Bob Bell - Hitching Across America Circa 1980 - Part 7
May 1980 - Fountain Hills, Arizona
A rare luxury to sleep in a bed, with crispy clean sheets, and not have to arise because one’s host is moving around the room, or because the sun is up and strangers are walking through your open air boudoir at 6am. And a shower, and the freedom to wander about the room naked, relaxed, with two hours to wile away before check out time. I watched a local news station for an hour so. There had been a big smash on the highway a few hours before, and the news crew was on the scene, and I watched the bizarre spectacle of a reporter down on her knees, microphone in hand, trying to get a response from a man who was pinned under a truck. And then it cut to commercials, and ads for Krispy Kreme Do-Nuts, Bounty paper rolls - the Quicker Picker Upper, and other essentials of everyday life. I switched it off, feeling it was a world that had nothing to do with me.
The hotel was small, old and had no restaurant, so after checking out at the cramped little front office, I hoisted my bag and hit the sidewalk. A whistle upon my lips and a spring in my walk. Today was kind of a day off, as I was to meet up with Cam who was staying at a friend’s house in a place called Fountain Hills, which was about 40 miles away. First order of the morning was to grab coffee and some breakfast. I tried to carry dried fruit and nuts with me most of the time, being small, light and a concentrated form of nutrition, but that diet got awfully boring very quickly, and I had learnt that it was best saved for those lonesome and interminable waits by the side of the highway, rather than being the main meal of the day.
Bacon, eggs, those awful things that get passed off as sausages in America and a couple of pieces of toast, washed down with orange juice and two cups of coffee, and I was all set for action. Fountain Hills lay to the east, through Tempe, skirting Mesa and then off towards McDowell Mountain Regional Park. Checking out the map, I headed toward 202, with a smiling and purposeful stride along the Phoenix streets. All was bustle and motion, city buses, taxi cabs, trucks, cars, motor bikes and the ever present pick up trucks. The sidewalks were relatively bare of pedestrians - the wheel reigned supreme here as it does in most American cities. Crossed the Gila River which looked more like a vanishing stream most of the time, idly sticking my thumb out as I walked. It was still really too urban, too citified to expect any luck, but if you don’t try, you get no luck at all.
Hard to tell how far I walked - probably no more than three or four miles - before I caught the first of several short rides. By mid afternoon I was in Fountain Springs. And why is it called Fountain Springs? Ah, there lies a story. If there is one thing America is good at, it is Grand Vision. A big country begets big ideas, and there is something particularly American in the endless drive to construct the biggest, the tallest, the fastest, the most impressive. I have no idea just where this need arises from, or why.
Anyway, one Robert P. McCulloch, the man behind McCulloch chainsaws, was the entrepreneur who developed Fountain Hills, and constructed a huge man-made lake. By 1970 he’d installed the fountain. Which was at the time the highest fountain in the world, rising to around 560 feet when powered by its three electric motors, and sprayed water for about 15 minutes every hour for 9am to 9pm. A wonderful sight, out there in the shimmering desert heat, this great column of man’s greatest and most valuable asset, shooting up into the big blue.
McCulloch was also the guy who bought London Bridge, had it dismantled and shipped to another of his mad ventures, Lake Havasu City, Arizona, where it was reassembled, in its entirety a year after the fountain was finished. It has always been bandied about that Robert P. thought he was buying London’s far more famous Tower Bridge, but as deliciously delightful as this myth is, it is just that… An urban myth. He knew what he was getting. Or did he? He died a few years later, in Los Angeles, of an overdose of alcohol and barbiturates. Was it an accident? Or was it the shame of knowing that his beloved fountain was no longer the world’s biggest? We’ll never know.
So of course I did get to see the great fountain, although it turned out that most of the time, only two of the electric fountain motors were used, and so the height was just a measly 300 feet. The town was standard American new town … Sub developments filled with ranch styled semi-mansions, big drives full of big cars, glistening green lawns right next to empty desert lots, with dried sage and wind blown tumbleweeds, trapped against ageing fences. The only people outside in the afternoon heat were Mexican gardeners, cutting grass, raking beds and perhaps dreaming Apache dreams, of the days before the white man came, and there were no electric motors whooshing great columns of water up in the air for no purpose at all. Or more likely, they were just cursing the desert sun, and hoping to make enough dollars to pay the rent, buy some groceries and enough evening cerveza to ease the pain.
Cam was staying with a couple who were looking after one of these huge great houses while the owners were in Europe. Or on safari in Africa, or maybe checking out the pyramids. Who knew? And who cared? It was a two day party, with a big pool out back, with five or six of us diving in and out, lounging around the edge, drinking beer and shots of tequila. Old time Western swing bands spun on the turntable with speakers poolside keeping everything jumping and copasetic, the sound of swinging fiddles and country guys playing the blues a joyful backdrop to pool splashes and mad laughter. Cam was there with his new Dutch wife Mary, whom I had met when I was staying with him in North Carolina a couple of months before. She had just been his girlfriend then, but in a grand romantic gesture, they had decided to tie the knot, and to do the deed in Howard Allen’s junkyard. The rationale was that as they had both been previously married, they were recycling their marriage vows, and what better place to do it in that most American recycling venue, a junkyard?
