East Coast in particular).  These are corrections within our capacities.

These problems point to the larger problem of human nature, which is always prone to squander abundance.  In fairy tales this merely sets the young heir up for a confrontation with wisdom and scarcity.  It has only become a problem because our powers are so magnified; we squander now not just the capital of our kingdom but of all life.

I've never seen the Nile, but river and desert always suggest it.

I have never seen the Nile, but the combination of river and desert always suggests it.

But it is certain that men like Mulholland created abundance, and the sight of Lake Havasu in the Mojave Desert is impressive, and while it may hold no charms for men like Reisner it certainly affected me.  This was true even in Lake Havasu City, the capital of the region, a modern town built after the dam.  Despite all its flaws it was instantly my favorite city in Arizona.  This is because it had a natural draw, a coastline, which it had sagely turned into beach and park.  I could walk along the sandy beach, put my feet into the water – cold but not unbearable – take my shirt off and get some sun.  This simple interaction between man and environment of course has to take place on foot, and so it had the most developed pedestrian culture of any place I had seen so far.  This had another benefit, which is that people could drink here without having to worry about driving home.  This, coupled with the beach, makes Lake Havasu City a spring break destination for college students.  I do not know if it is a minor destination, but I am in general no fan of crassness and I saw nothing objectionable in town, despite the fact that it was indeed spring break.  It was daytime, so perhaps that made a difference.  There were large numbers of college students in beach attire idling about.  It seemed innocent to me.  In general, all pleasures seem innocent compared with the automobile, and no form of socializing so sinister as undesired solitude.

the channel

The channel in Lake Havasu City.

The city was built, like Tarentum, on a promontory, which, like Tarentum, was then cut by a canal, creating an island and a mainland section of the town.  The channel has a little marina, beach areas for swimming, and walkways on either side where people, especially the young people who still retain their vestigial capacity for ambulatory locomotion, stroll about.  It’s all quite pleasant.

Bridging this channel, utterly incomprehensibly, is London Bridge.  Apparently this was in need of repair for some reason or other at some point or other and so – naturally – it was taken down and shipped to Lake Havasu City, where it was then – naturally – used to bridge the canal.  I did not ask for further details because it was so utterly absurd that it should not be dignified with any further explanation.  All I can say is that I recommend the practice, because it is one of the nicest bridges in America.  At this stage of our history we really are better at shopping than creating, so we should play to our strength and just buy whatever stuff we need or want.

Yup, London Bridge. In Lake Havasu City.

Yup, London Bridge. In Lake Havasu City.

Looking at it, I couldn’t see what in the world could have been wrong with it.  It’s made of granite.

Looks pretty solid to me.

Looks pretty solid to me.

And one more image:

Looks nicer than anything we could have made, so I approve.

Looks nicer than anything we could have made, so I approve.

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