The head
wound had stopped bleeding. What the hell – it was the Fourth of
July. A nice day for an all-American road trip – put on the
American flag/Route 66/hot rod shirt, and go . . .
The
roads were kind of empty due to it being the last day of the holiday
weekend. Rather relaxing, actually. The landscape unfolds. Signs of
civilization melt into desert, and the desert melts into the
mountains.
“This
is eroding in an interesting way,” Emily said.
There
was the smell of skunk, and mutilated roadkill of a species that
couldn't be identified. Chupacabras? The Mogollon monster? Did they
ever find that meteor?
Our
first spontaneous stop was at Montezuma's Well. It's actually an
ancient sinkhole. Long before Montezuma was born, the Sinagua built
summer and winter cliff dwellings around the edges and tapped it to
irrigate their crops with the arsenic-rich waters where only a few
hardy life-forms found nowhere else in the world survive.
Maybe
some of Monte's ancestors passed through before the volcanic
holocaust for the Aztlán World Cup.
These
days towns bristle with solar panels. The future glittering in the
sun.
They
have a lot of spectacular Sinaguan petroglyphs at the V Bar V Ranch
Heritage Site. We can
only read a few things, and don't know most of how the images and
their positions are synced up with the Sun, Moon, and stars. We
aren't as plugged into things on the cosmic scale any more, even with
smart phones. Maybe the archeoastronomers will figure it out some
day.
When we
arrived the Galaxy Diner on Route 66, Nathan's hot dog eating
championship was on the screens. You can't have a more American lunch
than that, especially with the old-time rock 'n' roll playing.
Further
along on Route 66, near the edge of Flagstaff, we saw cement mixers
with spiffy flame jobs.
And all
day the stars and stripes were flying, on vehicles, shirts, and
wrapped around buttocks – Abbie Hoffman would have been proud.
After
that we went to Walnut Canyon. We hadn't visited that vertical city
of Sinagua cliff dwellings in a while. This was probably one of the
Seven Cities of Cibola that conquistadors searched for, and didn't
appreciate. And I'm glad that I'm still enough of a mountain goat to
trek that twisted up and down trail.
Down in
Sedona, we got our usual iced cafe mochas at the place that keeps
changing names. Since our last visit a wall has been torn down, and a
Whole Foods had been surgically attached.
You
can't miss it, it's right behind a statue of a mountain man/wizard.
According to the plaque, it's the work of John M. Soderberg, PhD.,
and his name is Merlin. I think he needs more of a downhome, Wild
West moniker, like Brujo Bob or Hoodoo Harry.
Before
heading back home, we stopped at the White Rooster – well,
actually, it's officially Silver Son West, but Em has this habit of
renaming everything. She bought a colorful Oaxaca-style painted frog.
On the
way back we saw a lot of people were fixing flat tires at the
roadside. Not everybody was having such a nice day. Little did we
know that the summer was about to become a full-blown, shit-smeared,
blood-spattered spectacle . . .
