This is what this road trip looks like from behind the wheel.
Ahead, there is a long rolling strip of Interstate split into two lanes with shoulders and entrances and exits. There are road signs, overpasses, and vehicles. Always there is sky and empty land stretching away from the road as you eat up miles and look for a good rational talk radio station coming to you from an underground bunker somewhere in Kansas where cows, corn, and missile silos peacefully co-exist.
Clouds hover like cartoons waiting for words.
I-40 is a main path connecting east and west and I am somewhere between Gallup and Flagstaff. This is Indian country, one of the highest concentrations of Native Americans in the country. Along the freeway you whiz past billboards promoting blackjack, cheap meals, entertainment, and hotel rooms. The casino parking lots have big rigs silent as drivers catch sleep and divert themselves from tedium.
Travel is what happens between your starting point and arrival point. It is often boring enough that I count cars, fence posts, telephone poles.
There is nothing happening here that anyone with an imagination would want to write about.
A cool morning in Surprise, Arizona, you can hear paddles striking balls several streets away from the Happy Trails pickle ball courts.
“There are 15,000 pickle ball players in this area,” a woman educates me as she sells new pickle ball paddles and takes names for her E-mail list at her vendor stand by the entrance to the courts.
This morning, while much of the park sleeps, men over 50 warm up, talk strategy, stretch, get their game faces right. Once individual games start there are paddles slammed into the ground, curses, and strained expressions. All the results of the pairings are written down on a bracket board by the scorers table. This is a tournament to crown the Happy Trails Pickle ball Champions in doubles, men over 50, 2015.
Pickle ball goes down on a small court with lots of stretching and reaction, strategy and competition. Even old guys don’t lose their desire to crush other old guys, even if they all have beers after the tournament and talk about good shots whenever and whomever they came from.
Having your name engraved on a silver cup becomes for some, at some point in their life, a great prize. Bragging rights can be some of the best.
After watching the tournament, I still don’t know where the name pickle ball comes from?
Nobody here looks like a cucumber.
At dusk, clouds congregate on the horizon and cars exit Highway 303 at Bell Rd. to go to Surprise, Arizona.
It is quitting time for those who still have a job to go too.
In Surprise, brother Alan and I are staying at the Happy Trails Resort but it could just as well be Tumbleweed Acres, the Paradise River Resort, the Leaping Lizard RV Park, or the Frontier Horizons. There are plenty of places in Surprise for people to pull RV’s, buy homes to fit their budgets, or stay in planned parks with clubhouses, libraries, ballrooms, swimming pools and saunas. In the deserts of Arizona there are plenty of developer escapades to worry about ,and, according to a yesterday’s local news article, plenty of land fraud cases to keep a team of corporate lawyers busy.
On the off ramp at Bell Road, we are just another car in line, waiting to make a left, continue down Bell Rd till we see our Happy Trails Resort, stop at a security gate and get waved through by a security guard, a middle aged park tenant making extra money to pay his monthly space rent.
Sunset is on the way, and,as it spreads, the sky becomes streaks of pink with textures reminding me of Van Gogh;s ” Starry Night. “.
The End of the World has been on my mind lately.
There are enough bad toys around the world to exterminate us all.
Staying off the internet and staying uninformed is a smart thing to do.
When Rome burns, you want to be out of town.
Surprise, Arizona didn’t start where it is today.
Back in the day there wasn’t much here but tumbleweeds, cactus, rugged mountains, ranches, farms, a few dirt roads and lots of dreams.
The Happy Trails Resort was once nothing but a set of plans for RV lots, park models, a clubhouse and pool, and a golf course. It is now a place for those who have achieved the American dream to move to the desert from cold states that don’t see much sun in the winter. It has become a place for relaxation, socializing, barbecues, dances and ice cream socials.
Roy Rogers and Dale Evans lent this resort their aura and promoted it. In the Chuck wagon dining room, off in a lonesome corner, is a display of mannequins wearing authentic costumes worn by Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, and cowboy memorabilia from an era when Roy Rogers was as big a star as Hollywood could create.
Looking at the costumes one is struck by how small a man Roy Rogers was, and how petite a woman was Dale Evans.
Watching them ride the range on TV they looked larger than life.They fought evil on every episode and there was always time for a song around a campfire with the boys, a helpful hand for neighbors and friends. In the end, bad guys got what they deserved and good prevailed. Their costumes seem flamboyant, even now, but cowboy’s have a style all their own.
Happy Trails is more than a song and more than a resort.
It is a philosophy. It is a wish for good luck, a wish for the best for all, a hope that at the last roundup we really all will meet again under the best of circumstances, under a broad starry sky with a roaring campfire to gird us against the cold, some hot coffee and tasty jerky for a meal, and a good blanket to throw over us as we nestle our head against a saddle.
At one time Hollywood gave us real heroes, real role models. Now, life has become more gray, more conflicted, more questioning, more rebellious, more edgy.
Looking at Roy and Dale, I resolve to dig out a few old colorized westerns.
I resolve to eat buttered popcorn and think about the fall of Rome.
There is, at some point, a line whereby good taste moves into bad.
