August '21 Stained Glass Trip, Part 3

This is Part Three of this trip's blog posts. You can read Part 1 here. You can read Part 2 here. The photo album for this trip is here.

Arizona, where I started the day today, is on Pacific Time during the summer, since it doesn't concern itself with such social engineering schemes as Daylight Savings Time. So when I fall awake at 4AM -- that's 6AM back home, and my usual wake-up time -- I feel well-rested. I'm not, but I feel like I am, which is good enough for the present.

When I come out of my motel room I see that it's rained during the night, but the car is OK. No pool of water on the back seat, and nothing taken through the open windows. (I was worried about losing my liter-bottles of Diet Mountain Dew and my sun block; though I have lots of DMD, and with the top up, I don't really need the sun block.) My first objective for the day is, obviously, the Jaguar dealership in Scottsdale. Well, no, first is coffee, then breakfast, then Scottsdale. Google Maps claims it's 94 minutes away, and they're right, or right enough, about three fourths of the time. Plenty of time, so I load up and go on the hunt for coffee, easily found, and breakfast, also easily found. When I get back on the road, I have a cushion of maybe 20 minutes. I'm trying to wean myself off my obsessive dislike of being late, but it's a tough row. Twenty minutes' cushion is the best I can make myself do.

The Powers of the Universe decide to help me in that process, by sending me a backhoe with a top speed of fifteen mph, accompanied by a dump truck to keep the long tail accumulated by this little motorcade from even attempting to get around them on the narrow highway that winds west toward the big City. But at last, after about 20 minutes, they turn off. 

Coincidence? Or Providence? 

Traffic in Phoenix is as usual, meaning long stretches of very slow movement, but I do get where I'm going, and only a few minutes behind schedule. It's a building process, this move toward not giving a rat's ass about timeliness, like everybody else.

While I'm waiting for my car, I get a chance to reflect on one of my favourite topics: cars. Specifically, automotive design. More specifically, Jaguars. This place deals in both Jaguars and Land Rovers (both made by the same company). There are about a dozen Land Rovers in various models (all of which look the same to me) for sale on the lot. There are three Jaguars: one SUV and two convertibles, one of which is a used 2019 model. There are no XFs (the small sedan model), no XJs (the medium sedan), no XJLs (the large sedan). Maybe it's because of the pandemic; maybe it's a supply problem. Maybe the dealership can't keep them in stock. I think it's something else. I think it's because they don't sell.

Jaguars used to be sort of a slightly-more-affordable top-end brand. They succeeded when their cars were remarkably beautiful, and they had more success than most in coming up with beautiful designs: the XK-120, and its update, the XK-140; the E-Type (still the most beautiful mass-production car ever made), and the XJ sedans. They also threw out some visual clunkers, notably the XK-150 and the XJS, both last-minute model-line add-ons without the usual thought processes that resulted in the company's successes. When Ford bought the company, they came out with an almost-gorgeous model combining the old XK-series engine (updated, of course) with the E-Type's sexy lines (also updated): the XK-8. My car.

Almost as pretty: my Jaguar XK-8

It is not, I would claim, in the same design class as the E-Type or the XK-120. If I were a mechanic, I'd much rather have either of those models. But I'm just a guy who loves to drive and appreciates beauty in many forms; there's no way I could keep an E-Type's three carburetors in tune, and when it breaks down in western New Mexico, what the hell would I do about it? No point in taking it into a shop, there's nobody to work on those cars in most parts of the world. So I bought myself an XK-8. Almost as pretty as the E-Type, with modern features like anitlock brakes and 3-point seat belts and air bags; and new enough that it should be pretty reliable, still. And if it does break down, I can find somebody to fix it. I may have to drive 5 hours out of my way, but there are places out there. For me, it's the best combination of practicality, style and comfort. (And it has legroom and a trunk big enough to serve.) 

The new Jaguar line is not pretty. The sedans look ordinary, despite their overhyped "recessed" grille garbage. They're staid. They're meh. They're too expensive for most people who like them, and not expensive (or exclusive) enough for people who can afford them. They have no cachet. The new sport model, the F-Type, is commonplace. It looks like a cross between an undersized Camaro retread and a Mazda Miata, but with a deeper voice. There's basically nothing to recommend it to a purchaser with $100,000 to put towards a car-toy. If you want a car that small, you buy a Porsche or a Mercedes (or a Miata). 

So I think Jaguar is a failing marque, likely to go the way of the Hupmobile and the De Soto.

End of rant.

So they couldn't fix my car -- the parts would take days to come in, and I wasn't willing to wait. But they did get the back windows up (and then disconnected them so that I don't accidentally lower them again). It was around noon when I left the shop. Went across the highway to a restaurant to see what I could salvage of my planned excursion.

