That said, I like American roads, especially here in the West: blame it on the movies. At every stopover you can upload (food, drinks, gasoline) and download (restrooms, trash). Every semitrailer and big rig—shiny, accessorized, lit up—is a display of pride. Every advertising sign is an expression of commercial enthusiasm. The Best Seafood Combo! The Greatest Family Lodging! The obsession with being the best/the greatest is everywhere and is fascinating. A simple study of the comparatives would prove that they can’t all be the best; some of them must necessarily be worse than the others. But such details do nothing to discourage the nation’s entrepreneurial passions, and that’s something to be admired.
At Cisco two cars being towed swerve back and forth. A religious radio station informs us: “We don’t quote from best sellers unless they’re edifying.” A service station posts the announcement: “Anyone entering with an unregistered firearm may face a fine not greater than $10,000.” In Clyde, Texas, the Whataburger (Proudly owned and operated since 1950) offers apple pie for ninety-nine cents. The girl serving us is named Autumn. Three kitchen workers, dressed in orange like convicts, are out back, smoking cigarettes. On the window is written: “One nation under God, indivisible.” The first curve in the road appears at 3:55 in the afternoon, around exit 233. At 5 p.m. the thermometer rises above ninety degrees Fahrenheit (thirty-two degrees Celsius) for the first time. We pass Odessa (exit 116), a city of oil and business, especially business having to do with oil. It’s mentioned in James A. Michener’s Texas as the town where “you are more likely to be murdered . . . than in any other city in the nation.” The book was written in 1985; let’s hope things have changed since then. A sign announces: RABBIT RODEO! Would that be a rodeo with rabbits instead of bulls and horses? Not exactly: the competitors try to lasso jackrabbits. Or make that “tried to”; the practice of rabbit rodeos, first introduced in 1932, was discontinued after 1978 due to the objections of the ASPCA. All that remains is a statue: an enormous jackrabbit, ears in the wind, at the corner of West Eighth Street and North Sam Houston Avenue.
We stop at another service station. They sell denim shirts for $14.99, Sue Grafton audiobooks, energy drinks in giant phosphorescent bottles, Klondike ice cream bars, and beef jerky—a kind of meat chewing gum. We buy some, but I can’t talk Antonio into trying it. It’s going to lie in the caddy between the front seats for the rest of the trip, silently chiding us.
I start to realize that we’re drawn to gas stations. We spend more time in them than we strictly need to. Maybe it’s because we like feeling part of a mechanism that allows the United States to satisfy its hunger for forward movement and procure its basic necessities: restroom, gas, sodas, cookies, and then go. In effect, all basic human needs are available at a service station: drink (refrigerators from outer space, lit up like rocket ships), food (potato chips, hot dogs, hamburgers), bathroom break and washing up (immense, austere, and functional restrooms), information (maps, newspapers), relaxation (music CDs, audiobooks), excitement (magazines featuring young women endowed with colossal front bumpers; if they were to get into a head-on collision with a semitrailer, they’d get the best of it). Usually, there’s a motel not far away: sleep, too, then.
Our motel is at Pecos, population eight thousand, best known for growing cantaloupes and for having been the site, on July 4, 1883, of the first rodeo in history (at least, so they claim). Pecos is one of the many West Texas towns founded during the construction of the Texas and Pacific Railway. The motel is called the Swiss Chalet, not a name that you’d expect on the eastern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert. The reason is explained at the motel entrance, with an abundance of documentation: Hansueli Schlunegger, with his wife, Annamarie, arrived here from Switzerland in 1959 and built the place.
The Swiss love of tidiness, along with the Texan passion for tradition, has produced a sort of übermotel—a concentrate of predictability and reassurance that we find touching. Consistency! shouts our motel room the instant we open the door.
