Geekrant vs the Old West Staging Post

 

Greetings to you, my wonderful readers! 

Its always a blessing and privilege to write for you all and hope that I don’t disappoint and always inform and entertain. I’m also aware that months between blogs is not really a sign of a productive writer, so I made an effort to write my latest post as quickly as possible. An effort that my computer was not particularly onboard with, but such is the cooperative nature of technology at times.

Climate change, while a topical issue in much of today’s international political discourse, is, for many of us anyway, a somewhat abstract concept. We know that’s it an important issue and there are a myriad of opinions on the subject but do we really see its effect on our everyday lives?

In the American Mid-West, in winter, this effect is much easier to see than in many other places. Much thought in the northern-most states of the Mid-West during this most frigid of seasons goes into trying to work out just how cold the weather is going to get, the related potential for temperatures that cause frostbite and of course, is it going to snow enough to run a snowmobile safely?

This last question is often followed with the supplementary queries of whether the lake ice is thick enough to snowmobile/ice fish/drive snowmobiles and/or cars/trucks on to reach said ice fishing site/snowmobile/car/truck area in order to race them on a frozen lake and so on. Over the last few years, possibly due to climate change, the big freeze up and the first great snowfall has been late in coming, severely cutting into the length of the all important winter recreational season. This is, of course, an outcome that all Wisconsinites struggle with. After all, if there is no ice fishing, that is one less excuse to get together with friends, grill brats and drink copious amounts of beer in each other’s company.

The winter has finally arrived however, the snowfall covering the City of Four Lakes with its chilly white blanket; the temperatures have long since kissed freezing goodbye and have entered the frostbite zone. So with icy, blizzard choked streets outside and the heating on full blast inside, my mind is naturally cast back to the warmth and sunlight of Arizona where we spent some time visiting my wife’s great aunt last year.

Heat, in terms of the sort of climatic heat that America can bring, is something I still have to learn to adjust to. After all, I grew up on a damp, cool island on the edge of the north Atlantic, where temperatures never really break the bank, so to speak, it rains a lot and truly hot days generally feel oppressive and muggy.

 On the rare occasion that the United Kingdom does have a heatwave, most of everyone’s time is spent complaining about the heat that we spent the rest of the year complaining that we didn’t get, seasoned with complaints about why shops don’t invest in expensive air conditioning systems they’ll only end up using once every three years, finally finishing up with complaints about how, when we finally did get the BBQs out it rained. 

There is a historical theory, that is not too crazy, that suggests the reason the British built a global Empire is that nobody wanted to stay on our rainy and chilly island motherland. But I digress, suffice it to say that myself and weather-based heat do not have that long or amicable a relationship.

Arizona was hot, extremely hot, in fact, some of the hottest places in America lie within the Grand Canyon State and it can seem relentless. In many places in the state, particularly around the state capital, Phoenix, its a heat that doesn’t often let up. The skies there are a perfect sapphire blue and cloudless, seemingly going on forever like echoes of something that only existed in the daydreams I had on grey, wet weekends when I was a child.

 It’s a deceptive heat though, fully lacking the oppressive humidity of a summer in the Mid-west, so it can be easy not to realise how hot it really is until you brush up against something metal and nearly burn yourself for life.

It can be quite amazing to think that people lived in this space before the advent of air conditioners and bottled water, before highways and gas stations, they did, however and that makes me think of Tortilla Flat.

 It was the morning of our first full day in Arizona, when my wife’s great aunt mentioned that we should go to Tortilla Flat. So we all piled into our rental car, my wife and I, my wife’s great aunt and my mother in law (Did I mention my mother in law came with us, No? Well she did). In we got and away we drove through the strange, arid, metropolis of Phoenix and its surrounding area.

Despite its location in the middle of the desert, Phoenix feels busy and somewhat overcrowded. Phoenix proper is the fifth most populous city in the United States and when combined with the rest of “The Valley of the Sun” makes one sprawling conurbated mass reaching to the horizon.

It wasn’t immediately easy to tell that as we drove along we were actually driving from city to city. Places whose names I had heard, like Tempe, Mesa and Scottsdale are actually difficult to distinguish from each other. Nearly 5 million people live in this metropolitan area, over two thirds of Arizona’s total population make their homes here and its still growing.

