Geekrant vs Arizona- the Fantasy Landscape

Greetings Geekranters!

It has been far too long since I put pen to paper and updated this humble little blog of mine. Unfortunately this is the problem with a (hopefully) gifted amateur verses a professional writer; bills must be paid and overtime worked. Still I have not completely forgotten my self appointed responsibility to share with you, my dear readers, my reflections of being a person of two countries, an exile from one and a guest in the other. To share with you,  my interest, amazement and awe in all the different ways humanity can exist on this Earth.

As the years that I have spent living here in the United States start to grow, I have come to see even more, that this is a country full of contradictions, one might even say a country built upon them, a nation founded in the tension between one ideal and another, between the future and the past, between this landscape and the next.

Each state is so fundamentally different to the next and yet all are desperately trying to come together as part of a cohesive whole. The Founding Fathers who created this country, many of whom were Freemasons, used the Masonic symbol of the unfinished pyramid to represent the idea that their experiment in government was incomplete. Maybe that is the most crucial tension in the United States existence, the struggle between a nation that is still working towards what it was supposed to be and a nation that believes it has arrived.

Travelling across the continental U.S., particularly if you drive, is a lesson in just how vast this nation is, how great the distances can be between cities, towns, settlements and sometimes even the subcultures that exist in the “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave”. 

Most of the time that I’ve spent living in America has been in the area known as “the Mid-West”, an area of the country defined by the US Census Bureau as 12 states that lie in the middle of the nation bordered by the Appalachians on one side and the Rocky Mountains on the other. They were founded in the first great push for settlement after Independence and were the first great unknown wilderness of the fledgling republic.

This is an area of the nation typified by states with a definite rural, agricultural identity, many of which only have one or two large cities within them. They are full of small towns which, once upon a time, were often small scale industrial centres for the surrounding areas. These are some of the so-called “flyover states”. They are fertile, green landscapes where one can drive for hour upon hour and never find a settlement larger than a few thousand people, a place that can feel like it hasn’t changed much in the last fifty years.

It is, for the most part, a wonderful place to live, the people are generally unfailingly polite, always willing to go above and beyond to help anyone in need, they welcome you into their homes and families and never let you go. It is a place that rapidly becomes like home but it is also just one part of the US and there are thirty two other states out there, all of which are just as American but also just as unique as my adopted home in the Mid-West.

So if I really want to understand the US with all of its contradictions, tensions, hopes and dreams, I have to get out there and discover the forgotten places, the lost highways and undiscovered gems of this unbelievably complex and ever surprising nation.

Surprising it might be, but I never expected it to feel truly alien, that was until we flew to Arizona to stay with my wife’s great aunt for a few days.

 Truthfully, I should have known something was a little different when our plane landed in Phoenix, the capital and largest city in Arizona.  Most cities name their airport after their most famous son, such as Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport or simply  the place itself as is the case with Manchester Airport in Manchester, England. Phoenix however, it has to be said, has gone in a slightly different direction. A direction that wouldn’t be out of place in a J.R.R. Tolkien novel or some other classic of the science fiction and fantasy genres.

It is definitely slightly strange therefore, to come into land at Sky Harbor International Airport and to walk out of the plane straight past a wall emblazoned with Phoenix’s official badge; a badge with is obviously supposed to look like a Phoenix, but in my opinion looks more like an aggressive Griffin or Wyvern. Then I discovered that Phoenix is located in the middle of The Valley of the Sun and I felt like I’d slipped into a parallel universe.

Suddenly I could see it all, a fantasy hero landing his Griffin at Sky Harbor, walking into the only safe city in the Valley of the Sun, a haven within the scorched desert. I’m no fantasy hero, I’m accident prone and would trip over my cloak straight away and would probably accidentally impale myself on my own sword before I killed my first orc, but Phoenix is truly like no place that I have ever been. A place that inspires a different way of thinking. An oasis in the middle of the desert. A place that somehow feels unreal.

From the moment you step out into the desert heat, see your first cactus and glimpse the mountains off in the distance surrounding the Valley of the Sun, you know that you’re literally not in Kansas anymore.

As we drove through Phoenix, it was difficult not to marvel at how such a massive city could exist in the midst of such an apparently barren landscape. The land seemed totally devoid of water, every river we drove past was dry, a recurring theme in the gardens of all the houses and the medians of the highways was gravel. Everything seemed to scream sun-baked desolation and yet, here was a city and a large one at that. It was as far removed from the lakes and woodlands of Wisconsin or the gentle, flat farmland of Lincolnshire as the mountains are from the depths of the sea.

This was a place that up to now I had only seen on the silver screen or read about on the printed page and even then had not truly understood. Here was an environment that appeared totally hostile to human existence and yet, as I would soon discover, Native Americans have lived in Arizona for thousands of years, lived, survived and thrived. Centuries later we were driving through a huge metropolis far beyond the imaginations of any of the ancient people of the Earth.

The influence of ancient people’s and their descendants could still be felt everywhere we went, not just in Phoenix but in Arizona as a whole. From the walls and even the floors of Sky Harbor to the concrete medians and overpasses of the highways, native images and symbols adorned everything. 

Everywhere totem like representations of animals such as quail or the primitive, yet strangely striking image of the flute playing deity Kokopelli show that Arizona’s embracing its native heritage defines much of its public and private architecture. Its exotically wonderful and totally alien to someone born in a small town in the North of England not far from the wild and chilly North Sea.

Arizona was one of the last states to be “admitted to the Union” and it still has the spirit of a frontier land. The state feels wild, its landscape and nature speaking a different language and singing a different melody to the rest of the world. A feeling, came over me, a feeling, both beautiful and unsettling to someone born on an island tamed for so long by humanity. How strange it seemed, to my British eyes, for a moment to feel lost in an ocean of rock and sand on the other side of the globe.

Its a setting that, in my opinion, seems to breed thought and introspection and I tried to imagine what those early pioneers must have felt all those years ago, scratching out a new life in a new world as far removed from the old one as you could possibly get. Oh, the desire and ambition that must have fueled them; to wander into the wilderness and have the foresight to look beyond the dry, hard-baked desolation and see the potential not just to homestead or mine, but to grow and bring forth massive cities like Phoenix.

As we pulled up at my wife’s great aunt’s house in one of the seemingly endless communities for retired people all over Arizona, I found myself wondering if that very foresight is what makes Americans different from other nations and whether that is at the heart of so many of their contradictions.

 Maybe, I thought to myself, they are still dreaming of all their nation can be, still imagining cities in the desert and a new world in place of the old. Perhaps its this dream that binds them together and also, at the same time, magnifies their differences, keeping them separate. After all, no two people ever really dream the same dream in exactly the same way and we all long for our personal futures in ways that the next person would never understand. 

Still, the dream is still there in the heart of every American and it seemed that in this strange fantasy landscape I had glimpsed something more of just what that dream is, amongst the cacti and dry river beds, the scorpions and rattlesnakes and off in the distance, a coyote howled.