All the Beauty and the Bloodshed and Homogeny

Nature is cool! Rocks are massive! Ever felt WONDER?!

Sometime in mid-January, along with my dog Winnie, I drove from TwentyNine Palms, California, to Sedona, Arizona; a 400 mile drive mostly without cell service.

It was both lonely and liberating.

No one could reach me, but then again, no one could reach me.

I get it, this whole road trip thing is a little on the nose. An outward expression of some internal wandering and displacement I’ve been feeling lately, my reasoning being something along the lines of: Thought you were isolated in New York? WATCH THIS! In the city you only “felt” like you were free-falling, hurtling through space, let’s actually hurtle you at 85mph through vast, spacious landscapes, away from anything familiar, and anyone you’ve ever known and loved! The only people who can stop you are the police and what are they going to arrest you for, Driving Under The Influence of Awe? PUBLIC YEARNING? Be lonely but make it epic! Be divine in your isolation! See God’s creation and say, “Yes! I am small and insignificant; I had suspected, but now I really know!”

What’s next, go to space? 

But, in a weird way, it’s helping. Like loneliness immersion therapy. It puts things in perspective. If you can see past the plastic dashboard of your Nissan Maxima and ignore your GPS - whose voice has been inexplicably set to a Lancashire accent- the wilds of Arizona are so thoroughly un-modern, so entirely out of any time, state or nation, that whatever concerns you had before entering them are rendered completely irrelevant.

I have driven through vast, gaping valleys with behemoth rock formations surrounding me like sleeping dogs. Some things are so big that they’re comforting, like we’ve met before. Or maybe the feeling is that they know me and my kind, have seen millions of us flow through their canyons on foot, horseback, and trucks, forging ahead, carving out gullies and tracks like ants or brain waves before filing off to the great elsewhere on various missions. I can’t help feeling nostalgic, part of some grand scheme of things, even as a British person with no lineage in this place.

AweFest 2024 started in California.

Hiking with Hannah in Muir Woods, Marin County, we stumbled out of the darkness into a clearing with almost 360 views of the high, teal ocean. It felt too gorgeous. I told her my awe was always tinged with sadness because you can't touch or hold or keep any part of the moment in front of you. Its fleetingness is so tragic.

Hannah replied “I think that’s just what love is”.

Two weeks later I had the same feeling as I drove from Monterey to San Luis Obispo, gasping at mountains of flocked lava frozen in time, hugging each other, partially kneaded. Spooky low hazes of I don’t know what - cloud, mist, pollution- hung around the base of the hills like garlands. I wanted to climb into their crevices as PJ Harvey’s This is Love came on the radio.

I can’t describe the colors I have seen on this trip. Deep purples where mere shadows and dark spots should be. Sage green, alive and fizzing, painted across landscapes on a glass plate like in an old Disney film. Leaving the snowy mountains of Taos, New Mexico, the red earth smeared the sidelines of the road like old blood stains. To use the word orange doesn’t do justice to the glow in my rearview mirror demanding I look at it even though I’m not going that way. How can you have a pink that is both blue and lavender?

Driving into Sweetwater, Texas, cartoonish candyfloss clouds hung low on the horizon before turning into dark ink blots bleeding towards me across a bruised sky. When the world suddenly turned pitch black I could see nothing but red tail lights then flashes of horizontal, neon lightning streaking across the sky as Gimme Shelter built to a crescendo through my speakers. It was thrilling and dangerous and entirely ahead of me - I was hurtling straight for it at speed with a hundred other souls desperate to find cover and a warm bed before the wind blew us off the road.

All these epic views to the north, south, east, and west begging to be witnessed, each more spectacular and fleeting than the last, all for the first time, and never to be repeated in the exact way again for this exact same me, this audience of one hurtling down an empty road at golden hour. Me with somewhere else to be. Just me casually and hurriedly passing through one of Mother Nature’s home runs; an everyday miracle happening whether I notice or not.

It’s embarrassing to think that people might simply look to their left on their drive home and think, “Huh, nice sunset”. Choirs of Gregorian chanters should line the hard shoulder of CA-150 E if we’re even to begin to show our appreciation!

Perhaps I’m being dramatic, certainly unoriginal: Nature is cool! Rocks are huge! Ever felt WONDER?! Maybe locals grew bored of these landscapes long ago, as humans often do. Our grasp on novelty is weak and easily replaced with boredom and blank stares, momentary glances at surroundings over the tops of phones and newspapers, our mind always elsewhere. I’m sure that the brain needs to compartmentalize even the epic. Perhaps after a while I would look upon an explosive sunset behind some vast, rocky chasm older than time and be like “Yep, got it”, filing it away as life’s new desktop wallpaper.

