Change

Albuquerque took a toll on us.

We had originally planned to drive directly from Santa Fe westward toward Gallup, where we would stop at a hotel halfway to our next destination in Arizona that Rachel’s cousin had recommended. But at the last minute we heard that John McCain was going to be giving a talk in Albuquerque, and that the state Democratic Party was arranging a picket protest outside of it. Both sounded like good excuses to survey the political landscape, which is certainly as elemental to the place as its wind-blasted prairies and monumental red outcroppings, albeit far less pleasant to look at.

Soon after we breached the city limits, I decided there was no way any politics we might find in Albuquerque could be uglier than the city itself. If it seems as though I have written obsessively about urban sprawl over the course of these diary entries, it is only because the cities we have visited have left me with no choice. I have attempted to capture these phenomena as vividly as possible, and in an effort to keep the descriptions fresh for the reader I have exhausted most of the metaphors in my arsenal. I realize now that I have been flattering them unduly. Metaphors are wasted on urban sprawl. Comparing the boxy concrete buildings to mesas and their vast asphalt parking lots to oceans suggests a majesty of which these structures are unworthy. Urban sprawl is designed based on human formulas of efficiency, and is accordingly bland. The geological incidences one might contrive to compare sprawl to for the sake of metaphor are rougher, rawer, and forged by a more ruthless architect. They are raised and refined over epochs, and then destroyed just as painstakingly. While they exist, their purposes are less easily understood than, say, a Walgreens’s—just as their edges are not as neat and their dimensions not as precisely engineered. The power of the natural world lies not only in its forms, but in its complexity. Strip malls, by contrast, are prosaic, and deserve prosaic portrayals. I anticipate that my accounts of American sprawl are far from being over. If the reader grows bored and frustrated with the repetition of the same dull images, then he will see exactly what I see and feel exactly as I feel, and I will have succeeded in my task.

Suffice it to say that Albuquerque had sprawl. Lots of it. We checked into our motel early in the afternoon and spent the rest of the afternoon hiding from it, sprawled out on our stiff bedspreads, staring at the television screen and allowing the dry climate to sap our bodies of moisture and purpose. The room was stale and smelled like air conditioning, but we wasted away in it for hours anyway, having seen no evidence that anything we might find outside would prove more stimulating. It was all gray, even the sky. We managed to rally ourselves for dinner, and sought relief from this dreary monotony in a district called “Old Town.” Not fully realizing it was only 5 p.m., we caught the staff at a Mexican restaurant off guard and then took a stroll around the plaza. But it didn’t do much to drag us out of our slump. The adobe buildings that were once residences were now high-rent souvenir shops. The only thing about Old Town that was actually old was its shell—a veneer retained for the purposes of drawing in tourists eager to escape the sprawl. Admittedly, Old Town’s aesthetic was charming by comparison. But it was equally banal; high-end sprawl, dressed up in adobe. We browsed some shops cursorily but couldn’t afford anything, so we left.

We picked up some ice cream at Walgreens on the way home, then locked ourselves in our motel room and fell asleep with the TV on.

The next morning, we woke up early and tried to get into the McCain talk despite the fact that we didn’t have tickets. We threw ourselves at the mercy of a smartly-dressed young woman with blonde hair and a clipboard. She could not have been much older than we, albeit far less disheveled; for instance, she had probably bothered to change clothes at some point within the previous four days. Still, her dark pants suit did not disguise the fear behind her eyes. They were the eyes of someone who knows she cannot afford to screw up.

The young woman was briskly polite, and for a minute I thought she might be considering letting us in as props—young people they could seat somewhere within range of the camera’s eye to prove that McCain’s politics were more appealing to the younger set than his old-man musk was repellant. In the end, though, I think the young aide realized—correctly, no doubt—that putting us and the candidate in the same frame would do more to alienate his base than to expand it. “But couldn’t we just sit up on stage with the senator?” I asked. She did not find this humorous. We were denied entry.

We spent the next hour or so hanging out at a nearby intersection with the rest of the riffraff. They were holding up signs with slogans such as “Like Bush’s economy? Hire McCain!” and other messages that boiled down the broad issues to the point that they were simple and catchy enough to convey to passing motorists, some of whom honked approvingly. “If you want a sign, they’re right over there,” said one young woman, pointing to a pile. She was one of only a handful of young folks smattered among the crowd, the protesters were mostly in their 40s and 50s, some significantly older; two elderly protesters were actually toting oxygen tanks. It seemed odd to me that these people were leading the cries for change. I had always perceived the desire for change as a symptom of youth, emerging in tandem with a growing awareness of the society’s various problems and an instinctive optimism that these problems are solvable. Outrage at the status quo for tolerating such problems is translated into vehement cries for change; with age these cries become loud complaints, then bitter laments, and finally, reluctantly acknowledged facts—at which point an aversion to change sets in, and the struggle is taken up by the next generation. But this was different. The Aquarians and their antecedents at the protest did not seem motivated by the ambition of achieving something new, but of reclaiming something lost.

We coasted out of Albuquerque on this energy. The sprawl ended eventually, but in an ominous sort of way: The sprawl did not run up against any sort of natural barrier. It did not appear to have surrendered to the desert. It simply stopped, as if pausing to catch its breath. There was still plenty of room.

Posted from Deer Lodge Road, Cottonwood, Arizona.