Above and below the grade: Into The Cold

 25 January, 2013

 Albuquerque, New Mexico

Well, I'm a standing on a corner 
in Winslow, Arizona 
and such a fine sight to see

Songwriters: BROWNE, JACKSON / FREY, GLENN

We came up route 17 from North Phoenix, deciding against going South through Tucson into Las Cruces, and veered East on 260, into the Coconino National Forest. I had just had a conversation with my friend, Palmer, asking how something with no trees qualifies as a forest, when we went over the opening crest, and ran into the first snow since the Cascades, last October.

There was an immediate foot of snow, plowed from the road a couple of days ago, signs warning about ice, and the air got cold. We were also in tall conifers, pines, firs, cedars and junipers, and understood the forest designation. We crested somewhere around 9000 feet, seeing a sign for 7500 on the way down. At the top the snow was two feet deep.

Thinking of our dry, warm (83 degrees) respite from the road South of Kingston the day before, sitting in the desert sun, near an old stock ramp and a massive sehuaro cactus, I began to reconsider the Northern route to Albuquerque.

Taking route 87 toward Winslow, remaining in the National forest briefly, the landscape changed from the coniferous forest to blond grasslands, sun-bleached beyond the gold of my memories. The powdery green of the desert sage gave it a faded, familiar sort of worn blue jeans look. Table mesas began to emerge, and ultimately form a gateway into Windsor.

Windsor’s Southern approach is overburdened with ever-decreasing speed-limit signs, accompanied by signs demanding their respect, and after passing the State Prison on the left, I paid close attention. We have rolled over 8000 miles in the overall journey, and 1300 since the North Bay today, and it was not lost on me….well let me not jinx myself.

Filling with gas, at $3.92 per gallon, we regained Highway 40 for Albuquerque, and became fascinated with the scenery.  The grasslands gave way to red and beige cliffs, jutting above and below the grade. As we drew due South of the Four Corners cross between the states of Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, we saw stone formations resembling the Utah slickrock, liquid amorphous expressions lending themselves to pachyderm and anthropomorphic abstractions.

Through Holbrook, Sanders and chambers, we came into Navajo County and the country began to be littered with abandoned dwelling constructs, tractor-trailers without the tractors, mobile homes, desperate immobile winnebagos, and small frame houses, sometimes in a perfect grid, all placed in the dirt.

Gallup is rimmed in slums of the aforementioned character. Lacking the razor-wire fenced scrapyards that introduce Ogden, Utah, it still begins with scrapyards and outposts of abandoned dwellings and businesses. Inside the perimeter I could see some appeal, adobe hilltown meets americana, but I also thought of why guitarist J.J. Cale chooses to live in trailer parks. It looked like a place where everybody might know everybody, and thus constitute a defensible neighborhood, despite its poverty.

We came into Albuquerque at 6:30, as twilight settled into dark, and if I had thought Phoenix looked like Dallas at night, Albuquerque looks like Los Angeles, a truly moving spray of lights, filling the valley floor with articulated axes of illumination, spreading into infinity.