We’re going back to Phoenix as a sentimental journey. We stayed at the Marriott at the Buttes in Tempe some years ago in the midst of a vicious heat wave and we just loved it.
Of course, we also have loved the glorious saguaro city of Tucson.
It’s the only city I’ve visited where even the trailer parks are ritzy - avenues of tall palms and high walls.
It has roads with names like Sweetwater and Silverbell.
It has a deficit of architectural vulgarity.
It has the Santa Catalina Mountains.
And, whenever it rains, it rainbows.
We don’t hurry our departure. We linger around the pool first.
Oddly, I seem to have a touch of sunburn on my back. I have an olive skin and never have had sunburn and I can’t understand how I have it now, since I have not overexposed myself. Yet my back burns. I put on aloe vera and we drag ourselves away from this world of saguaros. Tucson is one of those low-rise cities which does not seem to have a CBD as a structural core. It sprawls in a big, wide easy way. It is big. It takes a while to get across it.
We decide we’ll have lunch at a Panera Bread. I love this chain. I have wonton soup.
Eventually we are on the road past mesquite scrub and lush, ripe corn crops on big, big flat land. It has been a while since I saw corn which was so much a part of the daily drives across the north of the country. We saw the crops young and watched their development right across the land. I have missed them.
The desert stretches out with craggy mountains ahead.
There’s a huge air base out there with lots of planes. It is clearly not commercial.
Oh, bee hives in the desert. Desert honey. Wish I had tried it.
A sign announces Red Rock. There are quite a few candidates out there. I Google and find Picacho Peak.
Good grief. You never know what you’ll find in the American desert. Caged Australian birds, no less.
Ironically, I spot raptors in the sky. Now, they belong here.
And so do goods trains. There they are out there, pushing their miles of loads overland. This one is Union Pacific. It has three engines at the front, two at the back. Even the graffiti artists can’t handle the volume of rail cargo. Only a couple of carriages show their multicoloured art.
The road is beautiful and wide. Six lanes. Flat and straight.
Sign: Blowing Dust Area.
Crops and shrubs adorn the land. A few cacti.
Hah. Here comes the town of Picacho. A long, long livestock train waits empty on the outskirts.
Police have sidelined an open-top sports car at the roadside.
A sign indicates Casa Grande Ruins National Monument.
The landscape has changed since those Pueblo days. What we’re seeing now is pecan orchards. Huge orchards with lovely lush trees. Fallow fields, Orchards.
And heavy traffic.
We are in another great cluster of trans-continental trucks and big rigs. I catch the eye of a driver as we pass. He is so high up. My father had a romantic notion about the loneliness of the long-distance truck driver. He saw an existential beauty in the somewhere nowhere nature of that life. I wonder what the trucker is thinking.
Now I spot four planes flying in formation quite low and slow over the desert. Planes and trains and automobiles. Yay!
And, suddenly, eek. There are always a few morons out there who can’t read the road. One such has just swerved past us to speed ahead and veer in front of the next car and tailgate the one ahead. Is he on drugs? Is he in a bad mood? Is he just plain stupid?
One often wonders about who are the other people on the road, where they are going and why.
Cactus seem to have vanished from the landscape. It is dry and dusty. Huge powerlines.
Cotton crops and fallow fields. Horses.
The town of Casa Grande turns up, big and dusty, malls and commerce.
And back to crops. Sorghum and cotton. Some acreage bright green with new growth. Some ploughed and brown.
Sign: Blowing Dust Area.
Mesquite and tufty saltbush plants. Dusty farms.
Another cop car has picked someone up.
We’re on the Gila River Indian Reservation - and cactus is suddenly back on the landscape.
It’s a wide old world out there, broad, flat with mountains on the horizons.
But the land is divided into patchwork irrigated crops. The deserts bloom these days and act as food bowls.
The police whizz by in pursuit of someone up ahead. We hope it is that hoon. We catch up as two cars pull over to the verge ahead of the police car. Hah. They have got that hoon. Oh, no. The hoon is not their target, though his pulling over indicates his guilt. He swings back into the stream of traffic ahead of us. Pfft.
We cross the Gilo River. It is bone dry. Pale, dusty mountains with slopes covered in cactus are around us now and feeder roads bring more traffic into our steady stream. We are nearing Phoenix.
Yep, industrial outlyings, reduced speed limit, mega storage, a racetrack, overpasses, A new line of mountains manifests, its ridges prickled with communication towers.
A big outlet mall. Very neat and handsome. Through the township of Chandler. Very sleek, tidy, busy, affluent with a big city efficiency to it, complete with traffic jams…
It is an upmarket Phoenix satellite - and here comes the big smoke itself, complete with its spectacular mesas and buttes.
That butte over there complete with ancient saguaros is our destination.
Hello Tempe at the Buttes Marriott.
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