I had fond memories of Howard, a grizzled 65 year old barrel chested man who chewed tobacco, drove a wrecker, and with whom I had spent several days in the Blue Ridge Mountains searching for ginseng. A long and tangled tale. The price of ginseng was way up, Howard knew where to find it by the sackful, and we could make our fortunes. We had his son, a wild eyed 30-year-old who went to a fundamentalist church every Sunday and proved his faith by handling live rattlesnakes (yes, that kind of church) drop us off on the Blue Ridge Parkway, a few miles out of Asheville.
And Howard and I walked through the forest for three days, sleeping in a tent, and hoisting our food supply up a tree every night to keep it away from bears. We saw huge animal paw prints which Howard would identify variously as bear, mountain lion, and scary ziggedy zaggedy lines in the dust where big snakes had travelled. For three days we saw no humans. And for three days saw no ginseng either. Eventually we stumbled out into civilisation, our bedrolls across our backs, two tramps emerging from the woods, smelling of woodsmoke.
Howard had insisted that we take a gun with us, a rifle, in case of attack from bears or wild cats. It was a good idea then, but now as we trudged through a little town, the idea we were wandering about, with the gun rolled up in a sleeping bag didn’t seem like such a hot idea. More like a curse. We stuck out like sore thumbs… Two very obvious bums walking through a very clean and well ordered country town. At a loss as to what to do, we walked into a drive-in movie, which of course brought us even more attention. The whole point of a drive-in movie lot is that you drive in. In your car or truck. The woman at the entrance took our money with raised eyebrows, but couldn’t find a reason to throw us out.
I was amazed to find that wherever we went, Howard seemed to know people. Being one of the few guys around those parts with a tow truck, he had rescued all manner of folks from scrapes up in the hills, usually without having to inform the authorities. So there were a lot of people who owed old Howard a favour. Judges who had one tipple too many who had been towed from a ditch. A wayward wife or husband pulled from a paramour’s car, at 3 am… They all knew Howard.
So it wasn’t really surprising to hear someone shout out his name. And so there we were, probably 20 miles and way over the hills from Marshall, in a drive-in movie lot, and sitting in the back of a big station wagon belonging to Earl, an old compadre of Howard, eating cold pizza and drinking colder beer. And in one those blessed happenstances, dear old Earl was driving back through Marshall at the end of the day.
Anyway, Howard was a fine and interesting guy, and I was happy to hear about the wedding in his junkyard, and that he was in good health, and that his son still had not gotten bitten by a rattlesnake.
The party went on for a couple of days. I wasn’t quite sure just what Cam’s friends did for a living, but there was a fair bit of coke around and so that was kind of a hint. The day before I left, they asked me to go to Sedona and check out some property that was being developed there. It was all very vague, and I wasn’t quite sure just how I was supposed to check it out.
“Well, just go to a realtor’s office, and tell ‘em you are thinking of investing, and ask ‘em to show you around. And then tell us what you think.”
I suppose it was coke logic, but to someone who was living a vagabond life, it didn’t quite add up. I just didn’t feel that I had the investor look. More like “he needs a handout look”. However they offered me 200 bucks to do it and who was I to turn that down? I could head up there, check it out, and move on to the Grand Canyon, and after that, who knew where?
So that was the plan. I’d go to Sedona, check out what vacant lots were available, do a recce and phone back at the end of the day. It seemed like a very easy 200 bucks. After a big breakfast, big farewells and accepting a decent sized bag of coke which I stuffed down my sock, one of my new found friends drove me past Scottsdale, and a little north of Phoenix, to an on-ramp for Interstate 17, which snaked north to Flagstaff.
Another shadeless road in the desert. Another blazing hot day and a fresh cardboard sign. I hadn’t been there long before a police car pulled over, and a lanky cop got out and walked back to me. “Where are you going?” “Well, going up to Sedona, and then up to Flagstaff. I’m on holiday, I’m from England, and want to see the Grand Canyon.”
Funny how the English accent softened tough situations. The cop’s demeanour quickly shifted from disapproving anti-long haired hippie looking hitch-hiker to sudden interest in England.
“Oh, you’re from England! Wow! My wife and I were in London last year. Saw the Tower of London, and Buckingham Palace. Boy, all that history!”
I shifted from foot to foot, feeling the coke moving about in my sock. “Ah, yes, London. London. Yes, London is quite a city.” I mumbled, and mentioned that I had been working there just a few months back.
“Well, you be safe out here. I really don’t recommend hitch-hiking, but jest as long as you don’t be walking out there on the Interstate, ain’t nothing I can do to stop you.”
And he ambled back to his car, in that special ambling manner that seemed to be common to cops all over this mad country. An amble that was intended to show that he was in charge, that he was in no hurry, and that this particular amble would magically keep all crooks, all flim-flam men, all outlaws, robbers, burglars, murderers, rapists, boozers, tramps, con men, floozies and snake oil salesmen in their place. At least temporarily on the right side of the law.
It was the swaggering amble of great authority, and it was also the swaggering amble of a Man walking along a desert road Who Had Been To London.
Yes siree.
