Day 3: The Rough Road to Arcosanti

You would think that a border between states would be not much more than a symbolic line, barely noticed were it not for a sign telling you it was there. But I've had this experience often, where you cross from one state to another and everything changes, not just the landscape, but the entire vibe of the place. Some states seem generous and welcoming. Others seem, well, like they're out to get you. Utah was charmed. Everything seemed clean and newly built. The landscapes were majestic and ever-changing. The people were exceptionally friendly wherever we went. Travel was smooth, and whenever we did chance to make an error, it always revealed something wonderfully unexpected.

It was at the Arizona border where our trouble began. After crossing over the Glen Canyon Dam and the strange, aqua blue waters of the man-made Lake Powell, we entered the town of Page to look for a lunch spot. The town struck me as a kind of Southwest version of Wisconsin Dells, before Wisconsin Dells went crazy overboard. We found a strip mall restaurant called Zapata's, which Caitlin pointed out would be Spanish for "shoes" if shoes were female. The sign said Mexican and Italian food. Although this combination seemed somewhat dubious, we decided to give it a try. Our waiter, who seemed altogether uninterested in waiting tables, served me a pretty good chicken salad and I was reasonably satisfied. But after several days in close quarters, I was feeling the need for a bit of personal space, so I slipped out of the restaurant and took a seat on the bench outside and watched the open air SUV's with benches full of tourists headed down to the canyon for guided tours. One by one, the members of our group filtered out, each complaining about some sort of debacle over the check, and cursing our waiter. I half listened to the details, anxious to get back on the road so we could make it to Arcosanti by dinner. Somehow, Zapatas managed to put every member of our cheerful group in a foul mood. Fortunately, retaliation could be had in the form of submitting multiple bad reviews on Yelp from our mobile phones.  

Lunch took longer than we expected and we were now in a race with the clock to get to Arcosanti by the six o'clock dinner bell. We were making good time when we hit a detour that sent us going East instead of South for about 50 miles. This took us deep into a Navajo Indian reservation. We stopped for gas at a dilapidated old station with half-broken pumps. A stray dog found our group and begged for handouts. As I waited in the long line for the one bathroom, a notice on the wall described the reason for the detour. I scanned the QR code with my phone and it gave me this artful account:



For the second time on this trip, we were rerouted by a landslide. The first instance was at our original day-one destination, Kennecot Copper Mine, which was closed to visitors due to a massive landslide that took out much of the mine's infrastructure and left a vast swath of red across its surface.

Back in the gas station parking lot, four more stray dogs had joined the first. After reluctantly refusing them a seat in the van, we continued on our long detour and speculated on the causes of poverty on the reservation, noting the harshness of the land and contrasting it with the seemingly ubiquitous prosperity of Utah. After nearly giving up on making it in time for dinner at Arcosanti, we magically gained an hour when we crossed a timezone, and the race was back on. The desert morphed into forest as we climbed into Flagstaff and I fought the heavy winds on mountain roads, weary of driving.

We missed our exit, turned around and finally rolled into Arcosanti just in time to scrape up the last of the buffet, sitting down to eat along with the Arcosanti residents in that vast and bizarre space which housed the cafeteria.

-Brent Budsberg