Inside we find:
a bed the size of a Manhattan studio apartment
a television set only a little smaller than the bed
a spacious worktable
a kettle to heat water for instant coffee (and packets of same)
a reading chair (Bible to go with it)
camo-pattern wall-to-wall carpeting (a stain just becomes part of the decor)
a bathroom without sharp edges or corners (hurting yourself would be a challenge)
a single-handle shower (easy to adjust with shampoo in your eyes)
conveniently located electrical outlets (no need to slither across the carpet to reach them)
lamps with switches on the base (easy to find in the dark)
uncluttered countertops (no bric-a-brac, no tourist brochures)
simplified, antiseptically clean remote control
Outside (You can enjoy the patio!): a small metal table with a central recess for bottles, ensuring they won’t fall and break. In the corners, three trash cans eager to be of assistance. Sorry, fellows: we have nothing to discard, not even our fixations with America.
* * *
There’s one sure way to complicate your life: fill it with expectations. It happens at work, in friendships, in love, in families. There are people who place great expectations on their sports teams, singers, actors, even politicians. When those expectations are disappointed, we are crushed. That’s the emblematic experience of these years we live in: short-lived dreams and long faces. Certainly, we have to make some emotional investments. A person without expectations is robotic. But a person with too many expectations is reckless.
Travel and vacations also ride on expectations. Friends, love affairs, relatives, traveling companions, destinations: everything needs to be exciting and gratifying. But the burden of expectations that we constantly place on relationships and places can be insidious. Expectations become demands. We build a mental film—be it documentary, romantic comedy, animated cartoon (it depends)—and then we’re disappointed if the reality turns out to be a minor horror flick.
For instance, I had high expectations of El Paso, a city on the Mexican border, along the banks of the Rio Grande. It’s a literary and cinematic destination, like Casablanca or Samarkand. When Antonio asked me, “Why do we need to go there?” I looked at him aghast: El Paso, don’t you see? As if the name alone were enough. El Paso! In my imagination, I pictured it as exotic, silent, seething, sharp shadows and implacable sunshine.
As far as the sunshine was concerned, it was exactly as I’d expected. We got there and the GPS navigator went on a heat strike: too hot, it announced. It’s Sunday, early afternoon: the streets are empty; the shops are shuttered. American advertising in Spanish, dusty cars. A sign says: BUY AMERICAN SAVE JOBS! We look for a place to eat lunch, and we find it. I ask how long it would take to cross the river into Mexico and have a quick look around Ciudad Juárez. Matthew, a student waiter at Crave Kitchen & Bar, says: “Don’t do it.
“When I was in high school, it was normal to go to Juárez. Not anymore. You never know what might happen, especially at night. Things are okay here, I guess. Nothing exciting. El Paso is always on the edge of crappiness.”
But Ciudad Juárez has passed that boundary and ventured well beyond. A few years ago, it was ranked as the most dangerous city on the planet, with more than sixty murders a week, with a population of 1.5 million. Many of the victims have been young women. Dark-haired, small, poor women, who worked in the maquiladoras, factories that assemble products to export to the U.S. These women were found outside the city, raped, mutilated, and murdered. There are various theories on the phenomenon. The most horrible one is also the most likely: they are considered disposable human beings. And here, when you dispose of something, you dump it in the desert.
Now Ciudad Juárez’s murder rate has dropped to ten a week, but the Mexican narcos consider it—along with Tijuan
a, just south of San Diego—to be their business headquarters, and they fight for control of the place with utter ferocity. This year, the Rio Grande Valley has become the chief entryway for illegal immigration into the United States, taking supremacy away from Tucson, Arizona, after twenty years.
In the hopes of joining the more than eleven million Mexican-born immigrants already in the United States, migrants are willing to face the desert, the rattlesnakes, the gangs of murderers, seven hundred miles of barbed wire fence, and La Migra (as they call the border police). In 2012 there were about 360,000 arrests—the American authorities call them, euphemistically, apprehensions—compared to the roughly 1.6 million in 2000. Human traffickers cross the river on jury-rigged rafts, or else they enter American territory and unceremoniously dump dozens of people in the open desert. Many of them come from Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador. “They cross the border fearlessly,” we are told. Just a few days ago, at La Joya, a small town on the Rio Grande, a single border guard tried to stop twenty people: they took one look at him and scattered in twenty different directions.