The beauty spots across Northern Arizona all had to go by the way: Point of Mountain, Military Sinkhole, Woods Canyon Vista and, most painfully, Mogollon Rim. And Tonto Natural Bridge, near Payson, was out. But the rest was still doable.

So I headed up past Wickenburg to see the Shrine of St. Joseph-of-the-Mountains, in a little town called Yarnell. I'm not big on things religious beyond the fact that some of them tend to be among the more beautiful architectural expressions of Western civilization. This wasn't likely to be that, but one never knows, does one. My reason for including it in the plan was that I have a good friend who is heavily into the rites of the Church of Rome, and so when I have the opportunity to visit such a place, I do so with him in mind, and maybe I pick up a little souvenir that he might appreciate. 

Well, the Shrine is "temporarily closed." No sign of when (or even if) it might re-open. But there appears to be some kind of construction-related activity contemplated. So maybe in the future.... And it wasn't a total loss, this cruise up the mountain: the road up there was a great drive, made even better by the fact that the travel lanes are separated by about 40 to 80 feet of altitude. The road winds up along the edge of a steep mountain, with views to the southeast across a wide valley. On the downhill run, there's a belvedere where I got some pictures of the view across the valley; but I need to stitch them together on my other computer. Someday, maybe in a couple of weeks, they'll be available for viewing.

I have a sort of gig lined up, contributing articles to a website called automotivemuseumguide.com. I intend to make my first submission about the Petersen Museum, one of the largest in the country. I already have a ticket purchased to see it (again; I was there in 2019) on Friday, but I thought it'd be a good idea to see if I could get somebody from the museum to meet with me then, to give me information to illuminate and edify my eventual article. Turns out, though, that it's Pebble Beach this week. That's one of the world's biggest antique-car shows, at a famous golf resort up the coast from LA; I reckon, for those Petersen people, it's either a buying trip, or a selling trip, or just a great perk of the job, and everyone's gone to that. But I got a couple of email contacts, which I will write to tomorrow, after I get to LA and check into my hotel.

Poston Monument

Meanwhile, I'm drivin', I'm drivin'. When I get to Parker, on the Colorado River, I almost decide to skip the next point on my itinerary, the Poston Monument, fifteen miles south of town. But it only added about 15 minutes to my trip, so I went on down the road to see it. It's a column marking the site of the largest of the Japanese-American Internment Camps during World War II. I'm glad I went to see it; it's a moving reminder of what this country did to loyal citizens in a time of panic, and I think the shame we all feel, or should feel, as Americans has gone a long way toward making us a better people.Or at least, to keep us from doing that again.

The border of the small plaza where the monument stands is lined with bricks giving the names and assigned dwellings of various internees of the camp; and on the back of the monument are the names of internees who gave their lives in the service of their nation during that same war, despite what that nation had done to them and their families. The bottom of the monument hosts a number of origami, mostly swans, which I assume are meant as reminders to the world and the former inmates of the camp that their suffering has not been forgotten. 

My First Sandstorm!

On leaving Poston, I caught my first-ever sandstorm. I could see it, off to the east, and by the time I'd gotten to my turn-off for California I'd had to pull over twice to wait for adequate visibility. It wasn't nearly as exciting as I thought it might be. The sandstorm continued as I headed west, but on that road I was mostly among irrigated fields, so the dust was only dangerously heavy in the interstices between fields, where the wind picked up dust and blew it across the road. I could always see six or seven telephone poles ahead, so I felt comfortable going on, though at reduced speed. (Plus that road had no shoulder to pull on to.) Once I crossed the river into California, though, there were no more telephone poles, so I had to slow way down. By then, though, the storm seemed to be waning, so I kept going. I thought about going back to Parker, but it was already 25 miles away, so I stopped for a time at the C-store at the turnoff for Twenty-Nine Palms and waited it out.

Between the C-store and Twenty-Nine Palms, I drove through my second and third sandstorms, with hard rain in the intervals. The sand was just drifting ahead of me on the road like wraiths. These sandstorms were lighter than the first, but it's a little disturbing when your automatic windshield wipers come on and throw off a load of powdery sand you didn't expect to have there. It was dark long before I got to my destination for the night, and I was tired, so I pulled over on a turnout (nice of them to put those in, and to let you know they're coming up) to just close my eyes for a couple of minutes. I often find that two or three minutes just sitting with eyes closed will perk me up enough for a sustained bout of driving. After, it turns out, about 20 minutes, a car passed me and woke me up, and I drove into Twenty-Nine Palms, where I am writing this. It's after Midnight, and I'm pretty wide awake. There's one thing in this area I want to see in the morning, then I'm heading over to Los Angeles on what I hope is a stunningly beautiful drive, but with the top up, as I can't put it down until I get the thing fixed after I get home. (I need two new high-pressure hydraulic hoses; both of them gave out, and I have hydraulic fluid sloshing around in the back of the car, between the trunk and the outer skin, according to the mechanic who worked on it. But at least my windows are up now.)