It felt faceless from the road, somehow, like someone had created a city without much character and dropped into the middle of the wasteland. As if it had grown too quickly to create its own identity. Still, as I mentioned in my previous blog, perhaps that is a result of building the American Dream in this desolate landscape, a need to keep building, keep creating, or Phoenix would have gone the same way as all the ghost-towns that haunt the backroads of the American Southwest.

Eventually we left the concrete and steel leviathan in our rear view mirror and headed out into what seemed more like the true south west.

Here the highway became somewhat lonely, no matter how many cars were on it. We were driving ever closer to the mountains which started to fill the windscreen, despite this proximity, details on the hills still eluded us. The heat made the very air appear hazy and dust seemed to be everywhere. Civilisation became a distant memory and the land seemed barren and dead, aside for the odd cacti and clumps of some sort of brown bushy looking plant. We didn’t know it yet but we were heading into the eerily named “Superstition Wilderness’.

We were heading towards Tortilla Flat, a place that is considered Arizona’s smallest community having both a U.S. Post Office and a voter precinct for elections. It also has an official population of just 6, is the last remaining stagecoach post on the Apache Trail and has become something of a tourist attraction.

As we climbed further into the mountains, we were ascending into a land of myth and legend. Some natives believed the entrance to their version of hell was in these mountains and all around can be found the remnants and ruins of many prospectors’s dreams of gold.  It was eerie and lonely but also majestic and beautiful. The road became winding, weaving its way between rocky outcroppings and crags until we came upon, of all things, a lake.

We were now fifty miles away from Phoenix but it could have been the other side of the world. Here, in the middle of a wasteland, was a lake, a reservoir, to be more precise. The road into the hills had been like a scene from Young Guns, cacti, tumbleweeds and to my eye, desolation, but here, by the lake, everything around seemed green.

The importance of water to life can sometimes be lost on many in the western world, with our showers and baths, our Perrier waters and Evian. Our entire life seems to be on tap and we forget how water brings life into nothing-less. Here, the effect was obvious, the lake was beautiful, sparkling green and blue under an azure sky, with bushes and grasses forming a thin, verdant, emerald strip round its banks which contrasted sharply with the arid khaki of the hills.

We lingered there for a moment, as tourists are want to do, then headed onward towards our final destination.

Tortilla Flat, when we reached it was, it has to be said, somewhat of a tourist trap. A unique and very striking tourist trap, I grant you, but a tourist trap, nonetheless. Its interesting to me, that no matter where I go, tourist traps are never really that different to the seafront at Skegness or Mablethorpe or any other British seaside resort.

 The whole place seemed to be made up of no more than four buildings or so on either side of the highway backed up against a hillside. One was a restaurant whose walls and ceiling seemed to be totally covered with one dollar bills, the next was some kind of “general store” full of souvenirs, t-shirts, postcards, fridge magnets and the like. Another sold sodas and ice creams. All of it was built in an Old Western style, which I couldn’t decide was authentic or not. 

Although Tortilla Flat was a stagecoach stop, it was a late one, not built until 1905, back when the state was still the Arizona Territory and days of the old west still felt very real. 

Its a jarring thought to think that Arizona only became a state the same year the Titanic sailed and sank and that this old fashioned staging post was built two years after the Wright Brothers invented the aeroplane and only four years before Louis Bleriot flew one over the channel

America is an unusual place, because, for all its development, its still a very young nation, comparatively, to the rest of the world. Here in this simple setting, I was struck by just how ephemeral humanity’s hold on this world is, strip away the road and take down the buildings and this place would be just as it had always been. Maybe its the height of arrogance for us to imagine that as humans we have that much impact on the Earth to change its climate, especially when this landscape as existed in this way for eons. Maybe it isn’t.

It also caught me once again just how much courage, determination and desperation it must have taken to create anything out here in the middle of the wilderness and whether that spirit still lives on even in Americans today. Maybe that is one of the reasons why this nation is struggling within itself so much right now. Perhaps there’s nothing left to build, nothing left to pioneer and American’s don’t know how to deal with that. It really wasn’t that long ago, after all, that prospectors searched the hills for gold and shots rang out in the miner’s boomtowns.