Phoenix to San Diego in only one day!

Wednesday, September 23:

Territorial prison, Yuma

The trip across the desert from Phoenix to San Diego is deceptively long, and there is very little of interest along the way: the old Territorial Prison in Yuma (which is closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays) and the Desert Tower in ... well, nowhere, really. We stopped at both.

The Territorial Prison is on the banks of the Colorado River, which these days, and at this time of the year, and this far downstream (below all the canals that siphon off water for Las Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and a host of other cities, plus much of the irrigation in Arizona and California) isn't much larger than the San Antonio River. It seems to consist of a pair of native-stone buildings set at right angles to one another, with windows only at the very top -- tiny windows, about a foot square, with iron bars set in them. That's about all I could tell, from the outside.

Desert Tower

The Interstate drops down all the way to sea level just west of the Colorado River and the Algodones (or Imperial) Dunes. I would have liked to get some pictures of the sand dunes; I was at their northern end about ten years ago, and they're pretty stunning. They look like Tatooine, the desert moon where R2D2 and C3PO landed after escaping from Darth Vader. Unfortunately, there is no place to stop on the southern end. The rest area smack-dab in the middle of the dunes is literally two cement-block latrines set in a paved area between the eastbound and westbound lanes of the freeway.

From there, the road starts to climb, gradually at first, then steeply through a series of long winding S-curves up to about 4,000 feet at the Desert Tower. The Desert Tower is a sort of folk-art construct overlooking the Interstate and the Imperial Valley. It was built in the 1920s, when the road through these parts from Yuma to San Diego was a two-lane highway. Most cars couldn't make it through without stopping to add water to the radiators, and even now there are concrete vats along the Interstate containing water for radiators every few hundred yards.

From the Tower you can see all the way across the valley, past what's left of the Salton Sea. It's a stunning spread of apparent nothingness: rock, sand, more rock, sun and rock. Oh, and that little bit of water way out there. Back in the 20s and 30s, a local man started carving fanciful animal shapes out of the rock, and these lie in the boulder field across the driveway from the Tower. You can clamber around in the rocks, kind of like I talked about doing at Texas Canyon (see my post a from few days ago).

Interstate 8 runs very close to the Mexico border most of the way. We passed through several immigration checkpoints; at one of them there was a sign boasting of the effectiveness of such checkpoints. It seemed to indicate -- it wasn't specific enough to say for certain -- that all of the internal checkpoints along the border from San Diego to Brownsville had resulted in so many immigration arrests, so many criminal arrests, so many tons of drugs confiscated, so many DUIs referred to local LEOs; if the statistics were for that one checkpoint, I would say (a) the checkpoint was moderately successful and (b) the illegal immigrants in that area have to be unreasonably stupid. If, as I suspect, the statistics were for the entire Mexican border, then I'd say that these checkpoints are a waste of time and resources, an easily avoidable inconvenience, and an irritating, albeit minor, infringement of my constitutional freedom of travel. (Yes, Virginia, the Supreme Court does say it's in there.)

Oh, well. So we get into San Diego around rush hour, and manage to get to our hotel without running out of gas (which, by the way, jumped about seventy-five cents per gallon in price on crossing into California -- an indication of just how out of balance the government of this state is. Think about it.) We had dinner in Old Town, the "original" settlement area of the city. If you're familiar with San Antonio, it's like La Villita but with four-lane streets and a lot more people, shops and restaurants. There was nothing the least bit authentic about it. We ate at one of the three restaurants recommended by the concierge at our hotel. The food was good, the chips were okay, the salsa was really good, and the margaritas were superb. Even the mariachi band was well within my tolerance limits for such things.

There will always be a Phoenix.

In the famous words of the late Governor Ann Richards, you can put lipstick on a pig and call it Monique, but it's still just a pig. That's kind of how I feel about Phoenix. You can bring in all the palm trees and esperanzas you want, fill the streets with Beemers and Volvos, and paint all the houses in earth tones, but it's still just a big, dusty flat spot in the desert.

