Some Necessary Lies

Down past the end of the hayfield and into the woodlot where in late fall you can see the surveyor’s stakes that delineate where our property ends and Harry’s begins, the creek makes a pair of quick turns.  In between, there’s a deep pool with the stump of a great tree sitting improbably upright where deep becomes shallow again.  That tree when it fell was the cause of that deep place;  during one hurricane and another, and through the fall and spring floods, rushing water, diverted under the massive trunk fallen across the stream, dug and dug until some equilibrium was reached or perhaps just until Peter Lundgren came and cut up the obstruction. 

It was a three-day job, far longer and more complex than he had expected.  The tree was oak, and oak-hard, and the water too deep to stand where a few judicious cuts with the chainsaw might have freed the great logs to fumble their way downstream, likely grounding at the next wide curve, down toward the gristmill where, in a couple of years, they could be assailed again, to be cut up for firewood. 

There was also the very real danger that comes with a powerful chainsaw wielded under unstable conditions—ground underfoot that was part slippery rocks and part shifting sand and mud; hardwood sodden and in places still living, making for unexpected changes in the way the saw might move; and, toward the end, the weight of the pieces clamping on the cut. 

Normally, Peter told me, you cut from above and below in two opposed V formations, but this was impossible, for the trunk was still half under water. The days were hot and sticky, and the flies and mosquitoes were heavy and difficult to ignore. When he was done, he’d sliced the tree into four parts, with only the middle two headed downstream.  The still-leafy upper branches stayed on our peninsula, to be propelled by the next great storm, the one that washed great swaths of the Catskill Mountains down the slopes, swept most of two villages away, and brought portions of houses, house trailers and woodsheds to us. The next spring, Harry complained, only half-joking, that we’d sent that awkward, debris-clad monstrosity down to the gristmill’s waterfall just to ensure that he’d have to pay Peter twice for the same project.

On the other side, Harry’s side, the stump, five feet high, its remaining big roots forming an irregular ball more than eight feet across, tilted near-horizontal through the end of summer and the winds of fall, until the great storm of mid-October.  We didn’t live here all the time back then. It was sheer chance that we’d been back for a long weekend of closing-up when the storm came in from the Atlantic, flooding much of New York City and leaving sudden lanes of knocked-down trees and yawing power lines sweeping diagonally across the hillsides up here.

So we didn’t see the stump again till Christmas time, when we went back down with the old dog in the first snow of the season.  There it was, perfectly upright, on an island of its own making in the middle of the deep spot where the creek turns.  It seemed impossible.  At first we imagined it was some other stump, washed down from far upmountain, but the next day, when the sun had melted the snow off its top, we could see the complex trajectories of Peter’s experiments with geometry, physics, and biology, with the angle of the chain, the power of the saw, the stubborn resistance of the waterlogged tree. 

It sits there still, some years gone.  Today we walked with the new young dog, and when we got to the stony places before the deep pool, he threw himself enthusiastically into the water, wallowing, drinking, and then turning his three tight turns before laying himself down in the shallows for a few moments, cooling himself from his wild running in the hot  late-August sun. Downstream from him, in the places where the water had fallen enough to bring the bottom stones up to bask in the dappled sunlight, leaves, some of them already orange and brilliant red and yellow, clung and nestled, as if placed there.  Up and down the creek from that vantage point, only a single leaf actually floated, delicately, atop the slow water. Back up to the hayfield, we stopped for a moment to watch a chevron of geese heading south-southeast above us, braying their itinerary to each other, calling out the corrections and then settling in to the long trip.

How do the geese, the trees, the haymown grasses staying brown despite the rains and the warm sun, know what we do not, that it is still summer, but it is also fall, disguised by hot spells and sudden thunderstorms, by barbecues and mornings reading the papers in the lawn chairs beside the stonework patio Dan has built for us? I know what it is. I am a studious observer and I have spent most of my life in places like this, where hot summers always mute to fall and then to bitter winters with the irregular iron-hard ground unsteadying your feet as you walk from the house to the barn or studio or the car in the morning darkness. The angle of the sun grows longer and the time it is high overhead diminishes.  The darkness comes sooner day by day, so I look up surprised from my work to see that the clock in the window and the light beyond it contradict one another—it is seven, still an hour from time to print out the day’s work and carry it in to go over while sitting in the chair on the grass, and yet it is already too dark to read the words were I ready to end the sentence here and summon the printer to click and hum.

The verb is wrong:  the trees don’t know, nor the geese, nor the haygrass.  They are organisms responding to loss of what they need for their exultant lives. And, as yet, we don’t know either; it is August still, for a few more days, and we express a mild sort of outrage that the living things around us are so wrong in their judgment.

Soon, though.  Soon it will be time to call Nick and contract with him for a new load of firewood.  Time to relight the pilot on the propane furnace, and take the air conditioner out of the studio window so the storm windows can go on and the screens be lugged up to their winter home in the hayloft. Time to look for the bin of sweaters up in the attic crawl-space, and bring out the bags of winter coats, hats, gloves, thick socks and sturdy boots.

Between this moment, still summer, only measurably late by the evidence we view with disbelief, and that one, when hard darkness seeps through the bare scuttling branches, there will be days of a plangent beauty unimaginable now, while the rumble of thunder cuts through the wet, exhausted air, days we don’t believe yet, despite the evidence we amassed last fall, when we trapped the best leaves between sheets of waxed paper and ironed them, just as we had when we were children, and then again when our children were young and the ritual was new to them.