But even by hour four of my six hour journey to Sedona, I was still clutching my heart at every new vista; an urge that felt so surprising and old-fashioned, like cosplaying a scandalized belle - Goodness gracious, have mercy!

It was pure instinct, my little nature bearing witness to Big Nature. I wonder what that is, what prehistoric hangover, what evolutionary purpose it serves to hold your hand to your chest other than perhaps to say, Hey, stop. Don’t rush. Look at this, it might make you feel good, it might make you live longer, take in some wonder why don’t you?

Nature arrests you and you arrest yourself.

Or perhaps it’s because these images are so overwhelming that a hand on your chest is to remind you that you still exist; that despite their bigness, and your smallness, you are still present nonetheless, Here you are! Feel the hardness of your breast plate, be still your beating heart!

The idea that any man could look upon this and think, “Only thing this bad boy needs is some Golden Arches” is beyond me. And yet, every small town and city I drove through proudly showcased the emblem of the world’s biggest fast food chain as I entered it. It was always the first sign of civilization. Even Sedona, home of cosmic rocks and spiritual vortexes, has a McDonald’s, but they at least had the good grace to make the sign turquoise. Sure, rampant capitalism and heart disease but make it tasteful!

After driving for hours seeing only huge, natural beauty, it started to feel odd and alien when I came across man’s puny creations. Even the most plain and unassuming building had the appearance of junk that some dude had left behind. And some humans felt even less native to the landscape than the architecture.

Driving through the Arizona desert, I stopped at a strange cafe-come-hardware store-come-mini-mart to use the bathroom; one of many urgent detours due to my weak bladder and love of black coffee no matter how bad, bitter and lukewarm. Leaving the restroom, I came across the cafe; a little liminal space between two walls with no windows, just a row of tables, and chairs behind a temporary partition. It had all the charm of a crawl space where psychopaths chain up their victims. A mirage of a social setting. A mean trick.

I have been coming across liminal spaces a lot. Perhaps because I’m traveling at low season, or perhaps because deserts are deserted by nature, but I regularly have the sensation that I am exploring the world after a mass extinction event. Any human I come across is just alive and civil enough for me to think, “OK, confirmed: definitely not a ghost”, a thought I almost never have in New York City.

The woman manning the crawl space cafe was in her 50s, maybe 60s, with bright yellow, fried hair and a complexion as white as bone. She was hard and wiry, and eating french fries from a red plastic basket, sucking on them one-by-one due to either an abundance of time or a shortage of teeth. I paid without her ever looking at me. Despite being the only customer in the only car I’d seen for miles, I could not compete with whatever was on her phone. People don’t move to remote barren wastelands to make friends.

Even the friendlier humans seem like they’re not expecting me. I regularly startle shop owners, like stumbling across a Truman Show actor who wasn’t told you were coming. In a vintage clothing store somewhere along US-60 E, the owner literally popped up from the floor behind the counter like the opening credits of a sitcom. She immediately suggested I try on the bright white shirt she was already holding in her hands because it “matched my hair”.

Almost fashion advice. A nearly normal exchange.

Stepping into random highway stores and pit-stops as a solo female traveler always feels fraught with danger. If you have seen any road trip movie, horror film, or news report, then you know that, in rural America, murder is around every corner. At the gas station. In the lay-by. Especially in the small “native store” run by a young white man wearing a stab vest in a shop full of dead stuffed creatures that are all bigger than you.

Upon entering these spaces I behave the same way I would in a fancy clothing store where t-shirts sell for $300; nod sagely at the giant dead grizzly bear, pretend to consider purchasing the grimacing head of an elk, rub my chin as I finish a calm but swift lap of the store, then get the hell out.

A woman with my bank balance and upper body strength cannot afford to be here.

Almost every native gift shop I’ve been in has been manned by white people in places supposedly home to Mohave, Chemehuevl, Hopi, and Navajo. The GPS tells me I’m approaching Apache Creek, and yet the only people I see look like they’re from the Brown, Richmond or Cooper tribes. I see the wares of native people - Genuine! Made by a local tribe! - but where are they? Local to who? Where are the people whose land you say we’re on? I think of Palestine and wonder if 100 years from now, young, fresh-faced Israeli actors will proudly declare “We acknowledge we are on the land of the al-filastiniyyin and honor their sacred wisdom and connection to this territory. Now, please enjoy, John Wick: Chapter 3: Parabellum, which we have adapted into a 3 hour stage play with no intermission”

Genocide is everywhere. Here is my version of the potted history of Sedona I read on a plaque in town one morning: “Natives lived peacefully in the area for around 1,400 years. In the 1800s, some guy called JJ. Thompson claimed squatters rights. The natives were either killed or ethnically cleansed off the land in the March of Tears and froze to death on the way to San Carlos. In 1902, a man called T.C. Schnebly named the town after his wife ( his second choice after “Schnebly Station” was rejected for being too long and too lame)

Sedona could’ve just as easily been called Barbara or Debbie.

