View from the Pier

Love consists in this,
that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, 1875-1926

Montezuma Castle National Monument, Arizona

This image is from a trip I took with my mother to the Sedona, Arizona area.  We departed the day after I concluded a 25-year career in corporate public relations.   We visited Montezuma Castle National Monument at the end of the visit, on our way back to Phoenix, from where we would fly home.  We pulled off the exit for the Monument, and began a spiral outward from the highway and into the barren desert.  I started to feel a little anxiety, realizing this wasn’t a roadside attraction in the literal sense of the word.  Eventually, we pulled into a full parking lot adjacent to a sleek, modern visitor’s center below white chalky cliffs.

After paying our admission, Mom said “I don’t know how far or fast I’ll go, so you go ahead.”  I felt a combination of being peeved at what I saw as her lack of enthusiasm, and relieved at being able to wander at will.  A sidewalk led from the visitor’s center down a path with the cliffs looming on the right, past an expanse of silvery and sage-colored scrub brush.  Huge, graceful hawks glided in circles, crying out a welcome.  Against a brilliant blue sky, the texture of the wall of rock resembled a flaky biscuit, layers and layers of sediment in shades of creamy white, topped with delicious-looking pinks, like jam for the eyes.

Carved into the cliff-face, five stories high, is the “Castle,” a Cubist-like citadel in the sky.  Intersecting vertical and horizontal rectangles of mauve comprise a 20-room “apartment building” built by the Sinagua people between 1000-1400 A.D.

I continued to follow the curve of the winding walkway as it paralleled the rock rising from the dusty desert floor.  I stopped at the point at which the path began to curve back around toward the visitors’ center and stood in front of the massive white cliff wall, in the center of which was the mouth of a cave, gaping open as though uttering a breathless “Ooooooh.”

I lingered just a little bit to admire the silver-barked trees–Arizona Sycamore was important to the Sinagua, used as the beams supporting the walls of the Castle, put in place about 800 years ago.

Returning to meet Mom at the exit, it looked like she hadn’t gone too far.  I switched gears mentally from awe and wonder to the business of the balance of our drive.  I asked her if she needed to go to the bathroom and she looked at me, puzzled and in a decidedly undecided manner, hesitated, saying “I don’t know…” I responded by suggesting she try, and that I would meet her in the car.

My awe and wonder returned, as I walked across the parking lot and unlocked the car.  I was in awe at my sudden acute awareness of the cycle of life, of my ability to have witnessed myself become the parent in that exchange.  I wondered at my own tenderness toward her uncharacteristic uncertainty.

I pulled around and waited in the idling car.  She emerged from the building, and flung open the door with gusto, proudly proclaiming, “I went!” as she settled into her seat.  And, with that,  off we went.

An hour later, as we clipped along the highway amid increasingly heavy traffic, panic began to set in.  The signs had told us dozens of miles ago that we were in the Phoenix environs.  “Why are there no signs for the airport?  Where are the signs for the airport?” we kept asking each other, in increasingly anxious voices.  The chant of “Lions and Tigers and Bears, oh MY!” from the Wizard of Oz began to ring in my head.

Now, this was terra firma for my mother and me.  We shared an unparalleled ability to whip each other up into a frenzy, each one’s agitation an emotional “gitty up” to the other’s.  At least we understood each other’s state of mind:  utter conviction we had entered the Twilight Zone, there was no airport exit, and we were in fact circling the inferno’s nine rings for eternity, our favorite get-away destination, one we visited together often. 

My heart rate accelerated along with the speedometer, as if pressing the gas pedal harder would get us to the elusive airport Marriott that much faster.  Now I had to go to the bathroom, and there was absolutely no uncertainty about it for me.

“There it is,” we screamed in unison, simultaneously sane again, as we headed toward the unheralded exit, cursing the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce, tourism bureau and highway department.  Another year of our lives shaved off, but just the price the phantom toll booth collected every time the two of us got in a car together.  Soon enough, we were reveling in the glory of having thwarted yet another one of life’s conspiracies to bring us down.

For more pictures of Arizona, see the site’s “Travel Photos” or “Store.”

http://www.nps.gov/moca/index.htm

http://www.americansouthwest.net/arizona/montezuma_castle/national_monument.html

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/295