All the rest of what is around us knows.  It is we who do not know.  It is past time to buy a generator so the sump pumps will not fail us when the next hurricane knocks the power out for hours or days.  It is past time to have talked to Nick about that firewood; he is back in school now and may not have time for weeks or longer to take Harry’s tractor out to the fallen trees in the far woodlot and drag them to a clearing, set up the mechanical splitter, cut the logs, and leave them open to the sun and air long enough that they will burn hot and clean come November. And so I will be out behind the barn myself, in a month or so, cutting up the old rail fencing, splitting the slices of oak from what Peter salvaged of the fallen tree, now, finally, purged of the deep-soaked remainders of the high creek that brought someone’s shed, almost intact, tumbling end-over-end to smash, disintegrating, into the stubborn tree that had stood for a century or more before finally falling across the imaginary line that separates one piece of property from another, one season from the next.  Cut and split and stack; my hands will be blistered in new places, different from the blisters of the rake and the hoe in the spring or the wheelbarrow and the paint scraper in the summer. Then bring the first loads in to the woodbins by the two fireplaces, the old one small and narrow accommodating only a single day’s fuel, or maybe two; the new one, the one that Harry designed, knowing what we had forgotten, how long is the trek up the hill and past the stand of evergreens, flashlight in one hand, carrier in the other, to replenish  what should have been enough for this cold spell, this blizzard, but was not: this new one big enough that it can take two loads from the trailer we inherited from the old man along with the tractor that he loved so immoderately. He is gone now, and that, too, is something we do not believe, yet. 

It is good that we are not so honest as the geese, the trees, the haygrass.  We will stand as we do now, soaked by the sudden rain, and count the seconds between the flash of lightning and the snap of close thunder.  We will sit and read the papers in the morning, watching the edge of the woods, persuading ourselves that the dense green is not already tinged with just a hint of yellow, that the red leaves and brown and orange that we see trapped in the creek, glistening and supersaturated by the gloss of the water, are just evidence of the stress of hot weather and the sudden unexpected violence of the stormy winds. Despite ourselves, we will not prepare but will instead revel in what is, in what will soon be memory, and regret and, flickering, anticipation of each next moment. 

Dessicated Houses, Under Water: Lake Havasu City, Arizona

You can tell that they’re foreclosure houses if you’re used to looking at the listings.  The teaser—you can own this house for as little as 3% down—is followed by the warning: Property is sold as is.

 

There’s another hint:  you can click the more pictures link, but there might not be any more pictures.  Just the lone shot from the street up the driveway; it’s likely the photographer didn’t bother getting out of the car.  These days, the banks aren’t paying much for the elements of a listing that might draw the casual shopper in.  Besides, there’s probably not much to attract at closer range. 

Over $140,000, though, you might see some inside pictures.  That’s a good sign:  it means the previous owner didn’t leave everything—plastic bags full of old toys, pilled blankets on the unmade beds, unflushed toilet, showerbath with the dandruff shampoo and the little wire soap rack still there in the corner, a lava-flow of dried soap running down the side of the tub. There aren’t dirty dishes still piled in the kitchen sink, the food crusts petrified by the desert air.  

That’s not to say the place didn’t look like that when the foreclosure finally went through and the eviction notice came with the sheriff or the bailiff or the hired process server.  It means Bank of America or Wells Fargo paid one of the services that have appeared in the online yellow pages of Lake Havasu City, Arizona, services that send an estimator and then, after the bank has chosen which of the levels of cleanup it’s ready to pay for, a crew, with a pickup truck to carry off the leavings if it’s an easy one; if not, a dumpster for the fisted wallboard, the carpeting destroyed by water left on in the sinks, old socks or underwear stuffed in the drain to keep the flow slow and steady, ensuring the maximum damage. 

It gets worse than that, of course—we’ve all read about the crews of scavengers who strip the house of every bit of metal, from the P-trap under the kitchen sink to the electrical wiring in the walls.  With these houses so new, and Lake Havasu City so liberal in its building code during the boom years, there’s not a lot of copper piping—it’s mostly PVC. So there’s not nearly the boom business in scrap to be had here as opposed, say, to Detroit or Chicago or Cleveland, where the Sears houses from the ‘20s and the Cape Cods from the postwar years and the raised ranches and split levels from the ‘60s and early ‘70s are a trove of overbuilding.  Even the porcelain sinks of the prewar places fetch a good price at the salvagers, especially if the faucets are still on them.  

Cleaning the surfaces, ripping up and replacing the carpet, waxing the terra-cotta Southwest themed tile floors, repainting the walls, emptying the swimming pool:  these are the daily activities of the only growth industry in Lake Havasu City, these days.

When the listing opens up to a set of pictures, you can often see the residues the cleaning service left, off in the corner of that photo of the cavernous interior of the four-stall garage— a box of contractor trash bags, super heavy duty, a five-gallon tub of cheap paint, the off-white or ivory or even Desert Tawny that the entire place has been repainted, except for the bathroom.  If it’s a HUD house, there seems to be some regulatory requirement that everything be photographed, and the pictures proliferate, and you can see the halo of slightly darkened, slightly more shiny residue where a thousand, ten thousand  hands fumbled for the lightswitch just inside the front door, or the slight valley in the carpeting from the bedroom to the bathroom. 

Sometimes these HUD houses are on their second or third foreclosure.  When that’s the case, you can see the half-finished work of the buyer or the contractor-crew that started to clean it up, the speculator betting—wrong—that the market had fallen as far as it could. 