122 years later, it’s a spiritual mecca people flock to for shamanic healing ceremonies, past life regressions, vortex tours, and crystal shopping. Here, I had an aura reading from a camp white man in his 60s, conducted using what I can only describe as an original 1990s Microsoft desktop camera and delivered to me from a slow printer that was running out of ink. He then sold me two jasper stones for $36 to help with my “unnaturally low levels”.

Whether in pristine, overpriced Sedona, or in a roadside shack in Flagstaff, all these native stores sell the exact same thing. Traditional rugs, ceremonial earthenware, selenite cleansing rods, and plastic cowboys swimming in square cubes filled with unnaturally blue liquid.

A third of the shop floor is dedicated to vanity name plates and jewelry. Halfway across California I gave myself the task of buying a kitsch “K” keyring or “Katy” license plate, but between there and Garfield, Texas I have not been able to find one. In America, names beginning with K are so embarrassingly common that all roadside gift shops seem to be in state of recovery after a recent raid by a gang of self-obsessed Katies, Katys, Karens, Kims, Katherines, Kellys, Kristens, Kirstens and Kaylas. All that’s ever left is the empty space between J and L, evidence that the Ks are everywhere, except right where I’m standing.

I saw my first confederate flag driving through Wingate, Texas. Then they were everywhere. Next, I kept thinking “Oh, cool, there’s a big Puerto Rican population in Texas” before realizing what I kept seeing flying next to Star Spangled Banner was the Texas State flag. In many ways, the whole of Texas is like walking through a Puerto Rican neighborhood in NYC, each flag proclaiming - Hey you! You are in Texas! We are also in Texas! It’s America, but it’s also Texas! We are definitely over here being both American and Texan, so, don’t you forget it! And in case you do, my neighbor will tell you again in half a mile!

Early, Texas, was nothing but fast-food places I didn't want to eat at and one gigantic Walmart. I kept driving into vast, unfinished forecourts searching for any kind of sustenance having survived on Pringles and Junior Mints for the past 24 hours. Whenever I caught a glimpse of my haunted reflection I would think “Uh, I need a facial” but what I really needed was to be turned inside out and have the Starburst, Chicken Nuggets, and Coca-Cola squeezed right out of me. A soul colonic.

Every town I passed through hoarded their dead in exactly the same way, on a sensible portion of land just on the outskirts of town. The cemeteries were always relative in size to current population despite the fact that the number of people alive today is dwarfed by the number of people who have ever lived. These modest graveyards were another exercise in perspective, a testament to how short all our attachments, legacies and memories are.

On this trip, I’ve felt life, death, wonder, boredom, beauty, and sickness everywhere, at all times. I have been driving through the soup and I’m more in love and horrified by America than I’ve ever been.

The night I drove into Sedona I cried, even before the tragic aura reading and the genocide plaque. I approached the town just after sundown and everything around me had turned a deep, navy blue. There must be a better color for me to point to but if there is I don’t know the name of it. It was dark, rich, and thick with the cosmos, brimming with electricity. An ecstatically muted black-blue.

I cried when the huge Sedona rocks rolled into view, perfectly silhouetted yet not quite separate from the night sky. I got it. I understood why people told me to come here. I sputtered to Winnie “We’re so lucky, we’re so lucky” as she looked at me in that uncomfortable, embarrassed way that dogs do, forever apologetic that she still doesn’t speak my language or know where and what she is. She was no doubt bored, worn down by the journey having only seen 6 hours of sky from her vantage point in the backseat. She didn’t even bother to whine.

I was tired and lonely, with a pain in my neck, arm, and shoulder and as I continued to cry it dawned on me that the sobs might not just be about the big rocks - you know? But perhaps I’m embarrassed to admit that nature made me cry and would rather say it was delayed disappointment about dating, aging, or career woes. How boring, how un-epic!

In fact, from now on, if I’m crying, I hope it’s only over the majesty of something big and unknowable like life or rocks, rather than small and predictable like not getting a second interview. We should be embarrassed to not be sobbing over how goddam beautiful the world is at all times (wheel out the Gregorian chanters!)

So, I’ll say that yes, the magical energy and vortexes of Sedona pulled the wracking sobs out of me, to the perfect soundtrack of New Grass by TalkTalk, as I crawled the winding roads with my small dog in this big landscape looking for the Matterhorn Inn.

Whatever the reason, like rain after a long summer, Oh, I needed it! A blessing! A good old cry!

Goodness gracious, America - have mercy!