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I took I-10 away from Phoenix for awhile, and then turned off it onto Salome Road, which headed straight for the small town of Salome, a railroad town where US-60 runs.  Most of the housing was temporary or seasonal; large numbers of retirees spend winters here, in RV parks or small cottages.  Almost everyone I could see, in cars and out of them, was old.  I followed the railroad tracks to the town of Hope, where I struck off to the northwest toward the river town of Parker.

The landscape began to change as I approached Parker.  Southern Arizona consists mostly of flat plains which abruptly rise in steep mountain ranges; the effect is like mountain islands in a desert ocean.  I suspect that this is the geological phenomenon called basin-and-range faulting so common in the Rocky Mountains: blocks of crust separate and float to different heights like a set of ice cubes in a drink.  The result is a sharp division between mountain areas and plains, as can be seen in places like Tucson or Jackson Hole.

Approaching the Colorado River, however, the landscape is more consistently broken and jagged; flat plains are found not surrounding mountains but nestled in between ranges.  Cactus and mesquite vanish; the Mojave desert begins.  The landscape is more dramatic but also darker and more menacing; the hostility of the desert to human life here is sensed not only as heat and waterlessness but even a hostility to passage: the mountains look jagged and impassable, even irrational.  Looking into them you cannot tell where the road might go or where the pass should be.  It is not even clear there would be a path large enough for a man to walk through them.  Given a brown-black cloud cover, the area could pass for Mordor.

This makes the arrival at the Colorado River, which runs through this wilderness, all the more astonishing.  I parked my car by the river, turned off the engine, and sat on a grassy bank watching the water swiftly flow by.

I think it is fair to say that I have an Easterner’s perspective, though of course to me it seems like the human perspective, but it was an astonishing relief to be by the river.  I think my body felt for the first time that the danger of the desert – where I had been for months – was passed.  In Southern Arizona there is only one source of safety – your proximity to a tap.  It is like living on a planet with no atmosphere: you can venture away temporarily in your little bubble, but you always think of returning to base, which is life.  This is of course always true; food ties almost all of us to civilization, because we cannot feed ourselves alone; but our need for food is a fairly long leash.  Our need for water will bring us back ten times as quickly.

The Colorado River.

But here at the river there was abundance, and, to my senses, safety.  The smell of the river was astonishing – an incredible pleasure.  The sight of it was a feast for the eyes as well, blue and green in the most fabulously rich saturations.  At its margins so many plants grew that there was a jungle of life, which was again utterly refreshing.  The flow was impressive, and a coolness came up from it.  I had expected the river to be brown and sludgy but this was not the case at all; perhaps all the upstream dams catch the silt.  The water was clear and had the mineral-blue color of mountain snow.

Again, I do not deny my Eastern sensibilities, but I was astonished that the cities of Arizona are not along the river.  The Colorado has been called the American Nile, with the odd difference that all of Egypt’s population lives along the Nile, whereas in America we have put the cities in the desert and then move the water to them.  The Colorado waters Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson, and others, but the largest city on its course is Yuma.

Just on the other side of the river was California, which tempted me.  In the desert on the other side of the river was Joshua Tree National Park.  It allowed backcountry camping as far as I knew.  I had left with the intention of spending some time in the wilderness.  Literally as I drove along the river to the place where the bridge crossed into California I did not know if I would cross or stay on my side and follow.  If I stayed in Arizona I was basically resigning myself to what I considered possible in the circumstances: I would travel conventionally, stringing together a series of scenic highlights over the course of a long drive, with motels in the in-betweens.  As I came to the intersection I was still unsure; I stopped at the stop sign, signaled one way, stopped again, got honked at by the person behind me, and decided to go in the other direction.  I would stay in Arizona.

Along the river.

I drove north along the river and found myself a motel alongside it, in a narrow canyon which I found lovely beyond other desert landscapes I had seen.  Again, mine is the Eastern perspective, but a river utterly changes the human experience of a place, because a river situates a place in a narrative of source, course, and destination which makes sense to the human mind.  The parallels with religion are obvious, a correspondence which religions have not been unaware of.  I was going to stick with the river.

Heading north from Ajo I had to go through one more checkpoint – almost old hat by now.  My plan was to head north, but as there had been a large snowstorm in the northern part of the state and the roads were supposedly messy, I figured I could follow the Colorado River and enter the north via the low ground.  But since there was no direct route there, I ended up for a short while on old US-80 heading towards Phoenix.  This followed the Gila River, through the fabulously Western-sounding Gila Bend.

Crossing the river heading north there was clear evidence that a dam had burst there; the rubble was still in the riverbed and concrete anchorings on the walls of the chasm.  This was apparently the Gillespie Dam – a private dam.  I hear that one of the reasons why the federal government got so involved in dam building was the horrible record that private businesses had building dams.

