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| (c) Google |
Still in Winslow when we woke up, and we were ready to for breakfast. Remarkably there turned out to be another café in Winslow that is worth a visit. We went to the Mojo Café for breakfast. It’s still in the flat desert with the desultory buildings all around it, and almost entangled in the interstate interchange, but is light and airy and features a very friendly dog, who I suspect is more friendly the more burritos you have on your plate. Lots of trucks seem to stop here and yet it’s more of a hipster coffee bar than the traditional greasy dishes you would expect. As seems to be de rigueur, there was a picture of an actor, Michael Keaton, on the wall. He had apparently eaten here, as had John McCain.
Short drive south to the Barringer Meteor Crater, which just seems to be called the Meteor Crater these days. I’d been here before and the museum/cactus seed-selling store is new and improved but the crater is the same as before – phenomenal. You can see it as you drive up to it, a splash that raised the rim hundreds of feet above the flat desert all around, but you can’t see into it unless you’ve gone round a little maze in the museum/rock shop and gone out the unassuming door. It could be a subtle trick they played to increase anticipation, or maybe the building was built backwards, but you go out of what looks like an emergency back exit door, and suddenly the enormous hole in the ground is in front of you. It’s almost a mile across, (now) 550 feet deep, barely weathered in its 50,000 years on the planet and looking much like the craters familiar from the moon and other rocky planets. The boards explaining the phenomenon of meteors say the meteor was about 150 feet wide when it hit, but the shockwave blasted out about a city-size piece of material. The meteorite (for so they are called if they reach the earth) mostly disintegrated into small, melted droplets and ended up all over the map along with shattered and melted rock, with only smallish pieces ever found at the bottom of the crater. It’s named after Daniel Moreau Barringer, who is presented in the texts there as a man who was driven to get to the bottom of the then-mystery – was this an extraterrestrial impact? – but since the company he formed was a mining company, I am going to guess that although he would be happy with the recent yes answer to the mystery, during his lifetime he was probably markedly less happy with the “blasted into small droplets all over the map” part of the findings.
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| Rim of the crater stands above the desert - taken from the main road |
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| Meteor crater from the visitors' center |
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| Shattered rock and inversions at the rim of the crater |
It really is something to behold, particularly bearing in mind that the visible trace of this enormous impact is only a small part of what the meteorite strike did. The shock would have flattened trees and killed animals for several miles around. The force has been estimated at 10 megatons (Wikipedia). The blast was not sufficient to cause the darkening of the skies and massive die-off that’s been associated with the impact that most likely caused the death of the dinosaurs, but it most assuredly was not a picnic for anything living in the region at the time.
After this bracing reminder that even the earth is temporary, we headed off west towards Flagstaff. The desert began to give way to pine trees and the whole atmosphere became almost humid and livable. We didn’t go into Flagstaff itself, but we did want to get into its environs in order to fulfill the accidental prophecy we made to the waitress in Payson what seemed like a year or so ago. Then we took I-17 south to Camp Verde, where we stopped for an Italian meal at the fine Moscato. Camp Verde seemed a little twee, but given the thousands of miles of prefabricated houses and giant metal huts that we’d passed over the last few days a Hobbit village seemed at least to be a little more human. You know what I mean.
We were heading to Arcosanti.
Arcosanti is one of those desert follies that rise like mirages wherever there’s space, solitude and lack of building codes. The archetypal Arizona desert dream is Taliesin West, but Arcosanti runs a close second. Like Taliesin, it was not built by itinerant hippies. Architect Paolo Soleri (1919-2013) designed it. He pioneered the “arcology” (a term he invented), a way to pack in the multitudes who would otherwise live in cities into a small, mostly self-sustaining building. Urban sprawl was his lifelong foe; he envisaged a compact community where living room could be combined with shopping, leisure and entertainment in such a way that neighbors would also be friends and active community members.
Arcosanti hasn’t grown quite as fast as was initially hoped. It’s still a tiny, incomplete dwelling on a mesa. It sustains itself by casting bells in its foundry for sale – its specialty is silt casting (i.e. sand casting). The inhabitants are expected to work on the buildings or in the foundry and appear to replenish their numbers by recruitment of outsiders rather than natural population growth. Having taken the tour there I speculated that this is because you have to be over 18 and under 40 to be idealistic enough and strong enough to do your part in the community. This is made more clear when you learn that the newcomers working for their keep are sent to live in “cubes” at the bottom of the hill. This seems to be based on the idea in Taliesin West, but there the budding architects are required to design and build their own cube, which gives them an accomplishment to put under their belt and also, probably more importantly, an appreciation of what it’s like to live in something they designed. The “cubes” at Arcosanti are permanent, not designed by Soleri, and (I’ve heard; I didn’t go to see them) are less than luxurious.
In more than one way, Arcosanti resembles the society of the movie Logan’s Run, where, you may recall, the society maintains its sustainability by offing people as they reach the age of 30. I wish to stress that none of this was suggested by our guide, who was a very pleasant and knowledgeable young man who obviously loved living and working there. But let’s say, if you use a wheelchair, or have a withered arm or balance issues or pretty much any variation from good health, you’d find it hard to get around Arcosanti. The guide told us that modern building codes are now required for new work on the buildings and this has slowed things drastically. For example, the road on the property is not surfaced and the city cannot send emergency vehicles to the area, which in turn means that their population is capped until that can be fixed. I believe this is bureaucratic nonsense – I’m sure the city hospital has a helicopter and one thing the solid concrete buildings are unlikely to do is burn down – but it’s being used to throttle building at Arcosanti and there’s not much they can do about it.
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| Amphitheater at Arcosanti |
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| Arcosanti architecture |
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| Arcosanti greenhouse |
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| Arcosanti top level |
The local view is pleasing and enhances the campus-like atmosphere. The structures are on top of a hill above a creek, with a mesa opposite. The buildings are a sight to behold. The larger domes are sandcasted, just like the bells. The builder mounds sand into a suitable shape, lays rebar over it and pours concrete to the requisite thickness. When it’s set, the sand is hauled away and a roofed space is now built. The straight walls are either tilt-ups or cast in forms. Soleri was an architect – he didn’t guess at the structural strength of his materials, but calculated it carefully. Designed into it are ways to cool in the heat of the desert sun, retain heat in the cold of the night and allow for run-off when it does rain. A grand plan for greenhouses is available, but not yet built. The soaring arcs of the model for the community and the little model of the completed sun-facing glassed-in area look like the futuristic designs of seventies movies – a movie, such as, for example, Logan’s Run. One can imagine lithe young things fresh from a classical play in the amphitheater, dressed in white linen tunics, arguing philosophy and nuclear physics while tow-headed children play underfoot and learn by osmosis. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your viewpoint, in this version it is the buildings that are likely to be terminated prematurely.
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| Mesa: view from Arcosanti |
And that, my friends, was the last stop on our little RV tour. We set off towards Phoenix, its approach marked by the increasing numbers of saguaro cactus in the roadway medians, stopping to replenish all the toiletries I’d depleted along the way in Alhambra. Soon the baggy, saggy decomposed granite “mountains” of Phoenix were in view, with their Sorting Hat flump and various holes, and STB’s apartment hoved onto the horizon.
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| Phoenix Sorting Hat mountains |
At STB’s place we had time for an Indian take-out (10 on the hot scale again, of course, because STB forgot I was going to eat some of it) before hitting the non-RV sack.
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