The RV was the covered wagon of the 20th century, the head of a caravan cutting through the same arid landscape of Manifested settlers. Their foreheads swathed in familiar sweat, both the Modern and the Industrial man knew this expansion was justified and inevitable. Nowhere but Arizona holds fervent dogma like this, even to this day. Whether true or not, this land is my land, this land was always my land, this land was never your land.
U.S. Route 66 cut The Grand Canyon State in thirds, a cyclic series of road signs divulging “Next Rest Stop 10 Miles.” A washed-out pattern, obsolete and dreary to history, only the neon-glazed words “Chevron” followed by “Taco Bell” followed by “Best Western.” The road and the artificial life along it died as quickly as it came.
Roadtrips and immigration were always the central issue where the Mojave and the Sonoran deserts collide. What you call Natives were first in line, pissing on palo verde trees, marking their territory like coyotes in between brutal wars waged amongst themselves.
Coronado and his posse shoved down the Apache for a rumor, spewing smallpox as a favor. Two centuries and a name change later, Arizona was Mexico’s claim, then Texas took his turn with her. The Mexican-American war ended with 30,000 corpses soaking the ground, fallen so that an imaginary line could be better defined. The gaps in this border allow once-citizens to crawl back home, propping up their Latino country through Western Union, meanwhile keeping Scottsdale’s streets “spic” and span.
Back while the 66 disintegrated, desert cities bloomed, interstates unraveled and surface streets coiled around sepia mountains. Civilization pressed against monumental scabs dug with molten blood, boring deeper still. Who says we raped the earth? It seems consensual, the gash we call Grand not more than parted, inviting labia moist with the Colorado river. Copper extraction, a rotten tooth pulled to wire holy iPhones and Gateway Notebooks, was doing the soil a favor.
Don’t worry! We’re not cruel to our mistress, Mother Nature. Good citizens don’t irrigate manicured lawns like they do back East – here they keep up appearances, hiring Rodriguez Landscaping Co. to drag half-dead saguaros to shade misty porches with 60-year old, wilted arms. Homeowners’ associations pump gravel yards with pesticides, terminating the invasive Bermuda grass and the immigrated Mediterranean gecko. The pool out back mutates green in fall and breeds West Nile mosquitoes. This is right, this is organic.
If we could build cities that float miles off the ground, never rivaling nature, I would protest. My home’s foundation must be sunk deep like a barbed wire in flesh. Parasitic, yet symbiotic, I want to feel the earth rumble with murmurs from California faults.
Who says we aren’t one with the environment? After all, landfills will become golf courses where cottontail rabbits burrow. Mourning doves will scavenge for bread crumbs in littered Cheetos bags. Coyotes will eat stray, unneutered tabby cats.
A different life cycle, but not lacking vitality. Like Ouroboros, the more the desert is destroyed, the more it becomes soldered within itself. Or as they say, the more things change, the more they remain the same. It’s almost as if ownership of this land never swapped hands.
Ancients followed a sorta pseudo-dirt worship, enamored with everything around them. North American Southwesterners are identical, only crossing themselves to Sheriff Joe, Our Lady of Guadalupe, and Biltmore Fashion Park respectively known as The Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit. Penance is given to Chase Mortgage and communion is taken with Indian fry bread and Corona Light. Even the somewhat spiritual drugs remain the same — cannabis sativa, psilocybin-laced panaeolus cinctulus and occasional buttons of mescaline.
The future doesn’t seem so bleak, either. Traffic projections and population explosions seem mild. Rising sea levels won’t flood The Valley of the Sun. This land is my land, this land is my oasis.
The streetlights contaminating the night sky mean you can literally see the edges of the atmosphere domed around the city. The moon shines all the brighter and it says nothing is real — but nothing has to be. Those hypnotic monsoon sunsets wouldn’t be the same without air pollution to tinge the clouds pink and orange. And when that familiar icon of the valley melts into the White Tank Mountains, sending up a few last miraged heat waves before it’s gone, that’s when I know I’m home.
—x
Written for a creative writing workshop called Re-Imagining the West.
