Mucking Around in the Past and . . . Recent Past

Daniel and Ellie came to visit, perhaps just to thaw out after a winter in Minneapolis, before they get married this summer in Madison, and before they return to Portland, Oregon, where they plan to settle back into the liquid life of a coastal climate.

We picked them up in Phoenix, and went straight to Sedona: Red Rock Country in Arizona. It just seemed right to us that we--two generations of tumbling family--should together see the place where John McCain vetted, and abetted, and pirouetted Sarah Palin's career, before he turned her loose on a shopping trip for clothes and a career in inanity.

(Don't look for a picture of Sedona, here: nothing I carried in my pockets was adequate to capture what Sedona is. "God may have created the Grand Canyon," we read, "but he lives in Sedona."

Jerome used to be called a Ghost Town, but that was before almost every inch of the almost-cliffside mining town was bought by people who could not afford to live in Sedona with God, who turned from singing hymns of red-spired praise to painting for their suppers, selling their high art to flatlanders.

We did drive up to the Grand Canyon on another day which, perhaps because it was a peculiarly overcast day, managed to transform the Canyon into an almost monotonously large hole in the ground, not without color, but nothing like it is when the dawn comes up like thunder out of Colorado, across the bay, or when the sun looks back at day's end, shining purple on where it had been. The Canyon was nothing like it is when storms come, or when Sarah Palin sips Tea at a Party, and savages the air with lightning.

We did stand where the Spanish explorers did, early in the 1700s, and spy the Colorado River, deep, deep down, exploring pre-history. It still looks, from edge, as if the River is, as they said, "six feet wide".

On the way home, after another day in Sedona, we stopped at Arcosanti, where Paolo Soleri, who died recently, has been whittling away at urban sprawl by building something out in the desert north of Phoenix. It is made of concrete and dreams from the Seventies, when God had finished the Canyon, but had not come to terms with traffic problems. Paolo Soleri proposed to remedy that, driving a van two days a week from his home in Phoenix out to Arcosanti, where the future is taking shape and sound, one bronze bell after another. On the schematics, it is labeled, "Automated Industry". The future happens, at Arcosanti, when you manually pour bronze into a boxful of sand, automatedly.

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