Into Thick Air (42 page)

The pumps are gulping 22,000 gallons each and every second, lifting it over 800 feet, and disgorging it into the Central Arizona Project canal that runs 330 miles to Phoenix and Tucson. Along the way the water will be raised by additional pumps another 2,100 feet. Messing with the numbers, I figure out that this distance and rise is equivalent to running a fair portion of the Colorado River backward and uphill all the way to Utah—all because of our refusal to live with aridity.

As for the natives, “The desert floras shame us with their cheerful adaptations to the seasonal limitations,” wrote Mary Austin in her 1903
The Land of Little Rain.
Cheerful is pushing it, but they certainly know how to bide their time. The hills hold mostly creosote and bouquets of thick knobby stems called brittlebush. No leaves on the latter, and it's no surprise. A survey with my binoculars confirms my suspicion: only three saguaros in the neighborhood. Although the big cactus is a canteen
capable of surviving a rainless year, the saguaro's seeds cannot split open and reach for the sky without the summer rains. That they are vanishing is proof that the rains go no further.

Usually. Climate is all about statistics, not the particularly large thunderhead that hunkers over the wreck of a mountain in the west. The sun, blotted out by the cloud, looks to be down for the count—but then breaks out to burn free on the horizon with one last ferocious shaft of light. Startled but feeling lucky, I pedal on to the perfect place for the night, a clear patch of pavements atop a ridge. To the south, beyond the ragged palisade of the Buckskin Mountains, the atmosphere is boiling over. The lightning delivers simple cloud-to-ground jabs as well as cloud-to-cloud shots that spread like cracks in shattered glass.

I prepare my bed, rinse off with a liter of water, pop open a beer, and turn to see that there are now four storms, one at each cardinal point. A hoot owl tells me I'm not alone. Sitting on a warm rock, I watch, grinning goofily in anticipation. But no storm will come.

Later, I wake to thunder. I get the tent up, crawl in, and count off the seconds from flash to rumble. When it's forty-five seconds, it's like counting sheep. But when it's suddenly twenty, then four seconds, it's like my wife's labor pains, just before she yelled, “It's coming!” That's how baby Rosa was born at home, by accident. Some things are simply beyond our control.

A hot bolt turns the world from black and white to color. The wind butts the tent. And with the first heavy splats of rain, the wait is over.

 

RIDING INTO LAKE HAVASU CITY, I'm surprised that the first homes aren't trailers but actual houses. The gravel yards are heaped in color-coordinated mounds topped with copper cutouts of the iconic flute-playing native, Kokopelli. Electric garage doors open and close, and vehicles with tinted windows come and go. But no actual humans are about, despite the Welcome to Lake Havasu City sign (
Keep Us Drug-Free, Gang-Free, Graffiti-Free
) claiming a population of 40,000.

I ride until I find a cinder-block strip mall, but on Sunday there's nobody at Sunshine Hair Styling or the gift shop trying to unload Beanie Babies. Things liven up at the Walgreen's, with a marquee reading
Patriotic
T-shirts, 3 for $10
. Doing my part, I buy some Made-in-America Sour Skittles.

Lake Havasu City is dense with flags. The shops have directions for “Proper Flag Display” taped to their windows. They also sell the flag decals I've seen slapped on car and truck windows. The resulting loss of visibility might explain the big wreck on Highway 95.

A man in a patriotic T-shirt and black horn-rims is reconstructing the accident for all who care to listen. He points to the filigree of skid marks and says, “Now you can see that the fifth-wheel couldn't stop—too much weight! He was
towing
an SUV
behind
his trailer. Come down the hill and round the bend and skidded into that little gray car, knocked it clear across the intersection. 'Course the fifth-wheel kept on skidding, into that Suburban towing what used to be a boat.”

Sherds of fiberglass are strewn over the road. A pity, because the boat had to go only another hundred yards to reach the World Famous English Village and London Bridge. I pedal down to the channel and watch the
Dixie-Bell
, a fake steamboat, cruise under the bridge.