The market in Lake Havasu City, Arizona has not fallen as far as it could, not even now.  In a week, the realtor has sent me 60 new listings, all foreclosed.  Read the descriptions and look at the pictures, and you can see why.  Almost all of these places, including some as low as $51,000, have RV garages or RV ports, in addition to the three- and usually four-stall garages. In some of these places, the square footage devoted to vehicles is much more than that allocated for the human dweller and mortgage payer.  

Outside, the yards are desert landscaped, which means the house is surrounded by dirt, with a few shrubs or a scrub oak tree or two. The driveways are empty.

It wasn’t this way six years ago, when I came through on the Freeways project.  Then the yards were desert landscaped, the stones were arrayed in geometric patterns, or tasteful arcs that led from one cactus to the next. In the late afternoon light, the cars gleamed:  an SUV, usually a Ford Explorer or Expedition, plus a smaller car, a Honda Accord or a Toyota Camry. If the door to the RV garage was open, or if the RV was parked outside, the garage having filled to capacity with other things—boats and their trailers, half-restored Corvettes, or just the neatly organized metal shelves filled with someone’s historic radio collection, or boxes marked with their contents (Hummel I, next to Hummel II, above Barbie I and Barbie II)—you could see the heavy-duty trailer hitch where that smaller car was attached on the trip from here to other places, places older, with longer histories and more seasons than hot and hotter. 

Lake Havasu City does have a history stretching back to the Great Depression, though to look at the houses for sale, you'd not guess it-- every one of the foreclosures in the last month’s listings was built between 1985 and 2008, and all of them look more-or-less the same:  open plans inside, wall-to-wall mixed with Southwest tiling; hollow-core Lowe’s or Home Depot doors; windows without frames; great planes of drywall leading from entryway past kitchen and dining area, through the living room to the wall separating the bedrooms from the public areas;  the bedroom ceilings often sprayed with popcorn, so that they look, in the pictures, more like motel rooms stripped even of the anonymous furniture that you find in a Red Roof Inn or a Best Western. The kitchen cabinets aren’t built in—they box out from the walls, and where they show their ends, there’s rarely an effort to disguise the cheap panelboard.  

These are houses that were built on spec; real estate speculators bought the acre lot of an older subdivision, bulldozed the adobe ranch house with the desert chiller left over from 1948 or 1955 or even 1970, subdivided the lot into four or six or eight, and crammed the houses in with no concern for their permanence, beauty, or even functionality.  There’s usually a swimming pool taking up much of the small back yard—it’s a swimming pool too small to actually swim in; it’s more like a large bathtub. In June, the average high is 106⁰; in July, it’s 111⁰.  You don’t sit on the veranda or in the cabana drinking a margarita after taking a dip when, at 7pm, it’s still sunny and 98⁰.  Inside, the kitchens aren’t made for real cooking.  The stoves are pristine in the listing pictures; it’s the microwave that shows the signs of protracted use. There’s not much wear in the carpets, outside the master bedroom, that is. These don’t look like houses that were lived in. 

Lake Havasu City was an invented place, invented by waves of speculation, dating back to the building of the Parker Dam in the mid-‘30s, flooding the Colorado River.  From the first, the area was an epicenter for wild-eyed utopian schemes, schemes that emerged as the latest in a succession of spectacular misreadings of the landscape, the climate, the ecology.  Exporting water across hundreds of miles to Los Angeles, San Diego, and the irrigation-dependent agriculture of the Imperial Valley, the Colorado River Aqueduct required half of the electric power generated from the Parker Dam to power the pumps pushing the water up and around mountainsides that cut across the desert wasteland. Traced on satellite photographs, the Aqueduct emerges and disappears as it’s piped through minor elevations; at Iron Mountain, though, north of Desert Center (average high temperature in July: 104^o; average high for the year: 84^o; total average annual rainfall: 4.4 inches), a massive pumping station shoves the water up one mountain, the rush downmountain providing the momentum to carry it all the way to Coxcomb Mountain, where it disappears under the harsh, vegetation-free rockfaces, returns as an on-again-off-again open ditch, then sinks beneath Eagle Mountain, emerging to the west to run parallel with the fantastically misnamed Hayfield Road.  Along these stretches, the satellite pictures show dry washes under which the Aqueduct is piped. 

The Aqueduct is well-sealed;  that’s evident.  No river-loving willows or cottonwoods grow on either side of the waterway.  The air is so dry that evaporation from the water’s surface is so quickly wicked up and dissipated that it fails even to provide a modicum of humidity for a plant to exploit.  West of Eagle Mountain, it’s running north of Interstate 10 and south of Joshua Tree National Park until, a few miles east of Chiriaco Summit, another massive pumping station sends it back into the Eagle Mountains.  There the remnants of the Hayfield Reservoir are etched on the land. In 1939, the Southern California Water District dug a small auxiliary holding reservoir, filled it, and watched the water disappear, sucked down by the porous desert soil that quickly cracked and dessicated, leaving an imprint of white like the ghost of a water-dream.

Hayfield is the last pump lift; after that, the water descends through a long string of tunnels bored into the San Bernardino Mountains, then emerges to water the Quail Ranch Resort and Country Club, passes the Perris Reservoir, and terminates in what was once the Cajalco Reservoir, now Lake Matthews, southwest of Riverside. 

By then the desert has ended;  the satellite images show not a grey-brown shading to the hard white of the alkali desert but a brilliant irrigated green.  Rancho Mirage, Cathedral City, Palm Springs:  these are the oases that served as the fantasy models for Lake Havasu City, Arizona.  Golf courses with names like the El Dorado or Indian Wells are surrounded by densely packed housing subdivisions, many with swimming pools behind each sprawling house, and all of them with green lawns fed by irrigation water.  

