Bob Bell's Letter From America - Sedona and High Desert Country, 1980
The cop car disappeared into the morning haze, and I was alone again. Traffic was sparse, but the magic sign soon worked its wonder and a pickup pulled over. “Sedona? I can get you there - hop in…” and we were off.
Learning I was from the UK, the driver told me he’d get to Sedona the scenic way, to show me the sights, and when we got to Camp Verde, he turned off the interstate toward Cottonwood-Verde. We were in the Tonto National Forest. Tonto is Spanish for silly, crazy, idiot, fool, dumb … and when you learn that it kinda gives a whole new slant to the adventures of the Lone Ranger and his sidekick Tonto, and a sad insight into the built in racism of America. As kids in the UK, we gathered around the family's black and white TV, rooting for Tonto, never knowing the meaning of his name. Native folks that would have seen those same programs out here in the fifties would sure enough have understood, and quietly wept salt tears of sadness, that life should be so unrelentingly bitter, so one-sided, the odds so stacked, great leaning towers of injustice threatening at any moment to fall and crush all optimism, happiness and joy with the hard hammer of Tonto Tonto Tonto.
Tonto or not, the forest was vast tracts of mountainous desert, cactus everywhere, sage, looming red stone mesas, distant peaks, and was the America of my boyhood dreams, my Hollywood vision of America, blue skies, rock strewn desert vistas. Looked in vain for the Lone Ranger, the Range Rider with Dickie West, All American Boy, and all my cowboy heroes, but did see an old pickup way out in the distance on an anonymous dirt road, kicking up a cloud of red dust, on some long and arduous errand, vanishing in the shimmering heat.
Cowboy country alright, that was for sure. I thought of Marty Robbins, Arizona native from the dry deserts outside Glendale that I had just left. He of the dolorous and tearful voice, the perfect pitch. Mr Teardrop as he was known in his early years, who later knew world wide fame with his gunfighter ballads, who must have travelled these very roads as a young man, with his guitar and amp in the trunk, going to roadhouses to sing for his supper, giving out with those tales of heartbreak and loss, those paeans to pain, exaltations to ecstasy, and steel guitar lamentations of lovestruck lovers, echoed by mourning and keening fiddles. His self-penned songs of broken hearted lovers, with such lyrics as, “You lend your heart, you never give, I guess I should have known, these teardrops fallen’ from my eyes are just interest on a loan … forget me, you don’t owe me a thing…”
Mr Teardrop indeed.
As we rode through Cottonwood-Verde, sweet little old town, and then on along the desert road to Sedona, it was plain to see why the Fountain Hills crew were interested in buying property around here. The surroundings were delicious, magnificent, humbling, endless and changing vistas around every turn, breathless beauty, stunning scenes that just made you want to shout and scream with joy, heart and soul afire with a bubbling and boiling satori…Oh Sedona, I love you.
The town itself was small, a mixture of new and old, set under towering mountains of breath dropping allure. My friendly driver let me off downtown, which wasn’t far from uptown and very close to out of town. I found a little cafe, and freshened up, trying to look a little less vagabond and a little more investor, asked the lady behind the counter if I might leave my bag there for a couple of hours, and wandered along the main drag, and found a realtor’s office.
I told the man there I was interested in seeing what plots of land he might have for sale, and in moments we were in his station-wagon, heading for the outskirts of town. Pulling off the tarmac, he drove down a dirt road for a short while, pulled over, and cut the engine. We got out, and walked around a patch of desert, marked out by wooden stakes, and he indicated half a dozen or so different lots.
“Sure could build yourself a fancy little place out here. You know, the sunsets are somethin’ else, somethin’ else indeedy…”
And as I looked at the sun, still a few hours before it lowered itself to the horizon, I could well imagine just how right he was. Didn’t really care too much about the fanciness, a decent and modest dwelling would do… If I had had any money, I probably would have bought a lot right there and then, hired a builder and got right on with it, built a simple wooden house, sent for my kids and spent the rest of our lives just digging the sunsets.
Well, no money, so the end of that little daydream. I thanked the realtor, and with a sheaf of sales information stuffed in my pocket, retrieved my bag, and walked to a phone, and called Fountain Hills, telling them the prices of the lots, the name of the realtor, and how I thought it would be a really wonderful buy. Hanging up the phone, I reflected how weird all this was. Two hundred bucks for what? Looking at a few bits of desert, that they could have driven to themselves. Jeez, I would never even think of buying real estate just based on a comparative stranger’s advice. It didn’t make any sense, but then snorting coke doesn’t really make any sense either, and that was what had really started all of this.
My magic sign was working wonders. I got a ride out of town, through Coconino National Forest, all the way to Flagstaff, within moments of putting out my thumb. The knee-drop and big grin was a winner every time… Biggest problem was finding pieces of decent cardboard to write the next destination upon. So this was Flagstaff. So much of my knowledge of America had been gleaned from songs. Flagstaff was one of the towns called out in Bobby Troup’s immortal ‘Route 66’, and here I was. Route 66 was pretty much a distant memory now - the old route had been supplanted by the interstates, and just a few fragments survived, here and there.
By now it was late afternoon, I was in Flagstaff, and for the first time really had no destination. Sitting on a bench, I pulled out my tattered map of the US and pondered my future. If I stayed on 40, I’d eventually get to Los Angeles. And if so, what lay in LA? I only knew one person there, and that was a guy I had known from my days at Island Records, and I certainly didn’t know him nearly well enough to just turn up and crash on his floor.
To the north was the Grand Canyon, Utah, Wyoming, Montana… Those north country places whose very names promised adventure and wonder. Maybe that was the direction. A wind blew up, litter and leaves blew past me, twisting and turning in the air, first this way, and then that, and I wanted to take off, join them, be airborne, and just be blown, adrift in a wind blown world, no decisions to be made, no directions determined, no ends in sight, touching down here, then up again borne upon the breezes of chance, tossed about on the gales of the gods, all in a glorious non stop maelstrom of now, grinning madly at the world as it passed. Visions of the flying dream returned, that dream where I was taking long long steps into the distance, each step getting longer and the touch down lighter until I would barely touch the earth at all, my feet pushing me higher and further with each touch until I would be airborne, my arms describing huge and vast beats, and I flew over fields, hills, wide rivers, purple mountains and chased the setting sun.
A dream that recurred every couple of years if I was lucky, and one from which I always awoke, refreshed, my soul afire and filled with a great sense of wonder, purpose and joy. That kind of feeling when as a kid… School was over, the summer bent a finger and the weeks stretched ahead, full of promise, sun, and the insect packed buzz of endless sunny days when the sun would set late and the green grass would be waist high and the scent of wild flowers was everywhere.
So to the north, to the great unknown, see the sights and drift thru the west, the wild wild west, I said to my self, and wrote Grand Canyon on my sign.