We nod our heads, we look at the river, and we resume driving west. Immediately after we cross the New Mexico state line, we’re stopped at a roadblock by police checking for illegals. The officers quickly check our Italian passports, and hand them back with a smile. Then they notice the Maori tattoo on Antonio’s leg. The smiles fade and they ask him to get out of the vehicle. I’m tempted to tell them, “Hey, that tattoo met with tremendous admiration at a bus station in Louisiana!” But I keep silent. They let us go. At seven that night we retire to our room in the Best Western in Lordsburg, New Mexico, to watch game five of the NBA championship. Outside, heat and copper mines. Inside, hamburgers, beers, and air-conditioning. It’s just us three: son, father, and America, with no one else to disturb us.
* * *
There’s no cell phone reception, so no Google Maps. I’m delighted, and delegate to Antonio the task of finding our way to Cochise County on the Rand McNally road atlas. I hope he finds it, because this place isn’t exactly packed with people.
Small dust storms move across the landscape, and the sun beats down on the rocks. It’s brutally hot. A scorched land where men and animals come out at night, in search of relief. The animal dens are invisible. The dens of the people are marked by beat-up mailboxes, threatening signs (NO TRESPASSING! KEEP OUT!), wandering paths heading toward provisional-looking houses and cluttered yards: car parts, metal and wood, empty barrels, and discarded appliances.
This is an America that is still white. While Latinos may constitute forty percent of the population in Tucson, there are none to be seen here. A hyperrealistic America that Europeans glimpse in passing in a movie or a novel, only to dismiss it. It’s too different: we prefer the multicultural cities with their malls, restaurants, and commercial smiles. “What can I do for you, sir?” is something you’re unlikely to hear in the gas stations around Gleeson, Arizona.
For tourists, the destinations are many. Tombstone, for instance. Twice a day, they reenact the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (October 26, 1881), made famous by books and movies. The chief lawman for the city, Deputy U.S. Marshal Virgil Earp, backed by his brothers Wyatt and Morgan Earp and their friend Doc Holliday, intended to disarm Tom McLaury, Frank McLaury, Ike Clanton, and Billy Clanton. Thirty gunshots later, three outlaws were dead. Virgil and Morgan Earp were seriously wounded; Doc Holliday was shot in the hip. Only Wyatt Earp emerged unhurt. In the reenactment we witnessed, the part of Billy Clanton was played by a well-mannered young man named Jim Robèrt. “Pronounced like the French,” he specified. When he’s not falling down dead in front of tourists, he’s a luthier. While he dusts himself off, we talk about Cremona, the center of Italian violin making.
* * *
As I look out at the wings lined up in the scorching hot Arizona desert, and my son tells me to stop complaining, I wonder: Why do Americans love planes so passionately? Fine movies (Dr. Strangelove, Top Gun), excellent books (Don DeLillo’s Underworld, The World According to Garp by John Irving), good music (Jefferson Airplane). A nation in love with takeoffs and landings. We Italians prefer to go for walks.
The place is called the Pima Air & Space Museum, on the outskirts of Tucson. Part of the museum is indoors, and part is outdoors, which gives you an opportunity to wander around in one of the weirdest places on the planet: the Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG) at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. It’s a parking lot for 4,400 airplanes, worth a combined thirty-five billion dollars. That’s 8,800 wings waiting for something in the blistering hot air.
For seven dollars, and after showing our passports, we get an hour’s tour. The world’s history and the world’s fears, lined up, wing to wing: bombers, fighters, patrol planes. Hundreds of every model, in seemingly endless rows. Your brain keeps telling you that this is some game of mirrors, but they’re really there. The elderly bus driver exclaims: “Two-thirds of these planes can fly again, and one-third is going to!” To look at them, you wouldn’t say they were especially enthusiastic to get back in the air.
The Boneyard, they call it. A storage site for out-of-service airplanes, while someone decides whether to do something with them or simply dismantle them. There are several such boneyards in Arizona, because climatic conditions in the desert reduce the risk of corrosion. There’s one in Phoenix, another in Kingman, and the biggest one is here in Tucson. Parked planes, covered with a coating of mastic tape to protect glass and paint; partially dismantled planes; airplanes on sale, ready to be sent off to poorer countries with lower levels of technology.