The Gila actually had water, unlike the “rivers” of Tucson, and its valley, which US-80 followed, was green and to Eastern eyes very pleasant.  In fact, it immediately made clear to me why Phoenix, the primary town on the Gila, became Arizona’s capital.  The Gila forms a classic valley which, to an Easterner, immediately suggests home – a fertile valley framed by low hills with farms every half-mile or so along the road.  They were obviously irrigated, but they have probably been irrigated a long time – the water source is at hand.  The farms reminded me a little bit of Arkansas, and closer inspection revealed why – they were almost all growing cotton.

I took a handful from a few of last year’s plants, which were growing as weeds outside the fields and had been left unharvested.  It is such an astonishing crop – ready-made cottonballs, a substance which seems like it must be processed but is not.  Pulling one out of a bottle of aspirin would not have shocked me, but pulling one off a dried rotted plant always does.  To a northerner it is something of a mythical plant – it cannot be grown in the short seasons of the temperate zone, and requires a tropical or subtropical climate to thrive.

Cotton and clothing are beginning to receive some long-overdue attention.  The immense effort involved in the production of clothing – which used to be the occupation of the vast majority of womankind – is hard for a Westerner even to conceive of now.  Clothing is cheap, and it is treated as such – as something ephemeral, to change with the fashions.  Disposability of this sort must be based on something unnatural and unsustainable.  The Guardian ran a piece on the relationship between cotton production in impoverished countries and their accompanying food shortages, which received some corrective but proper attention in Mother Jones.  I’m sure that New York fashionistas and their sorry imitators could care less about such things, but headlines like “is your clothes habit starving people?” can at least point people in the right direction.  You don’t really need more than a few new pieces of clothing per year, really, and much of that can be reused-recycled.  I will not deny that modern industrial society seems very attractive when it comes to the production of clothing, but to accept mechanization is not the same as accepting wanton waste.

Driving out of Tucson on the Ajo highway last night, I received a call from a friend in the middle of nowhere, about ten miles outside Why, Arizona.  I pulled over to the side of the road to take the call.  The phone’s records indicate that I had been talking to him for eleven minutes when things got interesting: an SUV stopped on the dark, abandoned road, then waited on the shoulder.  Another showed up.  The first SUV then pulled to my side of the road and came right up behind me.  It was a police car.  After a few minutes of waiting in the car, the officer turned the police lights on.  I hung up on my friend to deal with the police.

The officer came up with his bright flashlight, examining the interior of my car before greeting me.  I explained to him that I had received a phone call and had pulled over to the side of the road to take the call.  He demanded my I.D.  I reiterated that I had only stopped to take a phone call, I was fine, there were no problems.  “I need to see your I.D., sir.”

“Is Arizona always like this?”  I asked.  “I just thought it would be safer to pull over rather than talk while driving.  That’s all.”

“You’re parked very close to the edge of the road.”  This was true, as the shoulder was narrow.  That said, there was nobody on the road either.

Meanwhile a third police vehicle showed up.  They all had their obnoxious flashing lights on.  It looked like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which in a way it was.  I handed over my I.D.

I then sat in my car, helplessly stewing.  I had felt so horribly contained in Tucson – had felt that there was nowhere to go.  I had been lonely every day and alone not once.  My one attempt to spend time out in the desert had resulted in precisely the kind of police attention my second attempt was now garnering.  As the minutes stretched out I called my friend back.  The officer returned, now accompanied by two more officers.  They briefly discussed the contents of my pickup’s bed before the officer started asking questions about my driver’s license.  I absolutely refused his request to search the vehicle.  Then the questioning shifted: “Where are you going, sir?”

“Ajo.”

“Ajo?  Do you know anyone in Ajo?”

“No.”

“But you’re going to Ajo?”

Here, as always happens, I began to get upset.  “Yes, I’m going to Ajo.  No, I don’t know anyone in Ajo, but I can go there anyway, can’t I?  I just pulled over because I got a phone call and I wanted to take the call.  I thought it would be safer to pull over rather than talk while driving.  Can I go now?”

I looked at another one of the officers.  He said, “Don’t look at me, I’m not the officer making the stop.”

Now the initial officer was defensive.  “Sir, this is just a welfare check.  Your vehicle was just on the side of the road, we wanted to check to see if everything was okay.”

“I’m fine.”

In the end, it was a twenty-five minute welfare check, and then they sent me on my merry way.

A brilliant, brief post by one of the very best writers on the Internet.  One has this feeling all over the South but Savage actually captures it, in a hundred words and four pictures.