There are value meters operating in everyone’s head at any given time with rating needles moving from one to ten, good to bad, up or down simultaneously within many categories. The Happy Trails Resort is above 5 but less than 10 on most of my scales.
Yard decorations at Happy Trails, however, score ten and a half..
There are carved wooden bears that welcome you with open arms. There are pink flamingos that have eschewed the Florida Everglades for dry desert vistas. There are little plastic ducks circling the inside of birdbaths. There is Golf Ball Man waiting for his next shot, cow skulls painted like a woman’s nails, plastic flower gardens, wooden birds whose tails rotate as wind direction changes. Makeshift clotheslines reach across carports and golf carts are pulled into driveways as the preferred mode of transportation. Such devil may care decorating brings the best and worst from Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Oregon, Washington, California.
Saquaro cactus stand tall and in the evenings look like silent sentinels waiting for an Indian attack. There are stories from residents of bobcat sightings and unwary house cats being carried off in the clamped jaws of coyotes, never to be seen again.
Ages here hover around 70 and real estate signs pepper each street.
Few snowbirds stay through the summer with heat over a hundred and ten degrees. Those that do come out only in early morning or late evening. The rest of the day they spend checking stock portfolios, calling kids and grand kids, and fixing light meals in microwave ovens.
When you get old you don’t want to move randomly or carelessly.
You want to hunker down in a gated community and keep a loaded pistol on your nightstand.
I-10 takes you to Los Angeles if you stay on it all the way.
Out of Wilcox, Arizona the Interstate takes you along a steadily winding uphill road that goes from long flat expanses to foothills and into rugged mountains. Several miles before you get to Texas Canyon, a collection of rock formations that look like a group of dinosaur’s ridged backs, you come to a ghost town called Stein’s. There is a faded billboard promoting the place that has survived highway beautification and Ladybird Johnson.
Usually Stein’s has just been a glance to my right and is passed by. There is nothing here but old wood cabins, rusted machines, cactus, barbed wire fences and trailers for people who want to live away from other people because it is easier that way.
I drive over an overpass, follow a gravel road that ends at a closed chain link gate. There is a sign with red lettering that says the place is closed and two men inside the fence today are burning weeds and trying to get the best of their rakes and shovels.
“You closed?”
“They are,” one says, suspicious of my intentions.
“Good place for a movie shoot.”
“They did a few here,” comes a grunt, “but the highway noise makes it hard. Kills the sound man. ”
“Is the Museum open?”
“No, the owner’s husband was murdered here and it has been closed four years. She doesn’t know what she is going to do. ”
When a place has a population of two and one gets murdered you have devastation.
My love affair with Stein’s ends as quick as it began and I pull back out on the Interstate with relief, glad to leave the two prisoners to their work detail.
Stein’s is now in my rear view mirror and its history is sad.
It is just another comma in a long winded Faulkner novel where people are born, live, and die while moss grows thick in the trees and the difference between humans and animals is only razor thin.
Outside the Happy Trails Resort, to the southwest, is a nature preserve named the White Tank Mountains.
Whereas Surprise is a continuation of development, an encroachment upon the desert, the White Tank Mountains are resolutely clinging to nature. Within fifteen miles of Surprise, this preserve takes you into wilderness with some modern conveniences. There are picnic areas, a winding loop road that returns you to the visitor center, RV spaces for rent, clean bathrooms. Some of the trails are okay for patrons in wheelchairs or using canes, and on other trails you see mountain bikes, horseback riding, and hikers.
Leaving the visitor center and driving into the park, there is a pull off place for active souls who like to run, ride bikes, horseback, train for athletic events. This time of morning, on a weekday, there are only two cars in the parking lot when brother Alan and I pull in.
Walking the trail, it isn’t hard to imagine grizzled prospectors leading a donkey deep into the mountains looking for precious metals. It isn’t hard to imagine ranchers chasing down cattle or Indians fighting troops stationed at old time forts.
There are still places you can disappear in Arizona.
Staying on Pathways has always been difficult for me, but I am not the only one who has trouble walking a straight line.
Brothers keep us grounded by knowing who we used to be.
Golf and sunshine walk hand in hand in Arizona in 2015 like a retired couple on a perpetual honeymoon.
The Happy Trails RV Resort surrounds a golf course and its golf holes wind through the development like a snake doing a break dance. The greens are good but fairways need attention with new owners cutting doglegs to trim overhead and maximize profit.
Walking down streets named Trigger, Spur, Lariat, there are yard decorations in abundance.
In a golfing area, one is not surprised to find Golf Ball Man, a curious combination of super sized golf ball cells held together with wire skin and topped off with a driver, golf cap, sunglasses, and a determined look.
He shoots under par, sinks thirty foot down hill putts, has no trouble with sand shots, drives like a twisting desert dervish. If you ask him, he will tell you you have to give him five shots a nine plus one mulligan an eighteen. He can up the bet on the eighteenth hole if he chooses, and you can’t tee up your ball in the fairway.
Roy Rogers and Dale Evans are patron saints of this place but Golf Ball Man says his prayers in the pews.
At night I hear golf ball man practicing his putting, and, whistling, ” When the Saints, Go Marching in….. ”
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