Honeymoon Day 26: Jerome

After leaving the Grand Canyon, my yin and I spent the night in Kaibab National Forest. As with Yosemite, the campgrounds were full at the North Rim, but campers were allowed to take advantage of "dispersed campsites" in the forests outside the park free of charge. The nice thing about this was that it allowed us to sleep in a totally isolated area – no drunken college students (Big Sur), no singing Boy Scouts (Bryce), no screaming children (Zion).

The unfortunate thing was that it dropped down to almost freezing that night, and my yin and I woke before dawn to the sound of chattering teeth. We later confessed to one another that each of us had secretly tried to imagine how long until the sunrise because it meant we could finally break camp and get out of the freezing cold. The upside to the hypothermia, however, was that we got an early start that morning. Soon found ourselves entering another country:

I'm still not clear on exactly how the whole reservation system thing works, but I do know that it felt a little odd driving through the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona. I once heard Angela Davis refer to our treatment of Native Americans as "the great American apartheid", and what I saw seemed to confirm her analysis. Far from the apparent wealth of the tribes that have built and licensed casinos throughout the United States, all I saw driving down Highway 89 was poverty.

It saddened me, and the giant rock outcroppings of the Marble Canyons inspired snippets of verse:

Navajo reservations:
life in the mesa's shadow
(the silhouettes of)
vermillion cliffs
monsters in the daytime
and ghosts in the night.

The camera even got into the act, and the image below perfectly surmises the contradiction between the material poverty of the reservation, the majesty of the natural landscape, and the spiritual poverty of the nation surrounding the Nation:

(the billboard also shows why we chose not to go to the South Rim)

Eventually we came to Wupatki National Monument, which is about an hour or so north of Flagstaff. This was another of our unplanned stops and allowed us to glimpse both social and geologic history:

an Anasazi pueblo from the 12th century

lava flows not unlike those at Craters on the Moon

the San Francisco Mountains as seen from Sunset Crater

There was also this strange flower called Apache plume. The encounter with new plant species was one of the most consistently (and unexpectedly) rewarding parts of the trip for me, especially considering the fact that I can hardly tell a chickpea from a garbanzo bean:

Apache plume is without medicinal use, but does help prevent erosion

This was also the day that took us across parts of Route 66, which, once upon a time, connected Chicago to Los Angeles:

yes, that is our car antenna – the dangers of windshield photography

Much like Kerouac's On the Road, Route 66 was rendered a work of nostalgia by the advent of the interstate highway system, and now all that remains of its former vitality is a series of ill-kept marquees and billboards:

not exactly sure what the "European hostess" is meant to imply...

I wonder what "kicks" lurk inside this fine establishment?

After passing through Flagstaff, we followed Oak Creek Canyon down 2,000 feet into the stunning red rocks that surround and define Sedona. It was a warm Sunday afternoon, and there were cars lined up along both sides of the road. The entrance signs to the state parks and national forests along the way warned travelers "No Parking" and "Campsite Full", and my yin and I were a little nervous about the fact that we had no reservation.

Miraculously (or at least fortunately), we were able to secure a site at Manzanita Campground, and the park ranger told us that this was the first time since April that they hadn't been booked solid:

our campsite alongside Oak Creek

We told her we were hungry, and she directed us into Sedona:

our eventual destination

This restaurant, Sedona Chocolate, is the city's only purely vegetarian eatery (vegan actually), and most of the menu items are raw as well. Other than fruits and salad, I'm something of a skeptic when it comes to the whole raw food movement, but the Thai noodles I had were quite tasty:

noodles not pictured

They also had what appeared to be a giant orgone accumulator, or some other quasi-Reichian device that Burroughs undoubtedly endorsed between nods and hallucinations. It had a good look to it, though, and I suggested to my yin that she step inside so she could tune up her mojo:

With both her mojo and orgones in good working order, my yin and I headed westward towards the small town of Jerome, Arizona:

It was Saylor, back in San Francisco, who first told us about Jerome. At the start of the 20th century it was a booming copper town:

this lowered workers into the mineshaft

this is me, imitating said miners

When the price of copper fell, maintaining the mine became unfeasible and Jerome soon became a ghost town. It remained that way for more than fifty years, but during the last twenty it has become a haven for artists and artisans. Why they chose Jerome I have no idea, but my yin and I speculated that it was the overflow from Sedona as it grew more and more expensive.

The result is that Jerome is now half ghost town:

And half faux-Williamsburg:

Buddhas and hogs live side-by-side:

And prostitution has become a synecdoche for everything:

Even the post office (still in operation) is an accomplice to this ironic, quaintly contrived nostalgia:

Nonetheless, the downtown affords spectacular views of the old mine as well as the valley between Jerome and Sedona:

And I met a madman named Gabe who makes custom sundials:

my hand, not Gabe's

I was unable to ascertain whether he was:

A) a mathematical genius
B) completely insane
C) both answers A and B

But this is beside the point.

The point is that we returned to Sedona before sunset, and of all the towns we saw along our way it has to be the most beautiful. The earth is red, the sky is blue, the trees are green, and the white clouds float across them like dandelions in the wind:

to be continued...