Southwest is More than an Airline

The Southwest (which I left last night, as I moved into Oklahoma) is very much like the pictures you’ve seen of it. It has a stark beauty that really appeals to me. The great, flat, brown and green sagebrush wasteland goes on forever, and the highway just travels through it, as if it were traversing an abandoned planet. When there are signs of habitation, they are very often old and abandoned, weathered and graffiti-ed, often fallen down, probably built before the highway and abandoned when the highway left them high and dry. Many of these are tourist-trap relics in the shape of teepees (even though the Southwest native Americans didn’t use teepees), often with huge arrows pointing into the ground.

There are, for sure, the mesas I mentioned previously, sometimes ranked in a range of mesas that are miles long. But mostly they are solitary, big and small, scattered randomly like strange statues from a forgotten world. There are what we think of as mountains, too, also scattered singly and randomly, sometimes in a range in the distance. Just outside Flagstaff, there is a huge, solitary mountain with snow on the top, which can be seen from thirty miles in either direction.

There are still attempts to sell to the travelers who are no longer traveling in the Southwest, but traveling through it. Occasionally a gift shop entrepreneur will put up huge billboard, six or eight at a time, evenly spaced over a half mile or so, each one shouting “Jewelry!” “Candy!” “Moccasins!””Clean Rest Rooms!” When you finally get to the shop, which is right at the exit (often the only thing at the exit) and clearly visible from the highway, it is clear that if you piled all the billboards up together they would tower over it. My favorite – actually, it was today, in Missouri, so not in the Southwest – is the Discover Uranus Sideshow Museum and Candy Shop. You just don’t see that sort of stuff in Massachusetts.

In Arizona, the highway rises to 7,300 feet above sea level (half again as high as Denver) at Flagstaff, in a scrub pine forest which, although the individual trees would feel at home on the Cape, leaves a very different impression: impenetrable and trackless. Then downhill almost all the way to Albuquerque, a bright, colorful city in a blasted, treeless valley twenty miles wide.

The colors in the rock strata can be breathtaking and the view is unparalleled. But it is also a place where many cultures flourished for centuries – millennia? – only to be remembered with a decaying plywood teepee and a forlorn attempt to make a 21st century life in an ancient land.