It's not much of a tourist town, by any stretch. The attractions here are more geared to those who are here year-round, or at least through the winter months. People who live here, at least all the ones that I've met, enjoy it. The dry heat really is a lot more comfortable to those who venture outside than the relatively moist air of San Antonio; yesterday it was 104 and I thought it was very comfortable ... lying in the pool. But still.

And getting around is pretty easy, except where the traffic gets really bad. All of the through streets are wide and straight, and the entire Valley of the Sun is a grid of evenly spaced thoroughfares bracketing architecturally cohesive subdivisions, each with its monumental entrance, its water feature, its theme of colours and edificial gewgaws (Cupolas! Niche windows! Pilasters!). And where the population has reached a certain critical mass of density and prosperity, the appearance is one of comfort and order: a sort of regimented riverless Rhineland.

And of course, it's a very, very large city, with a large middle class, so it's full of good restaurants, and probably has a first-rate nightlife, for those who want that sort of thing. There are jobs here, and a sense of opportunity and promise. It may even be a very good place to raise your kids, though I'm not sure what the criteria for that is; honest small-business owners and con artists seem to come from all backgrounds equally.

But driving around the city yesterday, on the way to the vistas of Dobbins Point and South Mountain Park, I felt a certain je ne sais quoi, a feeling that the pleasant and promising aspects of Phoenix are unreal, that this massive sprawl of urbanity and civilization is more than just artificial; that it is an interloper in this desert, that it will eventually move on to places more suited to human habitation (please, God, not South Texas!) and leave behind the crumbling hulk of Spanish tile and concrete, like so many cicadas.

But that's not really going to happen, is it? No, as long as there is electricity to power the air conditioning, and gasoline to power the pick-up, and as long as there is snow in the Rockies to fill the canals here, Phoenix will survive, and prosper. So I'm thinking I should buy some land here, maybe a dusty half-acre on the Scottsdale side....

Reconsidering things

Earlier today, while we were stopped at the Texas Canyon rest area, I thought about my comment yesterday, about how boring it is driving through the West, and I decided that that was not entirely accurate.

It is true that going from Point A to Point B is a mechanical exercise; that's equally true in the East. Had I had the luxury of time, I could have made the trip from San Antonio to Phoenix, and presumably on to San Diego, much more interesting than it is when we just get on I-10 at Hildebrand and get off at the 202. I could drive west out of San Antonio to Camp Wood, and up the South Llano River, or over to Langtry and up through the Big Bend Country or the Davis Mountains; I could cut across the corner of New Mexico, through Cloudcroft and Alamogordo, and up through Silver City and into Globe. It'd take a long, long time, and it's all country I've covered before. It still wouldn't be as fascinating as a simple drive through any nondescript part of eastern Tennessee or Kentucky; but it'd be a nice trip.

But as it is, having to be in a certain place at a certain time, the freeway is really the only practical option. And on this particular freeway, once you're past the Hill Country around Kerrville, you've really only got that spot in the Transpecos where the Davis Mountains are to your left, and the Guadalupe Mountains are to your right; and Texas Canyon.

Now, I've never really spent any time at Texas Canyon. There's a rest area there, and that's about it. But it's clear from the graffiti on the rocks nearest the rest area that many people have gone climbing in the rocks. They remind me of Vidavoo Rocks in Wyoming, up in the Laramie Mountains not far from where I used to live. I'm not much of a rock-climber -- never done it, in fact -- but the shapes of the rocks are so weird and other-worldly that even us flatlanders are fascinated by the scenery. Maybe one of these days I'll take a few hours to wander around the rocks in Texas Canyon. Until then, it remains the only point of interest on an otherwise dull trip across open space.

We have two days of masterful inactivity planned here in Phoenix, and will probably divide our time between watching TV and swimming. Maybe I'll go wander around the town some, looking for things to photograph. (Today I got only the one shot at Texas Canyon, of a rock that looks like a lizard, before my battery died; I must've left the camera on.) Or maybe I won't. I would go for a drive, but I've already been to every county in Arizona, and I know from sad experience that I want to stay as far away from the traffic in this town, especially to the North, where all the most interesting scenery lies, as I can.