The Flagstaff Chronicles, Vol. 1

This story starts out with me sleeping on the floor of my small mountain cabin. Which, if it were June 20th of 2004, the story would start out in precisely the same way. The difference being that in June of 2004, it was the first night I had slept on the floor of my small mountain cabin. This story begins with the last time I'd sleep there.

At roughly 3:47 in the morning, two alarms went off simultaneously; the one on my cell phone, which plays an irrefutably irritating song as its wake-up notice and one on my iPod - which honks an equally vexatious horn - and, of course, I heard neither one of them. I owe that to the fact that I stayed up until 1:30 a.m. checking and re-checking my empty house to ensure that it was, in fact, empty. Moving 560 miles from your home and life of nearly six years necessitates such acts. Consequently, two hours and seventeen minutes of sleep turned out to not be enough. I slept on.

Being that I was sleeping peacefully under a yellow blanket on the floor by the space heater with my dog at my side - Ryan Bingham's Mescalito easing its way out of the speakers on my MacBook - at the agreed upon departure time of five a.m., my brother came down to my small mountain cabin and pounded on the front door. I had slept through eight straight phone calls from him as well. At my front door, he shouted something personable such as, "Are you fucking ready, or what?!" The dog nearly leapt out of her skin at that moment, barked like a crazed hyena, and tried to chew his face off through the glass of the front door. This whole turn of events made me nearly shit myself with surprise, for I thought I was being attacked by a hyena with the ability to knock loudly first and speak English gruffly. And let me tell you, that is an odd way to wake up. It also put me in a most disagreeable mood.

All that be as it may, I slipped behind the wheel of the Jeep at roughly 5:30 and drove out my driveway for the last time.

Glenwood Springs provided more coffee; South Canyon was dark grey light against red rock; New Castle was getting ready for the day; the sun came up somewhere between Silt and Rifle; the Grand Mesa was all cold pink and steel blue in the early morning light. We wound through DeBeque Canyon and Grand Junction offered me a Red Bull and some hideous, microwaved sort-of-sausage-and-egg-and-cheese type of sandwich. Then came the Utah border along with towns named Crescent Junction and Moab and Monticello and Blanding and Bluff and Mexican Hat. Some of the most oddly beautiful country one will ever get to see in a lifetime.

I followed the silver horse trailer full of all my stuff - all of the modest things that I have deemed necessary to have over the years - through the red rocks and high pinons; over the San Juan River; up and over the hill into Monument Valley with the ghosts of cowboys, outlaws, pioneers, movie-makers and Indians all over me like a cloak as we sliced through the high desert on a thin black road.

I turned the music up louder. The Devil Makes Three is fine, fine listening if you're desert driving, my friends. James McMurtry, Rodrigo y Gabriela, Tool, Eminem, Cross Canadian Ragweed and Cracker do wonders as well. I don't recommend, however, smoking a couple packs of Camel straights and drinking two big ol' Red Bulls and a shitty cup of coffee from a gas station in Blanding. Wow. I thought my innards were going to give out.

555 miles worth of pillars of rock and red-tainted sky and dust devils a dozen miles away on a sage-splattered slope fueled by a wind I will never know of the origin tends to lend to thoughts from long ago and little bit of what may come next and I question things a little more than I ought to but I feel like I’ve been caught, too, so I just pull my hat down over my glasses and wait as the voice passes that is whispering to me to turn around.

That's what the desert does to you. It makes your brain wander. The Navajo and Hopi lands all around; desolate but beautiful expanses of land with arbitrary borders and a weight of loneliness. That's where the wayward dogs were attacking and killing the sheep as we drove by. That's where wild horses graze alongside the 70 m.p.h. highway. I've seen sleeping Indians - as romantic as that may sound, it seems a bit precarious - on the shoulder of said highway. That's where I saw a guy riding in the bed of a Ford pickup truck whilst sitting in a La-Z-Boy recliner. It's roughly seventy-five miles from Kayenta to Tuba City and there isn't anything to mention in between. I've seen people walking that stretch of road. In August. In no particular hurry, either. Just going from one place to the next.

And, if you would have been in Tuba City, Arizona at roughly 2:30 p.m. on November 30, you would have seen the two jackasses standing like fucking statues on the side of the highway - not a ranch nor fence in sight - like they were part of some kind of Chamber of Commerce "Welcome to Tuba City" sign for chrissakes.

One had a halter on, blue in color, and she didn't move as much as an eyelash as the cars and trucks zipped by at fifty miles an hour. I'm presuming it was a she because jackass #2, standing behind her, was sporting his donkey-ness in a glistening two foot fashion for all passers-by to see. He was proud, to say the least. He, too, never moved because he seemed to be quite focused - in one general direction - on the impending task at hand. Welcome to Tuba City, as it were.

Seventy miles or so later, after we passed the dinosaur tracks, we began the 2000 foot climb from Gray Mountain into Flagstaff with the San Francisco Peaks to our right holding on to the waning sun of late afternoon. At that point, you are leaving the Painted Desert and making your way south along Highway 89 as the terrain changes from rock and dirt to grass and Pinus ponderosa var. scopulorum within twenty minutes. You are smack in the middle of the largest Ponderosa Pine forest on the continent. A few 12,000 foot mountains stand as sleeping yet explosive sentinels over the fair town. You pass the sign for the road named "Camino de los Vientos." Road of the winds. You live, again, at just over seven thousand feet, you drive the 12% grades on city streets and await the 100 inches or so of annual snowfall. (A quarter of which, by the way, arrived Monday.)

I looked at the city tucked into the foothills below me that day - all hustle and bustle and rumble and steam and whistles and streets and strangers. And me; a new arrival in a group of 60,000.

I took the lead at that point and as we made the right hand turn off of Route 66 on to North Park Drive - to my new home - a lot of thoughts ran through my head. As a good friend from Colorado said, "Well, hell yes. Now you're a stranger in a strange land."