Life in a Hair Dryer: Phoenix, AZ

Driving out of Santa Fe, we’d expected to hit a gas station, but instead found ourselves on another endless stretch of desert with the needle nosing towards empty. Neither of our phones had a signal, so we wound up stopping in a small town called Madrid to ask where the nearest station was.

At this point, several nights of incomplete sleep cycles had left me decidedly short of cheerful, but my crankiness waned as we walked through Madrid. This was exactly the sort of place that inspired me to take roadtrips in the first place: although we soon learned that Madrid was home to only about 300 people, the main street was stuffed with colorful galleries, restaurants, and jewelry shops. We talked to one gallery owner who said she’d stopped in Madrid (firmly pronounced MAD-rid by the locals) in the 80’s and bought property there within the week. The jewelry salesman showed us his collection of cerrillos turquoise, a soft, aqua-tinted variety that had a smoky quality when unfinished. Everyone told us we had to go to Harvey the chocolate maker, whose generous samples and Wonka-esque wackiness lived up to their reputation. When we stopped in the bar to ask about a gas station, two day-drinking locals kindly offered to proffer gas cans from their own homes.

Instead, we managed to make it to the nearest station, which wasn’t far from our campground in Turquoise Trails. We settled in for a peaceful evening, pitching our tent under some low juniper trees that emitted a soft crackling sound through the night.

We also befriended the campground cat, whose loyalty was cemented when I helped him fish a dead bird out of our grill.

Om nom nom. Just kidding, I played it with it for three seconds and then forgot about it because I’m a cat.

Unfortunately, he also took it personally when we retired inside our tent, and decided to get our attention by jumping on top of it. I couldn’t stop laughing, but Sean was less than amused by the twenty claws coming through our recently repaired rain fly. (By the end of this trip, I suspect the whole thing will be made of weatherproofing tape.)

When we finally made it to Phoenix, our first stop was Sean’s aunt and uncle’s house, where we also found his cousin and her three kids. The five of us adults chatted over some much-needed ice water while we watched the big-screen TV that was the window onto the backyard pool, where the kids were by turns splashing manically through the water and jumping up on land to wave shyly at us.

Shyness didn’t last long. Who could resist Funcle Sean?

Once the sun went down and it went from being brutally hot to just horrendously hot, we all took a walk around the neighborhood while the kids rode their bikes. Sean opted for a more rigorous exercise routine, which mostly involved giving endless piggybacks to everyone under 10.

We also met up with Sean’s cousin from the other side of the family, who’d moved to Phoenix from Connecticut about a year ago. We were going to check out her friend’s concert at some cool dive bar downtown, but at the last minute we remembered that we’re old and broke, so instead we caught up over salads and craft beers in her kitchen the next day.

These family visits pretty much concluded our adventures in Phoenix, since it was too hot to explore anything that required leaving air conditioning. (I don’t know what the logistics are of connecting the entire city by underground tunnels, but it’s something Phoenix should maybe look into.) We set off for San Diego, our jumping-off point for the Mexican leg of our trip.

Fortunately, this drive offered a little more variety in scenery than the last few days. Rolling hills gave way to sandy desert, which morphed back into towering clay-red mesas. Once or twice we even drove through wind farms, which felt like being an ant in some Seussian garden, the long white blades swinging with the mesmerizing grace of something very large moving very swiftly.

After a night in San Diego, we’ll start heading down the Baja Peninsula to where my dad lives on a 30-foot Westsail in La Paz. Hasta luego, Estados!

Strange Oasis: Santa Fe, NM

The stretch of road between Roswell and Santa Fe was perilously empty, in the way that makes you glance nervously at your gas gauge every few minutes even if you just fueled up. It seemed we were the only people on the road.

Well… almost the only people. (art by John Cerney)

When we finally spotted a glinting chrome diner just off the highway — the first functioning business we’d seen in hours — we all but screeched the car to a cartoon stop.