Bruce, age seventy-four, drives an open tram through the museum proper: different airplanes, same sunshine beating down. He was an air force pilot, and he lists the names with competence and pride: “DF-8A Crusader! F-105D Thunderchief! F-101B Voodoo! That right there is a C-130, they still make them today! That one was used in the Berlin airlift, to break Stalin’s blockade! This one brought the American hostages back from Iran! That one shot down some of the bad guys! Look at the bombs painted on the fuselage, one for every bombing raid!”
The tour is detailed and hot. After an hour and fifteen minutes, the tour group is starting to show signs of exhaustion. Suddenly, mutiny: half of them get up and ask to get out, eager to flee to someplace air-conditioned. My son orders them not to move. He’s right. Bruce would have his feelings hurt. He couldn’t imagine that anyone could fail to grasp the poetry of row after row of B-52s in the desert.
* * *
From Tucson, sun-kissed and geometric, we head north, along geometric, sun-kissed roads. After a long family negotiation, we decide how to choose the soundtrack. Five songs apiece from the iPhone, plugged into the car stereo, I propose. Antonio accepts, and chooses five unsettling rap songs; when it’s my turn, he immediately argues with my first choice, and we go back to the radio: someone else can do the choosing for us. As usual, it’s country music.
For three days, I suggest, let’s be tourists. Antonio is suspicious: he fears an ambush of some kind, a way of trying to get him to learn something. We drive north through Arizona on a state route (77). We stop on the land of the White Mountain Apache tribe (Fort Apache) to admire a Corvette rally, sports cars driven by euphoric seventy-year-olds. We photograph the Painted Desert and we walk out into the Petrified Forest, where my cowboy hat helps me to fit in with the French and German tourists.
The next morning we climb down through the tamarisks and oaks into the Canyon de Chelly, where the ancient Anasazi dug their homes out of the rock cliffs. Red dirt, white rocks, green plants: a damp microclimate, very different from the surrounding desert. Deswood Yazzie, an authorized Navajo guide, shows up in a beat-up Chevrolet Silverado, which he can exit only by pulling the handle on the outside of the door. He leads the way, speaking rarely. I understand; we’re seeing what tens of thousands of travelers before us have seen. But I’m seeing it with my son, and that makes all the difference.
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I guess that sums up the privilege of being a father. You see everything for the first time, because, at least for a moment, you see things with your children’s eyes. Antonio is twenty, my age when I first came to Arizona, with five friends, in a motor home. I was very excited then. But I’m more excited now. Friends travel together for all sorts of reasons—sharing expenses, making the best of time off school. A grown-up son takes to the road with his dad for one reason only: because the two get along and enjoy each other’s company. Of course, Antonio would never say it. But we both know it to be true, and that’s enough.
Traveling through Many Farms and Rough Rock, that afternoon we reach Navajo National Monument, a place with perfect profiles, where it’s impossible to take a bad picture. Monument Valley is not just a place where movies have been made (seven movies by John Ford alone, including Stagecoach). Car companies, too, have plundered the imagery of ocher buttes against a blue sky for their ads for the latest model of off-road vehicle. For several billion people around the globe, this is the American West, just as the Colosseum is Italy and the Eiffel Tower is France. In certain matters, mankind is not very sophisticated.
When Ortensia and I lived in Washington, DC, we came out here on vacation. We have a photo of us from that trip, close together and smiling, with the Mitten and Merrick buttes right behind us. What we didn’t know was that, just a short while later, Antonio would arrive. Now he’s here, driving the Toyota down the track between the rocks and asking Navajo for directions, and this strikes me as wonderful, a circle that folds back on itself. In the immense, recently opened cafeteria-with-a-view, we meet a couple from Piacenza. They tell me that they have a son Antonio’s age, who stayed in Italy. “You’re very lucky to be traveling with your son,” the father tells me. “I know,” I reply, when the son in question is out of earshot.
Off the Rails Page 4