From Albuquerque, west on Interstate 10, I had to stop at Gallup to travel along the iconic Route 66. I remembered two trips to California in the Sixties, and wondered if any of the motels and burger joints I was seeing were possibly places where we stopped back then.
There's always a moment of sitting for a few minutes at a crossroads deciding where to go next: Do I drive on to Flagstaff? Or do I drive north and explore the Navajo Nation and Canyon De Chelly? I hear echoes of Frost's poem, "The Road Not Taken...."
So I saved Canyon de Chelly and the Navajo nation for another day, and headed to Flagstaff. Whenever I saw the name of a place I remembered from 1963, I had to stop, check it out, compare it with the version of it in my memory.
Gallop, New Mexico, for instance: I can't say I remember it, per se, but what I remember is Route 66 on which we were traveling that summer, and how excited we'd get when we finally! found a Kentucky Fried Chicken. That was our first fast-food, as I recall, and we were all over it--and vice versa.
When I traveled west twice in the Sixties, we didn't have much in the way of chains. Motels had their own unique names: Desert Skies, The Road Wanderer, Gardenia Inn....
No Holiday Inns, nothing that matched the town you were just in.
No Burger Kings, Taco Bells....
When you travel the sections of Route 66 still open, it brings back memories of the days before fast food and chain-everything homogenized the landscape. When the Interstate stretched all the way from one coast to another, you started noticing that The Road Wanderers and Desert Skies disappeared (or looked like relics compared to the new kids on the block) as the Hospitality Industry began spinning out matched sets of motels at every intersection.
As a child, I found the Painted Desert a big disappointment! I'd have much preferred more time in souvenir shops and wax museums, stuff like that.
So when I saw the sign Painted Desert--an hour or so east of Flagstaff--I had to return to see if it was really as boring as I remembered it.
Sometimes it's not the places with the big recognition value that take your breath away, though; you go there because it would be a crying shame to be so close and not to get to Say You'd Been.
What I personally love more are the stretches of road before and after the places with visitors centers and post cards.
I love pulling over to watch an entire train, engine to caboose, crawl along the landscape. Against the enormous skies and scale-shifting enormity of the red rock formations of New Mexico and Arizona, these metallic strings of boxcars always remind me of miniature trains.
I'll keep going to the state and national parks that have visitors centers and postcards and hat pins and patches and tee-shirts. I'll rent a cookie cutter motel, too, from time to time. But when I discover a lodging or a road I never heard of before, that's cause for doing the In Car version of Jumping Up and Down!
All the motels in Flagstaff were filled or outrageously expensive. So I took my laptop into the Days Inn lobby and the young woman at the desk ("I wouldn't pay $225 for this room, either!") gave me directions to the Air B&B I booked right there in the Days Inn lobby. It was called Solaris, a whole basement apartment in Lake Montezuma, Arizona, just south of Sedona. (For $70 a night)
"The GPS will tell you to go Highway 17," she said, "But go 89A instead, through Sedona."
89A from Flagstaff to Sedona started out as a pine forest, then--without fanfare, without big signs--the road became tight turns, 15 MPH switchbacks. At 6000 elevation, the canyons appeared to be lit by the glow of a fire as the sun was setting against their western walls.
No postcards. No photographs--of mine or anyone else's. Nothing can capture the magic and mystery of any place. But we try, don't we? And just trying, just looking through the lens of a camera, frames what we are seeing--as best we can--in that particular moment.
When we leave wherever we are, we will look back at the pictures as reminders of the whole day surrounding the moment when we clicked.
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