Penny’s Diner was one of the few fixtures of a small town called Vaughn, New Mexico. It provided exactly the classic diner experience its retro image promised: generous but poker-faced waitresses in heavy eyeshadow, a white-haired man in suspenders cleaning egg out of his moustache, a misspelled specials board, rewardingly bland sandwiches.

After devouring said sandwiches, we soldiered on through the emptiness towards Santa Fe National Forest, where we set up for the night at Black Canyon Campground.

After the wide-open landscapes of western Texas, the tall pines had a sort of magical hush that felt like true wilderness. The quiet was punctuated with wingbeats up above, crows and robin trading places in the branches, the occasional whirr of a hummingbird.

We spent a couple peaceful nights as forest creatures, then ventured back down into the city to do a little exploring. We wound up springing for tickets to Meow Wolf‘s House of Eternal Return, something we’d heard about from almost everyone we’d talked to since Marfa.

Built from an old bowling alley owned by George R. R. Martin, House of Eternal Return is something of a real-life choose-your-own-adventure story with a highly interpretable plot. The installation essentially has two layers: visitors start out exploring the very believable facade of an ordinary household, but crawl into the fireplace or hop through the fridge and you’ll find yourself in a kaleidoscopic wonderland of neon surrealism.

Unfortunately, even on a Wednesday morning the place was shoulder-to-shoulder with visitors. Any detail that called for more than a few seconds’ attention — a newspaper clipping on the fridge, a bedside journal, a computer full of mysterious documents — was quickly swarmed with impatient bodies vying for their turn. The place itself was also rife with narrow tunnels and stairs, so anyone with limited mobility would miss out on most of the good stuff.

Emerging back into the soothing palette of reality, our imaginations and retinas still aflame, Sean and I retired to a nearby brewery to plan the route to our next stop: Phoenix. There, we’d meet up with two different factions of Sean’s family as well as some friends of mine from when I came through on my solo epic roadtrip a few years ago.

Hopefully, the desert will continue to smile upon us.

Land of Enchantment (and Aliens): Roswell, NM

En route from Marfa to our next destination in Santa Fe, we wound up landing in Roswell for a night. Like pretty much everyone, our only knowledge of Roswell came from the alleged alien sighting in 1947, and I was curious to see what the town was really like.

I came prepared to see beyond Roswell’s campy reputation, but as it turns out, when something brings tourism to your otherwise unremarkable rural town for over 60 years, you lean into it hard. The bug-eyed, green-skinned, mysteriously buff visages of those classic alien figures stared at us from fast food restaurants, sporting goods stores, T-shirt shops, even the local tax service.

After a peaceful evening at Bottomless Lake campground, where we found relief from the New Mexico heat by spending exactly eight seconds in the frigid water before waddling desperately ashore, we ventured into downtown Roswell and spent some time at the International UFO Museum & Research Center.

I come to Earth just for the tanning beds.

If only we hadn’t run out of gas in Zeta-9, we would have arrived in the 90’s like we planned and these chokers would have KILLED.

Indisputable proof that aliens also enjoy playing Frisbee.

In spite of its silliness, I was surprised to find that the whole experience did actually leave me a little unsettled. After all, regardless of what you believe about the 1947 incident, what are the chances that we’re the only intelligent beings in the universe? And if we don’t have a monopoly on “intelligent life,” wouldn’t that be cause to rethink what it is that makes us human?

One of the most interesting items I came across in the museum was a framed excerpt from a declassified report explaining why the government keeps information on UFOs under wraps. This particular quote stuck with me:

“If the public learned that other intelligent life was actually coming to our planet, many of our social institutions would be disrupted…Perhaps most important from a political viewpoint, younger members of society, especially those who grew up with the space program, would push for a new view of ourselves. Instead of thinking…Americans, Canadians, Peruvians, French, or Chinese, they would start to think of themselves as earthlings…As idyllic as this sounds, I know of no government that wants its citizens to owe their primary allegiance to the planet instead of to the nation…The biggest fear of anybody in power,…is losing that power…National governments do not want their subjects to have a planet wide orientation.”

I’ll leave it at that. Peace out, earthlings.