This is what Lake Havasu City was supposed to have been.  Look at the satellite pictures, though, and a very different process can be seen hidden in the archaeology of land, its color, its overlays with the grids of building and farming, its striving toward an orderly domesticity of human use subordinating the imperatives of climate, topography, soil.  There are three golf courses—two of them carved out of the same small area near the city’s “center”, though the city has no center:  Lake Havasu Golf Course, and London Bridge Golf Course.  Further north along the lake's edge is the Refuge Golf Course.  These are the spots of green you can read, inserted in the complex weave of subdivision streets.  From a wide angle, at low magnification, the city seems ever-so-slightly greener than its surroundings.  Bring the picture down, and you see why—almost every house has one, or perhaps two, green plantings—shrub palms, mostly, or perhaps mesquite or junipers, usually close to the house, where they can be watered with the garden hose early in the morning or late at night when the temperature drops below 95. And of course, the greens and blues of those small pools, spa pools, they’re called, contribute to the shift in color.  

Along the lakeside, there’s a thin band of greenery, sometimes as narrow as two or three trees deep.  That’s as far as the water can sustain life. Beyond that, the street views confirm what those of us who’ve patrolled the citys know too well:  this is a landscape beyond arid.

What possessed those real estate agents, those speculators, those contractors and subcontractors, bank mortgage agents, those snowbirders and speculative landlords and city boosters:  what did they see that isn’t here?  Palm Springs, California, perhaps, where freely flowing water assured irrigation ditches for the golf courses, sprinklers for the lawns and parks, free-flowing water from the Colorado for as long as it might flow.

Not so Lake Havasu.  By the doctrine of prior claim, it came too late to get more than a tiny stake in the water right beside it.  What the foliage might steal from lake’s edge was about all that could be expropriated;  upriver and downriver claimants were vigilant to keep their rights and slake their own desires for greenswards and golf courses, parks and playing fields.  In Lake Havasu City, even the high school’s baseball and football fields are sparse and parched. 

What Lake Havasu City doesn’t have in greenery or scenery, it more than makes up for in houses.  Houses whose mortgages went under water at the very earliest moments of the Great Bust, and now are dessicated with the drought of interest, attention, fantasy that might bring buyers and dwellers.  The spa pools are dry, the scrub palms are dying;  inside the walls, behind the thin veneer of stucco, the 2x4s are twisting in the absolute dryness, for the air conditioner and the humidifier have long been turned off.  

When this happens to a city in a temperate climate—in Detroit, say, or Cleveland, or Philadelphia—over time the land and its primordial occupants claim back their portions, their rights.  Camilo Vergara, my old friend, has been photographing these sites for decades.In one sequence, we watch as the dome of a library crumbles.  It collapses.  Then the compost of leaves and branches accumulates on the tiled floor.  A tree grows up, rising through the ruined remnants of a Carnegie-funded American monument.  Soon the neighborhood, the city, is a Piranesian  fantasy, only it is American civilization that has had its time, its flowering, and its decay, and is now disappearing from view and from memory.

Not Lake Havasu City.  There’s no foliage to reclaim this land.  There’s no rainfall to hasten the decay, to return plaster to earth, wood to dirt. Instead, it will stand for centuries, perhaps millennia, until, finally, a great wind will come and brush it away, dust to dust.

Highway Design Seen Sideways at High Speeds: Bus Crash Interstate 40 23 Miles North of Lake Havasu City, Late July 2002

It was the left front tire that blew, and we were doing 75 when it happened, on Interstate 40, in a Van Hool luxury bus, with Bill at the wheel.  Bill was a million-miler, a retired Army vet who’d been with the company for a decade.  We’d had him for about a thousand miles, from Albuquerque to Santa Fe, back to Gallup, Acoma Pueblo, up to Durango, Colorado, then along the winding highway to Silverton, back down to Purgatory, then westward to the Grand Canyon.  At a rest-and-tourist stop outside of Ash Fork, I’d watched Bill check the tire pressure and run his hand over all ten of the big tires, while I was on the mobile to the Department of State concerning a kidney infection on a participant from, it think,  the United Arab Emirates.

We had come down the elevation to relative ground level, and it was suddenly hot.  We'd been warned away from the normal route to Las Vegas because we had a bus full of foreigners, many of them from the former Soviet Republics and as many from known Muslim nations, like Egypt and Uzbekhistan, all of them fully vetted by the Department of State and six weeks into a sponsored American Studies Institute, but still too risky to allow over various bridges and dams. We were going to take I-40 to US-95 up to Vegas, Baby! As Neil, my fellow guide used to call it.  This had an added benefit:  it put California as a notch on the states-we-saw-in-the-States list, and California was a jewel-encrusted notch.

It was the left front tire that blew, and we were doing 75—the speed limit, not a bit over, for Bill was a by-the-book driver.  We lurched, and I was thrown out of my seat.  From the floor, I watched the bus veer wildly while Bill struggled with the steering wheel and the contents of the overhead compartments spilled out into the aisle.  We headed down into the gravelly median, as Bill steered us past a guardrail that would have impaled the bus and sent me, at least, hundreds of feet forward through the windshield to die. 

In the gravel, the bus settled down: 70; 60; 50; then it slid onto its side, the gravel flying like a bow-wave as the prow of the bus rose into the oncoming lanes of traffic racing at us at 80, 85, 90.