Unlike the
Dixie-Bell
, the bridge is the real thing. It was sinking into the Thames until Robert McCulloch, of chainsaw fame, bought it in 1968 for a mere $2.4 million (shipping and handling not included). He had a plan. In 1963 McCulloch had bought twenty-six square miles of land from the state of Arizona on the shore of Lake Havasu. It was supremely vacant of humans. Real steamboats, like the 175-foot-long
Mohave
, used to paddle the Colorado, but the dams had finished them off. Now there was nobody within forty miles.

McCulloch pitched his master-planned community on television. The curious called a number, and a man would come to your house. One came to my family's house, in a suburb of Chicago. My parents dearly wanted to escape the post-1968 desolation of the South Side. The pictures of swimming pools and palm trees looked good.

McCulloch's man flew them out for a look, and my father later recalled his impression of Lake Havasu City: “We'd just landed the astronauts on the moon—and here it was. There was nothing at all.”

McCulloch needed an attraction. While my family packed up for Tucson
(the Garden of Eden compared to Havasu), he had London Bridge rebuilt, stone by stone, near the lunar shore of Havasu. The completed bridge looked perfect if you didn't notice that it spanned nothing but gravel. McCulloch next sent in the heavy equipment. With 'dozers and dredgers, the lake was brought to and under London Bridge.

The year was 1972, and the effect was immediate. You could drive a boat under London Bridge, and thousands wanted to. By 1974, Lake Havasu City had seventy organizations, including the John Birch Society, Havasu Cactus Kickers, and Overeaters Anonymous.

The overeaters are still here—or are those tourists? The young men by the Old English Pub look like Maori warriors, shirtless barrels of flesh with vaguely Asian tattoos and sun-peeled noses. One is barking into a cell phone, “Bin Laden just released his latest video, and we just released our latest bombs. Did you hear? Nine-thirty this morning. Afghanistan.”

I can't stop staring at these people, that bridge, those drag boats with chrome exhaust headers spitting pure noise and power. So I leave for something more familiar: breakfast at Denny's, where the coffee is hot and the air is cool.

Without air conditioning, few would live in a place where the temperature last summer reached 126 degrees. Yet air conditioning was invented in 1902 for printing, not people. Four-color printing then required four perfectly aligned runs through the press, but changes in humidity made the paper swell and shrink between runs. To keep the humidity low and constant, Willis Carrier devised the “Apparatus for Treating Air.” The trick was chilled coils that cooled the air so the water vapor would condense. That's why air conditioners drip.

But the machinery was huge and unruly, and the stuff in the coils was toxic ammonia—not for the home mechanic. It wasn't until 1947 that affordable window air conditioners hit the market. It's perhaps not a coincidence that, soon afterward, Americans reversed the post–Civil War trend of moving north. They headed south.

They're still heading south, following the tanker trucks and power lines to Lake Havasu City. They pass me as I head north on Highway 95 the next day. Some are seasonal nomads in cars with North Dakota plates (
Discover
the Spirit
), and others are in for the long haul, behind the wheel of U-Haul vans (
Adventure in Moving
). With looks of neighborly concern they wave to me as they pass. They're wondering, Why is that man standing by his bike in the desert?

Jotting a few botanical notes. The saguaros are truly gone. The teddy-bear cholla look scorched. It's no wonder: a typical year sees five inches of rain. Yet Lake Havasu City swells. People can live on the moon, after all.

 

ON THE TV at a fuel oasis called the Pilot Travel Center, a man with a beefy mustache is explaining what America is about:

“We put a human being on the moon.”

He's not an historian. He's selling American cars that are superior to those from countries that haven't reached the moon.

“That's what we believe at Anderson Ford.”

I share the pride in homegrown ingenuity. Nowhere but America can I buy a foam beer cooler that doubles as an insulated coffee cup. It's brilliant.

I check out the bumper stickers for sale. “God Bless America” and “Remember the Towers.”

One of my high-school friends was in the South Tower. He escaped, barely. He knew of my experiences with Muslims in Djibouti, Egypt, and Jordan. Now he had his own. As he told me, with elegant economy, “They tried to kill me.”

I ride north to the Black Mountains on old Route 66, across an open valley of creosote and little else, then climb slowly up the
bajada
. The closer to the mountain, the rockier the desert and the happier the arroyos, thick with tall loose switches of desert lavender. With a critical eye I judge the Black Mountains to be of questionable stability, tilted and busted into ramps and cliffs, and scabbed with old mines. Fortunately, most drivers bypass the narrow two-lane road in favor of the interstate. Along the shoulder are the hoofprints of what must be burros that outlasted the miners.

