Arizona Dreaming

Reflections on a home away from home

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Well, I feel the rain drops from the storm down in Mexico
Truck will go no further, out of gas
I walk through the desert past a lizard and a rattlesnake
I tip the bottle and bite the lime

There ain't no moral to this story at all Anything I tell you very well could be a lie
There ain't no morals to these stories at all
And everything I tell you, you can bet will be a lie

I been away from the living,
I don't need to be forgiven I'm just waiting for that cold black sun-cracked
Numb-inside
Soul of mine
To come alive

— The Refreshments, Nada

The time I first lay eyes on Arizona, in the flesh, it’s August, 1997, and I’m riding shotgun in my best friend Paul’s red Nissan pickup truck, barreling across the Sonoran desert on I-10 from LA.

I’m sick as a dog. Sun poisoning. Like most 19-year-old guys, I’m kind of an idiot. I spent the previous day body surfing on Zuma beach. All day, without so much as a drop of sunblock. I’ve got a mix of ethnicities — Irish, Slovak, English, Welsh — but not a single one of them has a melanin count that can hold up to 8 hours of California sun unaided.

As we pass the windmill farms and make our way into Phoenix proper, the pickup starts struggling. We’re hauling Paul’s Honda CBR 1000 in the bed, and there’s a U-Haul trailer with all our crap hitched up to the back. With the mercury well into the triple digits, the little 4-banger’s coolant temperature is ascending quickly into the danger zone. Despite how I feel, we have no choice but to turn off the A/C and roll down the windows. It’s an unholy 112 degrees outside.

I’ve got blisters all over my shoulders and upper back, I’m nauseous, and I probably have a fever. I don’t know if you’ve ever taken a hot shower after getting a minor sunburn, but this is a second-degree sunburn, and the desert heat is searing. I have no desire to make a detour into Phoenix to see what the city is like or grab a bite to eat. I just want to get the hell out of the fire.

I’d spent the entire summer living and working with Paul and his family on their farm in northern Idaho. When we weren’t pulling 12-16 hour days installing pumps in water wells drilled deep into Idaho’s mountainous terrain, we were out chasing cattle, fixing fences, bailing hay, or crashing weddings for free beer. When it came time for both of us to head out to Franciscan University in Steubenville, OH, to start our freshman year, we decided to first visit his brother out in Seattle and then make a road trip down the Pacific Coast Highway before ultimately heading East. Not our first big road trip together. Not our last, either. But on this trip, Phoenix comes and goes in just a few minutes, with me too delirious to stop and smell the cactus blossoms.

The next time I see Arizona, the conditions are considerably different.

It’s December, 1998, and in the same red pickup, Paul and I and our friend Tomas are driving non-stop from southern Ohio all the way to Mexico City for the feast of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. With a cap on the pickup and a mattress in the back, we do rotations in shifts: one man drives, one rides shotgun to keep him awake, one sleeps in the back, then we switch. An unexpected overnight stop for repairs in San Antonio kills our progress, though, and we arrive too late for the holy day festivities. As we pull up to the plaza of the giant basilica in Distrito Federal — or DF (prounounced deh-ehfeh) as the locals often call it — we get out to find the gates locked and the Basilica closed. It’s a frustrating end to a week of driving through some pretty hairy conditions, but we did our best.

The roads through Mexico are nothing like they are in the US. Just a few miles past the border, we nearly slam head on into a stalled-out and abandoned tractor trailer right in the middle of the unlit highway. The roads are often unlit, in fact, and some end without warning. No matter which route we take, the road is strewn with seemingly random military checkpoints, where teenagers with automatic rifles nervously poke and prod large sleeping gringos while grilling us about where we’re going. There are also crooked cops, who stop us just to see if they can extort a bribe. Sometimes, the roads are downright treacherous. One foggy afternoon, we come across a galleta truck that has gone of the edge of one the cliffside mountain roads. We are forced to wait as the behemoth is hauled slowly back up the side by two ancient tow trucks, each having strung their tow cable around the trunk of a thick tree for extra leverage as their winches struggle and groan to haul the bulk of the thing up a nearly vertical face. The cables bite so deep into the bark it looks like they might just saw the whole tree down. But eventually, they prevail, and at long last we are allowed to pass.

Half an hour later, as we eat peanut butter from a jar for lack of a place to stop for food, we come upon the scene of a one of the reckless tour buses that had been passing us at high speeds all day. This one appears to have misjudged a particularly sharp hairpin turn and gotten lodged between cliff faces about 50 feet down. There is already a crowd gathered and nothing we can do, but the scene is macabre, and I cannot escape the feeling that people in that bus may well have died from the fall. I can’t imagine how they’ll ever retrieve them or the vehicle.

We’ve been avoiding paying for lodging by staying on the move and keeping to our rotation, but it’s late in Mexico City when we arrive, and we’re forced find a cheap hotel. The one we wind up at looks to be the pay-by-the-hour sort, but we book a whole night. I’m broke until I go home and work through the Christmas break; here only on the charity of my friends, so I have no real say in our accommodations. Still, it’s hard not to comment on the stale urine smell of our room, and not to wonder aloud just what kinds of unspeakable things have transpired there before we arrive. Tomas and I decide that for sanitary purposes, we’re sleeping fully clothed on top of the bedspread rather than find out what lies beneath. Paul shrugs and pulls back the sheets and climbs in.

The next morning, we make our visit to the tilma and present our petitions. While there, we run into a guy who offers to show us the old basilica with its solid silver altar, which is closed to the public. We take him up on the offer before realizing he wants us to pay him for this guided indiscretion, so we slip him a few pesos, grab a terribly-composed selfie in front of the altar, and move on.

Children are hawking churros in the plaza. Their refrain is a constant auditory loop: “Churros! Diez peso, diez peso, diez peeeesssooooo!” We grab some, cinnamon sugar crumbling from the edifice of absurdly long tubes of striated dough. They’re stale, but that doesn’t stop us.

We make the drive just outside DF to Teotihuacán, the ancient Mesoamerican city whose Nahuatl name means, “the home of the gods.”