Taliesen West

24 January, 2013

Carefree, Arizona

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

Matthew 5:6

We spent an hour checking out Kingman before leaving, already an hour behind our normal takeoff time, which seems to be reverting to Virginia standards. Photographing a couple of old motels, juxtaposed against the mountains, we headed East on 40 to 93, South and East, towards Scottsdale, a northern extension of Phoenix.

As soon as we came down 93 from highway 40 toward Wickenburg, we began to see cactus, the tall ones. The turn onto 60 East brought warnings of roadwork.

The desert sage and palmettos began to part further, the sandy soils to become stony, then boulders laying on the ground plane, to mountains of boulders, with cholla and sehuaro cactus, standing tall, like every western Americana motif captured at one time or another. The cactus proceeded to dominate the terrain, no matter how steep or unforgiving, and we began drawing nearer to Mexico.

We arrived at Golden Hour, sunset, after the tours were long over, but caught a couple of photographs, a few with the filling moon in the indigo sky. It was road chaos on the way in, and we accidentally discovered the town of Carefree, North of Scottsdale, before arriving.

As one approaches Scottsdale, Frank Lloyd Wright references abound in the architecture. Then one rides in on Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard. Carefree has a number of houses sited in the mountains and cliffs, many of which are obvious (design) tips of the hat to Wright. It is an affluent community, economically vivacious to the degree that I thought, Larchmont of the Southwest.

Frank Lloyd Wright built Taliesin West fairly late in his career, and he handled the open Arizona country, cactus desert and mountain backgrounds, as a part of the architecture. And the architecture has a way of shaping the landscape around it, bringing order to chaos, and perhaps gaining the opposite in return.

The low forms, the timeless nature of the desert and the rough masonry walls, the slope of the beamed roofs all cause the senses to open. Too late to consider the tours, and traveling nearly eight thousand miles on a budget, I decided to stay nearby and reconsider the panorama tour in the morning.

Having had the requisite confusion coming into town without my ipad being a map, it had taken a while to find Taliesen, as hot-air balloons appeared in the South, dramatic against the mountains beyond. Leaving at dark, into rush hour caused some unnecessary and egregious turns about Northern Phoenix, before we found a place to stay.

Phoenix looks like the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport after dark. It goes on forever.

We woke to find the rain that had come into Seattle as we left California on Monday had caught up with us.