From their first incarnations in New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York State, high-speed limited access freeways have wound through artificial landscapes of the picturesque.  Take the Merritt Parkway or the Wilbur Cross, even today, and you’ll see rusticated stone overpasses marked with Gothic Revival details, set within a bucolic landscape of native trees, brilliant red and yellow shrubs, brief swatches of meadow, dark green or golden, close-cropped in places, in others left to grow tall and wave gently in the gentle breezes directed to them by scrupulously located groves of maples and oaks. On the Wilbur Cross Parkway, the median was a wide swatch of well-groomed lawn.  The entrance to the Merritt Parkway in Greenwich dove through an apple orchard, then cut through stands of evergreens interrupted by tall individual hardwoods;  on either side, rough cuts of granite rose and fell, their rock faces in winter brilliant with ice cascades. On the Taconic State Parkway, maples and other fall-foliage hardwoods crowded up to the lanes, and rills and waterfalls tumbled down the hillsides and raced underneath the traffic lanes.

All this was originally designed to be seen by a new kind of driver, part tourist, part commuter.  The parkways and freeways were both vectors and destinations, and their architectural details and landscape designs were meant to be seen at appropriate speeds:  35 to 45. When landscape architect Gilmore David Clark was commissioned to design the Taconic, he was already a celebrated practitioner, with the Central Park Zoo and the expansion of Riverside Park to his credit; he organized the parkway’s vistas to expand and contract, showing mountain vistas, swaths of Hudson Valley, river views, and the more intimate details of rock and rill, maple stand and greensward.

That’s all very well when you’re building in the ‘30s and ‘40s, for cars with bias-ply tires, drum brakes, bench seats, wide plate-glass windshields and windows that rolled down to let the breeze in, and 40 mph is pretty thrilling.  It’s fine when the climate is seasonal but temperate and the rainfall is predictable and the watertable high. 

Out in Arizona, on I-40, there’s no water at all most of the year, and the closest you’ll come to landscape design is a few cacti planted on the rest areas. That’s about the only place anyone would notice the scenery anyway, when the speed limit’s 75 and everyone’s doing 9 miles over that, if they worry about the radar, 20 miles over if they’re hot and irritable and in a hurry. If you’re bored, there’s low, brown mountains twenty miles away, but no matter how fast you’re going, they pass too slowly to qualify as scenery. The rest is desert scrub, sandy soil and trucked-in gravel for the median.  Compared to the older back-east ones, it’s wide, and rather than doming slightly, it cups down in a V, so the flash floods will race off the pavement to be captured in the storm drains that run underneath the center, at the lowest point.

We hit the bottom of that V hard enough to lurch back upright before coming to a stop, front wheels—one of them smoking-hot metal without a hint of rubber left on it—hanging disconsolately a couple of feet above the pavement. Bill turned to me as I pulled myself back upright, and I could see his hands as he tried to loosen them from the steering wheel.  It took a minute before he could, and the tremors went up his arms and into his shoulders with a regularity that reminded me of the stripes on a rotating barber pole.  In front of us, three cars had stopped and one of them was putting out flares while the others ran down the shoulders of the eastbound lanes waving frantically to slow the semis and the SUVs and big sedans that were barreling back to Grand Canyon Village and Flagstaff and Albuquerque and beyond that:  Amarillo, Oklahoma City, Little Rock, Memphis, Nashville.

It took the state cops a couple of hours to cordon us off, sort us out, and write us down.  By that time it was 105⁰ and most of us had left our water bottles rolling around under the seats as we dove for the door.  Some of us huddled in the meager shade the bus provided, but wary as we were of the thing tipping over, we didn’t leave ourselves more than a single-file sliver, and it wasn’t much cooler there anyway. 

Then the cops ferried us over to the nearest exit, where there was a Pilot Travel Center with a Wendy’s.  It was air conditioned, and there was water for sale.  It took a few hours to get a replacement bus out from Flagstaff, and by then the relief had turned to boredom and even discontent, and one of the European women, the one with the best shoes, had noticed injuries that might require the healing touch of an American lawyer.  

Not the Muslims, you can be sure.  They were too busy trying to blend into the formica and laminate dinettes—a little hard considering Ahmed had decided to dress that morning in full-on Saudi costume to demonstrate the virtues of Middle Eastern garb in hot desert climates, and most of the North Africans had followed suit, partly to outdo him in the brilliance of their plumage.  The truckers pulled in with their little American flags tied to the rooflines of their cabs and their Let’s Roll! slogans painted on the doors, and pretty soon they’d be clustered in small groups around the diesel pumps giving us the hard stares. Eventually they’d disperse, noisily blatting and airhorning their way back onto the interstate, and after a hiatus, another group would assemble.  Even the state cops were getting patriotic; one of them decided to take Ahmed aside for a little quiet interrogation and I had to explain to him that the State Department wasn’t going to take kindly to my phone call if he followed through. Vigilante justice isn’t just a movie theme in Arizona;  it’s a hallowed tradition. 

We made it out, though, and the European woman never did get satisfaction for the trauma she’d endured, despite calls to various American acquaintances who she hoped would know the right lawyer.  The State Department had flown her over and put her up for six weeks and paid us to teach her and to ferry her around the scenic U.S. of A. and our Washington rep had a certain disdain for ingrates.  When her story got around, the rest of the foreigners pretty much shunned her, and she had a miserable last two weeks of it, especially since she periodically forgot she was injured, arriving late at the new bus in the morning having forgotten to don her makeshift sling, leading her to reenact the injury in steadily more incredible melodramas to steadily more contemptuous audiences.  In the group debriefing in DC, she tried one more time to unmask the bus company and Bill in particular for wanton disregard and cruelty, and she was loudly shouted down by the rest of the group.  I think there was a little shoving involved, too.  It was heartwarming evidence that they’d been studying the natives even in a Wendy’s attached to a Pilot Travel Center twenty miles north of Lake Havasu City, Arizona;  they’d learned a little vigilantism, and Ahmed even did a passable Clint Eastwood, derived from the Westerns we’d been showing on the bus in the long flat stretches on either side of Oklahoma City.