I camp high on a tree-free ridge, facing west. The Colorado River valley, now 1,500 feet below, falls into shadow, yet up here the backlit cholla
are radiant with a halo of spines. I strip and pour a liter of water over my head. With a smooth boulder for a seat, I drip-dry and read the
Wall Street Journal
I picked up in Lake Havasu City.

There's a review of survival gear. A “Level-A hazmat suit” can be had for only $2,700. If you prefer to run away, you might consider “radiation-detection equipment,” keeping in mind the advice of Mr. Hopkins of
SurvivalLink.com
: “If you've got to measure radiation levels, it's already kind of late, you know?”

Everybody is afraid of something. Desert botanists like myself fear certain plants, like the Sahara mustard I spotted down by the Parker Strip. This dreadful salad of prickles is smothering the native wildflowers. I felt the hot blush of xenophobia when I saw a big dead mustard tumbling along on the wind: nature invents the wheel, and the foreigners roll in without a visa.

This spring, while working on a map of the Sahara mustard invasion, I wrote to a botanist in Kuwait. How, I asked, to get rid of this weed? He tactfully replied that it isn't a weed in the Middle East, but welcome browse for their camels. They plant it.

In my mind the mustard remained a weed—an uninvited agent of change. I like things they way they are, or, as wilderness defender Edward Abbey liked to say, “Let's keep things the way they
were
.”

The night slips in and soothes the desert. I put my shoes on and clear the sharpest rocks from a patch just big enough for my sleeping bag. So long as I keep my distance from the jumping cholla, I feel supremely safe. And it's a relief to escape the parade of flags that was Lake Havasu City. Any time more than twenty people start cheering, I feel the urge to slip into the background. Neither can I happily attend a basketball game at the University of Arizona. The crowd's enthusiasm for the home team includes a barrage of insults hurled at the opponents—as if we cannot support
us
without cursing
them
.

Now our president had struck a similar tone: if you aren't with us on the war on terror, you are helping them. This worries me. I fret over speeches in which I can no longer tell if “God Bless America” is an invocation or a battle cry. It is, after all, the same tactic used by the terrorists: you are
compelled to be either for Allah or for the devil Americans that seek to destroy
our
way of life.

Disquieting thoughts in the quiet desert. Alone with my memories of tea and
khat
with the ceaselessly hospitable Muslims, I wonder if the Djiboutian bride-to-be, Roda, really did jump ship for America to escape an arranged marriage she could not abide. Not long ago she would have stayed, knowing of no other way. Now she knows, and I wonder what her family will think of America once she is gone.

The stars make themselves known, constellations appearing in concert, yet mute. There's nobody to say, How come you don't wonder about the families whose daughters were killed by these monsters?

But I do. Grief knows no flag.

 

THE ROAD TURNS EAST, the wrong direction, but the lay of the land forces the detour, over a 3,500-foot pass and across a valley not much lower than the pass itself. It's high desert, too cold in the winter for ironwood or palo verde but just right for the mesquite scrub bent like claws and grass that's more gray than green. It's chewed to nubs, probably by cows, although there are none to be seen. They must have moved to livelier pastures or dropped dead.

Late in the day, the valley turns northwest to Hoover Dam and Las Vegas, the big and the busy. Where the meager rains are amplified by the runoff from the pavement, a long fine yellow grass flourishes, arched by a north wind. So does a wild pea called
Senna,
with split and twisted pods rattling in the breeze.

LANDFILL 1 MILE, says a sign that is itself a kind of rubbish. There are a lot of signs in America, and not many in Djibouti. Never did I see a Djiboutian sign saying,
This Highway Adopted by the Afar Junior Salt League
.

People live here, in far-off trailers and homes among the foothills of the low dark mountains to the west. Where the map indicates “Santa Claus” there is an old tourist stop with a toy train out front. Closed, shuttered, outmoded. When I was young, places like Santa Claus were essential to a cross-country trip. Not for gas, but for the sanity of my parents in a 1968
Impala station wagon with six children. Before air-conditioning and cup holders, kids not only looked out the window, they wanted out. New cars are so sweet and comfortable there's no need to stop.