-Lines in Sand

Before I read Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire , my perception of deserts in the American west was shaped by televisual media. Think "Star Trek" episodes with Kirk wandering the wasteland battling some improbable monster, or spaghetti westerns with no-name Clint smoking and shooting his way across the sand. Desert means no home or comfort or beauty, just a place to be borne, survived, between more hospitable spots.

I don't know if it was in that book that Abbey discussed Phoenix--I haven't looked through it in about 15 years. He said of that city: "Phoenix, Arizona: an oasis of ugliness in the midst of a beautiful wasteland." As the author of The Monkey Wrench Gang and other novels that describe the actions of characters roughly comparable to the real-life activities of Earth First! members, Abbey is often described as a radical environmentalist. Sometimes, the word "terrorist" is used. Regardless of the assessment, Abbey is a man whose regard for and defense of nature, while perhaps strident, is beyond dispute.

I am civilized/desensitized/commercialized/spoiled enough to regard the oases in Phoenix and Scottsdale as somewhat more welcoming than did Edward Abbey. I liked our meals out, sleeping in air-conditioning and swimming in a pool. It was, however, easy to agree with Sheryl when she said, "People do nothing but spend money here," as we drove through North Scottsdale, past the glittering palaces of consumption lining the road. I wanted to spend as much as anyone would, feeling that disease of desire for things. As we got further north, the buildings behind the retail road-fronts thinned out, and the incongruity with the surrounding desert became stark.

The chief virtue this blasted land seems to have for the developers is its sheer linear availability. Up to and onto the mountains, they build out and up and more. As long as the oil and water flow, Phoenix will grow.

Land availability seems to have been a factor for Frank Lloyd Wright in his purchase of the acres that would later house his winter camp, Taliesin West. Do the tour sometime if you find yourself in Scottsdale. The tour-guide can tell you more about the shockingly low prices the Wrights paid, even adjusting for inflation and its, at the time of purchase and construction, remote desert location.

Now Scottsdale crowds Taliesin, and while I couldn't hear the traffic while on the property, it was more than visible when we walked outside, as were the lightposts, cell-towers, strip-malls and access roads. The Wrights detested this intrusion into the sanctuary this summer "camp" was for them and the architiecture students, even going so far as to reverse the orientation of the common buildings so as to focus the inhabitants on the hillside, rather than on the encroaching sprawl below.

Our second visit outside the lines was to Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti. This project, far more ambitious and less complete than Taliesin, shares several things with Talieisin. Both projects, both schools, both architects, consciously rejected the city and sought wilderness for the place in which to build community. The influence of each man's vision and personality on their desert outposts is unmistakable. Soleri's use of concrete and line, his concern for the land around the site and the impact of humans on it were lessons Soleri learned well as Wright's student at Taliesin.

Soleri still lives, though, while Wright died years ago. Taliesin froze at the death of Wright and his wife, transforming into a museum with school attached. Now, the only structures built there are those that all new students construct as individual living space. To do so, students must dismantle and destroy the newly-vacant structures of a departing students--nothing lost, nothing gained--static.

Arcosanti, while growing slowly, has, as its very purpose, the completion of a living space in oppostion to the sprawl and materialism 50 miles away in Phoenix. (arco=architecture+ecology, cosa+anti=materials & against-->an ecological architecture against materialism). One can eat, sleep, work and live there. Our guide told us that only about 4% of the planned and ever-shifting development has happened in the 35 years since the project has begun. I hope they sell enough books and bells to get halfway before another 30 years passes. It is an alive place, though strange and hobbled in ways inherent to its structure and ideology. I'll be back.

The afternoon we arrived at Arcosanti, we took a walk on the visitor's trail down in the valley below the community. Limping still from the epidural injection of several days before, I walked ahead of Sheryl slowly, feeling the sting in my lower back and left thigh. Pain would have been there had I been laying on a couch, so I tried to disregard and move forward in my life on that day.

As we moved across the nadir of the valley and up the slopes opposite Arcosanti, the land inclined sharply. Rocks became boulders. Sheryl caught up, and I could hear her breathing behind me as we reached a rock wall that would require, all of a sudden, use of both hands and feet. Here was some real climbing, almost.

And I heard Sheryl, and she said, "You're not climbing that."

And there it was, my line in the sand, and I would not cross it. I could not. Sheryl only voiced what I knew to be true, even as I put my hands to the rock, looking for a hold on which to pull myself up. I had found my desert limit, the line in the sand. Strange and hobbled.

And there are things I can create (in and out of me) as my body destroys little bits of itself and ages.

And that progress will be slow--I don't know what I will be in thirty years, but as one part of my foundation crumbles, I know some things I won't. And I will not be static.

And I cannot freeze.