I never did get to Lake Havasu City that year, though I’d planned to skip town and drive down there from Vegas, leaving Neil to keep the foreigners from losing their stipends at the blackjack table.  I wanted to see the London Bridge they’d bought, dismantled, shipped over, and rebuilt as a tourist attraction. I didn’t make it back for a few years.  After that trip, we changed the route, skipping the Grand Canyon and taking in the Navajo Res and Monument Valley instead.  We kept the same bus company, but try as we might, we couldn’t get Bill to drive us again.  

All in all, though, it was worth it, even if I didn’t see the London Bridge.  Later, when I went, I would find it was the wrong one, anyway—not the spectacular Gothic Revival  Tower Bridge but the low, ornament-free New London Bridge designed by the brilliantly innovative Scottish engineer John Rennie.  Rennie’s design was revolutionary, for it allowed far longer spans between piers, and no complex superstructure. Stripped to its bare, functional bones, it is the model for most modern American highway and freeway bridges.

And that’s the problem.  Out there in Lake Havasu City, New London Bridge looks like every other bridge you’ve ever driven over at 65 or 70 or more. It spans a turbid little cutoff of the Colorado River between two artificially widened bays; on one side there’s Papa Leone’s, on the other, Barley Bros. Brewpub. To juice it up, they’ve illuminated it with colored spotlights, but they don’t do much for the stolid grey stone of the bridge. Far more sublime was the sight of the bus, still cantilevered over the fast lane, as we saw it looking over our shoulders out the rear window of an Arizona State Patrol car driven by a fastidious young man trying his best not to gawk at Ahmed in his bisht and turban, and Fatou in her takchita, crammed into the front seat next to him. 

Looking at America: Modified Mobile Homes

Looking at America: Modified Mobile Homes: "I was about halfway up the hill when I realized I was about halfway up the hill. That wasn’t good. It was very hot, and I’d not planne..."

Modified Mobile Homes

I was about halfway up the hill when I realized I was about halfway up the hill. That wasn’t good. It was very hot, and I’d not planned on more than a quick flat ride. But the county had just closed 213, the Atwood Road, and sent the detour up the Vly-Atwood, always a killer. You turn off Atwood to Vly-Atwood and immediately there’s what looks like a quick steep climb. At the top, you realize there’s a slight curve disguising another quick steep climb. This happens five times before you can sit back down in the saddle and upshift from the granny gear.

This time, the orange detour sign took you to the right, and a second set of deceptive climbs followed one upon the next. Once you got to the Vly-Atwood Volunteer Fire Department you had another bout. Then you turned right onto Scarawan Road. Immediately there was a warning sign: No Shoulder. Road Narrows to One Lane. That wasn’t exactly accurate. What had happened was this: the road had simply crumbled at both edges until there was just over a lane left standing. And there was a reason for that. Vly-Atwood is tough: Scarawan is tougher, steep enough that springtime water and summer storms sluice down the road.

When it comes to really looking at America, a bike is about the best tool you can find, better than a camera, better than a laptop, better, even, than the complete works of J.B. Jackson, John McPhee, and Yi-Fu Tuan. Yes, there are places where a car is better. Out on the Res, the Navajo Nation, the heat is unrelenting, there is little or no shade, and the distances are daunting. Going through the Rockies, particularly along the older national roads like the Million Dollar Highway, US550 in Colorado, between Silverton and Ouray, a car is definitely the safer means. There, vacationers in recreational vehicles rented from RV-by-the-week places like CruiseAmerica, unused to the width and instability of the machine they’re steering, will veer from lane to lane, tipping alarmingly on curves, scraping the guard rails. You don’t want to be on a bike on the Million Dollar Highway between June and September.

There are also places where it’s better to walk: big, dense cities like New York and Chicago. There, unless you're walking, the chances of noticing anything beyond the cabs and the limos and the messenger bikers and the jaywalking pedestrians texting away is slim to none. The same applies to most of the national parks, where the whole point is to slow down, focus in, develop an eye for almost hallucinatory attention to detail.

But between the extremes of density—between too crowded and way too big, there’s a balance to be achieved, and the 12-to-40-mph speed of a good road bike strikes a balance between getting there and seeing clearly.

That particular set of detours was a test of the hypothesis: it would be sheer vanity to claim that I was making 12 mph up those hills. A 10 year old boy in a pair of worn-out keds would have probably beat me to the top while bouncing a basketball on the rims of the potholes. Plus, I was concentrating on animal survival: leaving myself just one more downshift just in case and then, that case having come, trying to convince myself that I was really going to make it to the next level-off.

But there I was, halfway up the hill, thinking about the other half, already in the granniest of granny gears, when I saw what I hadn’t known I was looking for: a housing typology I’d been looking at for years but never recognized—the modified mobile home.

Mobile homes have a tough time of it. Back in the ‘30s, when architects didn’t have any work to do or any clients to pay them, they became, for a brief while, moralistic communists, worker-housing advocates, proponents of new forms of building that might make use of new manufacturing technologies and economies of scale to provide cheap, humane housing for the millions of Americans forced by the Depression into substandard or overcrowded housing. The '30s was a heyday for architect-designed utopian housing, and just about none of it got built. The housing crisis of World War II further pushed the rhetoric of what were now being labeled manufactured houses, though with widespread shortages and rationing, few were built outside the military.

