Whenever I enter Arizona I feel like I’m coming home. I lived in Tucson for seven years, and
whether it was my relative youth (I was in my late twenties, just married) or
the implacable heat, the land left its impression on me. Even crossing the Northern border far away in
Utah, I felt the change. Utah is like a
sketch of the Southwest: the canyonlands hint at it, but in general it’s still
too green. As soon as I was in Arizona
the colors paled to pastels, the vegetation grew thornier, the wide vistas
became somehow less public, a working road through the desert, parochial to
those who belong. I liked it.
That clip of Northern Arizona, actually, is one of the
ugliest landscapes, in a particular way that Arizona can be ugly. The rolling land is reduced to dun dirt, the
ground vegetation so pale and dust-covered that it looks like leftover
scrapings of the dirt itself. Industrial
structures—power trestles, radio towers, crane yards—only add to a sense of
pervasive litter. But beauty started to
return as the road ran south toward Flagstaff, and Sedona.
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I had wanted to revisit Sedona, but those who know the town
could have warned me that it exercises a strange and powerful magic. They say it sits on an intersection of ley
lines that are buzzing or incompatible or something. At any rate, it proved oddly difficult of
access. The road from Flagstaff was
undergoing serious construction, including long sections of dirt and gravel
over which my lowslung Miata and the other shiny highway cars crept at 20
mph. I was headed for a campground in
Oak Creek (there were a few to choose from), but I had lost track of calendar
time, and it turned out to be a weekend—in summer—and all campgrounds were
blocked with little signs saying “FULL.”
Irony drifted down with the evening: I was driving on one of the world’s
loveliest roads at sunset, on hairpin turns over forest slopes and on tight
creek-following curves through deep pine woods, but the lack of knowing where
or how I would be spending the night made me anxious and unable to stop.
My plan had been to amble into Sedona the next morning and
have breakfast there, but the road, or whatever force was pushing me along it,
hustled me straight into town and out the other side before I could even see
it. Actually it let me pause just long
enough in a pullout to use its cellphone coverage, which found me an open
campground 15 miles further on and thus sent me on my way. Glimpses of the high heart-red fortresses
surrounding the town in the sunset light: those famous mountains. I checked into a wonderful, calm campground
far from Sedona, chatted with a friendly family from California, took a swim in
the pool, and had a good night’s sleep in my tent to the sound of a trickling
stream.
And in the morning I tried again.
I knew exactly where I wanted to have breakfast. I had been to Sedona recently, within the
last few years, back when I would have said “We had been to Sedona,” and our
favorite breakfast spot was a little café on the strip south of town. Heading back in, however, I found I
could remember neither its location nor its name. I thought it was called “Love’s Café,” but my
Google couldn’t find that, and the next thing I knew I was through the strip
and back in Sedona proper. I tried to
have breakfast at a homey little café called Theia’s, but their wi-fi was
broken.
And thus, plaything of the fates, I found myself walking
around Sedona without food or coffee, trying to take photos for my blog and my Instagram. I was now decidedly wary of the place (and
sore at myself for not remembering the name of my favorite café, senile old
codger that I am), and I think those mixed feelings came out pretty well in the
photo below, which is the only good one I got.
I gave up. Having been denied both coffee and Instagram photos, and feeling welcomed by neither ley line, I recovered my Miata and drove on. Oh well. It was perhaps foolish of me to attempt a sentimental return
to a town that in the original encounter was found to be a strangely confused institution, a
hodgepodge tourist trap mingling rosy scenery and spiritualist
marketing to extract fortunes from you in art shops and jolt you around on
jeep tours. Farewell Sedona.
On the way out of town, I found my café. It was permanently closed.
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