But the military did push the process, and the results ranged from the hot, horrid Quonset huts on island sites in the Pacific Theater, to TDU’s (temporary dwelling units) built on sites as diverse as Fort Hood, Texas, and Los Alamos, New Mexico, serving functions that ranged from 8-man work crew bunkhouses to married officer’s quarters meant to house with dignity, a Lt. Col., his wife, and their four children. In the Manhattan Project’s three principal townsites—Los Alamos, New Mexico, Richland, Washington, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee—the wide range of houses, including mock-log cabins and modernist machines for living, all of them meant to last just four to ten years, have survived more than half a century and are still fetching good prices.

After the war, though, manufactured housing languished, to the surprise of all. In part it was a failure of will, in part a matter of conservative town and county planning and zoning commissions, and in part a concerted campaign by traditional home builders to eliminate what was seen as a major threat to the industry. The famous Lustron houses—all-steel manufactured dwellings of considerable scale and ambition—came to symbolize both the hope and the collapse of the manufactured housing market. When Lustron went belly-up in 1950, that was seen as the death-knell of the manufactured housing industry.

The lineage split around that time. On one side were mass-production houses built on an unmoving assembly line, with workers migrating from house to house in an orderly assembly of uniform parts. This was the story of Bill Levitt and his Levittowns, and it meant that a good, permanent, 950-square-foot house could be bought not far from New York City for about $6,995, roughly twice an owner’s annual income-- about $62,000 in today’s dollars.

On the other were those odd hybrids known first as travel trailers, and then as mobile homes. Early travel trailers were relatively tiny, meant to be hooked to an everyday car and moved from trailer court to trailer court. The fabled Airstream is an example of the genre. These trailers were anywhere from 12 to 25 feet long, but they were always no more than six feet wide, because they had to fit within the lanes of everyday American roads. The introduction of 8-foot and then 10-foot models changed the dynamic dramatically. Now it was necessary to hire a trucker to move the home from site to site, and mobile homes became increasingly immobile. But once the single-lane, car-towed barrier broke, mobile homes could grow significantly wider—what American has not sighed in exasperation behind a flatbed with its Oversize Load sign-bearing pickups behind and ahead of it? And with that, the line between the old “manufactured housing” and the mobile home largely disappeared, with double-wides and triple-wides assembled onsite, and lobbying by the manufacturing industry resulting in a 1980 law changing the name in all government documents from mobile home to manufactured home.

Back here in the areas where weekenders and tourists don’t go, places where the Catskills begin to resemble the hills and mountains of West Virginia, where, as my friend Ralph Perri puts it, your status in the neighborhood depends on the presence of a motor vehicle composting area, the woods are full of mobile homes dating back to the ‘50s in some cases, but mainly to the ‘70s. These aren’t really temporary structures and it’s doubtful they’ve ever moved or ever will move. Up here, you have to dig a well, and that’s not cheap. You have to put in a propane tank, and you’ve got to have a driveway that the propane company will agree to drive up in the winter to refill that tank. You’ve got to run electrical in from the road, and telephone, and you’ve got to put a satellite dish on the roof—two, these days, if you want HD.

Some people like their mobile homes—like them enough to rebuild them into real houses. This is what I was noticing: the houses on the other side of the line between disguising your mobile home and full-on rebuilding. There was one up there that had a second story added on; the outer metal and vinyl cladding had been covered by cedar-shake shingling. Another was clad in stucco; a third had been made into a log cabin.

At the pace I was going, I could see just how complicated a process this conversion was. For one thing, windows and doors couldn’t really be moved—though in a couple of cases someone had simply removed the original windows and doors from their frames, and put new, traditional doors on the outer cladding. The front door was open, and you could clearly see the hollow between the two sets of outside walls. In the ones less ingeniously adapted, the window and door punchouts were recessed into the darkness, hollowed-out eyes and a black mouth, dream-faces in the darkness of the woods.

Almost every type of manufactured home can be found, hidden in these woods. Up here, it’s hardscrabble all the time, not just when the robber barons have sucked the country dry and the politicians are passing laws to change the meaning of whole classes of words—billionaires must now be called job creators, factory farms are family farms, and megacorporations are family businesses. And even though an earlier corrupted political class required the change of name from manufactured housing (too socialistic!) and mobile home (too trailer-trashy!) to manufactured home, up here everybody calls them by their real names. The small ones, perched up on the ridges, mostly used these days for hunting, trapping, fishing, maple-syrup harvests or firewood forarys: they’re trailers. And so are a lot of the larger ones—if the wheels are visible, the flattened tires long collapsed and disintegrated from rubber rot, they’re trailers. If they’re bigger, harder-edged, with a picture-window punchout on one side and the fake-stonework panels hiding the wheel wells, and the once-vibrant greens and blues and reds have faded to pastels and rust stains creep down at the corners, they’re mobile homes. If they’re newer, they’re double wides, even if they’re actually two-roof single-wides or right-angle triple-wides.

The mobile homes: mostly these days, they’re occupied by the old, people surviving on Social Security and, if they’re really lucky, a small pension from the Post Office or the county. Coming up the hill on the bike, you can see the old man mowing the lawn with an old Toro, or working on the faded red riding mower, tipped on its side, the oil leaking out of the air filter and staining the weed-strewn gravel of the driveway. There’s usually a birdbath, and a clothesline. Out in front, there’s an ornamental shingle with the family name burned into it, the apostrophe placed wrong: The William’s or The Johnson’s. The mailbox is attached to a wooden 4x4 buried in concrete in an old milk pail.

The double-wides are different. Often there’s a prefab shed behind them, and when the doors are open you can see a Harley in there, or a ’47 Merc or a ‘55 Chevy in some state of restoration. These are people who aren’t house-proud. They’re mobility-proud. Their status is found in their cars and bikes, and it’s found among others who share their love of cars and bikes. Summer vacation may take them out to Sturges, South Dakota, on the Harley, or it may take them to Tucumcari for the annual Tucumcari to Gallup Motor Tour on Route 66. It’s not just nostalgia for an earlier time of motoring on two wheels or four. It’s a willed holding-on to an older myth of upward mobility, when you could be pretty sure that you’d be better off soon, things were looking up, it was blue skies from here on out.

Down below, where the road’s not as steep, and there’s probably a view of farmland or the mountains, and space for a good quarter-acre of lawn grass: that’s where the double-wides are. The people who own them have pretty good jobs: they’re electricians, plumbers, building inspectors for the county, road-crew foremen. Their wives are the ones not working, laid off, or about to be: ex-secretaries, ex-clerks, ex-assistants to the tax assessor, ex-teachers, ex-assistant-principals of the middle school. I see them in the Shop-Rite on Senior Day, with their zipperpurses full of coupons.

I see them there because I’m there, too. They aren’t distant from me. They’re like me. They know their place, and they know it well: they sledded down that hill as kids and their kids did, too, and now they take their grandkids down it when they have them for the day or the week while their kids are driving to Tennessee to see if there’s work at the Nissan plant or are stuck staying with friends in between the foreclosure and the rental. The trees are theirs, the mountains are theirs. They know who’s the cheapest, the fastest, and the best deer dresser when it’s hunting season, and they are using layaway again to get a lead on the Christmas presents for the grandchildren. A couple of times a week, they drive up into the dark green light up Scarawan Road to see their own parents, to help them with the shopping and to bring the newly sharpened blade back from the hardware store and reassemble the riding mower, old as it is, cleaning the spilled oil off the air filter so it won’t smoke and leave its acrid taste in the mouth.

Trailers, mobile homes and double-wides have another virtue that keeps them occupied these days. They’re financed differently than regular houses. The Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD, severely limits the amount that can be loaned, and the maximum loan length is 25 years; if you’re talking about a mobile and not a double-wide, it’s 20 years. It wasn’t worth it for the job creators to develop sub-prime, specialty loan arrangements for the people who bought, or buy, a mobile home or a double-wide. Refinances are simpler and more straightforward. You can’t really get a home equity loan on a mobile home.

As it turns out, mobile home Americans are turning out to be less mobile than the rest of us, at least the ones up here, on the ridges in the woods. When you lose your mobile home, they don’t evict you. They come and take your house away. In the flatlands, where the subdivisions of mobile homes and trailer parks set them in neat rectilinear rows serviced by a nice wide road, the specialty semi- can show up, change the rotted tires and rusted wheels out for new ones in about an hour, and have you left by the side of the road by ten in the morning.

Those are the mobile homes that the job creators look down on. They’re marginal housing for marginal people in the marginal economy. They’re not worth wasting your time over. They probably won’t vote. You can fire them anytime. They’ll work for you for just about nothing, and be grateful. With the right push-pollsters and enough shrill repetitions of virulent lies by virulent commentators, you can keep them down when you don’t need them, round them up when you do. If the flood washes away their mobile home park, it’s a good thing real taxpayers (of course, you’re not one of them—you’re a job creator, so you don’t pay taxes) and government social programs aren’t subsidizing their lifestyles by providing them with flood insurance or disaster relief. Save that money for the horse farms; save it for the Houston megamansion hurricane relief. If the flood washed away their mobile home park it just improved the view.

Up here, though, it’s not so simple. For the mobile homes are older, and the growing season here is pretty long, and trees spring up to twenty feet and more in just a few years. Getting in there, and getting back out with a mobile home hitched to the back of the big rig, isn’t something most trucking companies are ready to do. Besides, there’s the problem of those modifications: the log cabin, the gabled roof, the garage added on, the ell made from Home Depot plans, accessed by an opening cut into the short wall of the mobile home using a blowtorch. It’s hard to get back down to what you plan to steal.

These are homes that have hunkered down on their sites. Their owners won’t be evicted, and they won’t leave—except in the ambulance that will take them to the nursing home or the hospital for a few weeks before the funeral. Once they’re gone, maybe the younger generation, down the hill, will abandon the double-wide and the shed to their own kids, and move up into the dark, green, loamy overgrowth with the small grass lawn carved out of it, where it doesn’t cost anything to stay in your home, where you aren’t connected by ties of financing and fear to the job creators and their instruments of greed and duplicity and their bought-election mouthpieces with the deep tans and the hand-made suits.

If that doesn’t happen, it’s unlikely anyone will move back into that mobile home. It will sit up there, the propane tank rusting, the lawn turned to weeds and then to scrub and then to saplings and finally to full-on new woodland. The deer will see it as they pass from grassland to grassland, ghosts in the woods. Maybe after a time, a hunter will bring a crowbar along and pop the door, and it will have a new life in the fall and winter, past the legal seasons' end, when it’s better to poach out where nobody reports hearing a gunshot in the woods, and you’d best dress your venison yourself, as the commercial cutters will report you to the DEC. Come summer, the bend-open door will slap and slam in the wind and, coming up the worst of the climbs on that Atwood detour, I will wonder who it is that’s going in and out, in and out of that ghostly face: black-eyed windows, black-mouth door.